Using digital inspectors as marketing communication tools: Determining types of brand collaboration and practices to use Instagram as a domain

The inadequacy of traditional marketing in reaching digital consumers, promoting their products or services, and meeting their demands and complaints has led brands to seek alternative marketing methods. As a matter of fact, "Influencer Marketing", which has gained popularity as a result of these searches, is actually an application that has been found in different forms for centuries. Influencer marketing, which is increasingly important in digital marketing and is seen as a new marketing communication tool; It is the promotion of products or services belonging to the brand on social media platforms by digital influencers, that is, people with a high level of influence. Digital influencers, as they can reach wider audiences as well as more niche audiences, minimize traditional marketing budgets, increase interaction, cover an organic process and offer more measurable results; Recently, it is frequently used by brands as a marketing communication tool. Brands collaborate with digital influencers who share content in different categories on different platforms and in different ways. This research has two main aims. The first is to determine the types of collaboration that micro-digital influencers use in brand collaborations, and the second is to examine the practices of micro-digital influencers using Instagram as an influence area in brand collaborations. The reason for considering micro digital influencers within the scope of the research is that it is the category of digital influencers that performs the most brand collaboration in the light of the information obtained from the literature. The reason for examining the Instagram platform as a domain is that influencing marketing activities are mostly carried out on this platform, in line with the information obtained from the literature. In this direction, with the sampling of maximum diversity, which is one of the purposive sampling methods, micro-digital influencers with 10 thousand to 100 thousand followers in the category of Fashion and Beauty, Lifestyle, Travel, Food and Beverage and Instamom in Turkey were selected as the sample group. 4 representing each category of digital influencers and a total of 20 digital influencers were included in the research, and their visual, audio and textual messages shared on Instagram were analyzed by content analysis method. Within the scope of the research, 1433 Instagram posts were obtained, statistical analysis of the data was carried out using the SPSS-version 22.0 program. The findings obtained in the research were examined in detail in the conclusion section, and the research ended with suggestions for future studies.