If you’ve even spent 10 minutes on Instagram or Twitter, you might have come across some form of influencer marketing. Since people avoid ads and annoying pop-ups on their screens every now and then, brands have to find more natural ways to attract people’s attention – and influencer marketing can provide just that.
Influencer marketing is when an opinion leader on social media tells their followers about something they might be interested in. According to research, 60% of consumers make purchases after seeing a recommendation from their favorite influencers. Impressive, isn’t it?
So let’s take a deep dive into the world of influencers and their impact on digital marketing!
What is influencer marketing?
Simply put, an influencer is someone who can influence others with their words. And influencer marketing is when a brand collaborates with these influencers to promote their products or services to the influencer’s audience.
Some years ago, the term ‘influencer’ was associated only with celebrities and a few popular bloggers. But in today’s digital world, content creators with their niche audience have emerged in every field. These people have their own dedicated and engaged audience on multiple social media channels that can offer more value to brands.
Using influencer marketing, brands can increase awareness, grow loyalty, reach new audiences, get honest feedback, and generate sales for their products in a short time.
Let’s see why and how you can use influencer marketing to promote your brand to the desired audience.
Types of social media influencers
1. Nano-influencers
Nano-influencers are those who have a follower count less than 10,000.
2. Micro-influencers
Micro-influencers have a follower count lying between 10,000 to 100,000.
3. Macro-influencers
Macro-influencers are those who have a follower count between 100,000 and 1 million.
4. Mega-influencers
Mega-influencers are the ones who hold a following of more than 1 million. Celebrities majorly fall under this category.
Reasons why influencer marketing works
1. People trust influencers
To make any kind of social media influencer campaign successful, trust plays a major role. When people see others use a product or service, especially the ones they trust, it is easier for them to make a purchase decision. Apart from word-of-mouth marketing, Influencer marketing is a visual demonstration of how this works.
According to a research done by NoGre, 88% of consumers trust the recommendations made by their favorite influencers on social media channels like Instagram. Thus, influencer marketing ends up building trust for your brand along with providing a huge ROI.
2. Influencers create quality content
Social media influencers build their audience solely on the basis of content that they curate. They know how to win the attention of their audience. Thus, you don’t even have to work on how they will present your brand to their followers.
Based on their own experience with their followers, influencers will curate the best content for your brand by incorporating their own unique creation style. Also, if you work with multiple influencers, you will be able to present your products to people in completely different advertising manners!
3. Get precious insights about your audience
When you collaborate with influencers, you gather a lot of feedback in the form of likes, comments, and shares. Additionally, fashion influencers can also provide their own tips and suggestions related to your audience to make your campaign better. This information can be very useful as a business wanting to reach the right audience.
Getting actual market feedback may require a lot of time, effort as well as money; whereas influencer marketing can help you get that instantly. You will get to know what people think about your products, its pros, their requirements, and what they expect. All these insights can be used for your future marketing campaigns.
4. Reach a massive audience in a short duration
Influencers belonging to your industry already have an already established audience that might be interested in your products or services. This makes it the easiest way to reach a massive audience in the shortest duration possible, that too organically!
How to create an influencer marketing strategy?
1. Determine your goals and audience
Decide what you want to achieve from your influencer marketing campaign. Reaching new customers, raising brand awareness, generating leads and driving sales are the most common goals of influencer campaigns. Think about how the campaign will fit in your overall social media marketing strategy and decide metrics to track.
The next step is to decide the target audience. Developing audience personas is a great way to ensure that you speak to the right people using the right influencers.
2. Find out industry influencers
Once you have created audience personas, create a matching set of influencer personas. This will help you understand the qualities that you will need in your brand influencers. Based on the characteristics, start researching relevant influencers belonging to your niche. Compile a list of influencers and work on analyzing their profiles.
You’d want to see the engagement that they receive on their posts. A good engagement rate in the form of likes, comments, and shares implies a loyal following. Their tone of creating content should also be appropriate for the way you want to present your brand to potential customers.
3. Reach out and collaborate with relevant influencers
Shortlist some influencers from the list you’ve created and start your communication slowly by interacting organically with their posts. It is important to engage with their content first so that they recognize you when you reach out to them for collaboration.
When you’re ready to send the proposal, sending a DM is a great place to initiate the conversation. Also, have a look at their bio – they might prefer being contacted by brands through an email. In the message, provide as much information about your brand as you can. When they agree to the collaboration, use their ideas and develop an effective content campaign to execute.
4. Measure your results
When your influencer campaign is in action, you might get distracted by vanity metrics like likes and comments received on the posts. However, to measure the actual effectiveness of the campaign, you have to understand its value in terms of ROI received.
You should assign influencers with a unique code that they can provide to their audience. This way, you can track when people make purchases after seeing their posts. When you use branded content tools provided by FB and Instagram, you will be able to see insights for both feed posts and stories.
Influencer marketing tips
1. Look for engagement rate, not followers
Some brands just look at the number of followers that a person has in order to collaborate with them. However, that shouldn’t be the case. Along with seeing the follower count, you also need to check the engagement rate to get an idea whether their followers are real or not.
Have a look at the number of likes, shares, and especially the comments that influencers receive on their posts. If there are only emojis or one word comments, it’s a major red flag.
2. Collaborate with micro-influencers
When it comes to influencer marketing, brands often hunt for people with more than 100k followers. But, the way to get the most out of influencer collaborations is by working with micro-influencers. They are opinion leaders who have a more engaged and similar audience because the more the followers, the more scattered they are in terms of interests.
Across various social media platforms, nano and micro influencers have the highest engagement rates. Thus, instead of emptying your pockets on mega influencers, collaborating with multiple micro-influencers can bring you better results.
3. Look for video creators
Video content is taking over every social media platform today. Whether it is TikTok, Reels, FB Watch, or YouTube – 4 out of 5 millennials prefer watching video content over seeing static images. Thus, you should look out for influencers who create more video content on their profiles.
If you want to promote your mobile app, you can harness the power of influencer marketing and launch a video marketing campaign for your mobile app development project. Bloggers and influencers perfectly know how to create a video that defines the benefits, features, and USP of your mobile app. This strategy will definitely help you reach your potential prospects and promote your app effectively.
4. Build long-term connections
Rather than focusing on just one social media star, working with numerous influencers is a more effective strategy. However, hunting new influencers for every campaign is also not the best idea. The best way is to make a small list of influencers and work with them repeatedly, thus building long-term partnerships. When people hear about your brand again and again from the same person, they are more likely to make a purchase.
Final thoughts
In this highly competitive marketing world, influencer marketing can help your brand reach the right audience easily. It can strengthen your online presence, boost brand awareness, and acquire high-quality leads. So open up your social media profiles and start hunting some influencers today itself!
Read more:
- What are Fake Influencers and How Do You Find Them?
- The Growth Of Social Influencer Marketing
- Top 9 SEO Marketing Tools
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Dinesh Agarwal.
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