What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer Marketing is the fastest-growing channel in the digital marketing space. It has the power to expose your brand to new audiences and leads, as well as increase brand awareness for existing customers. In this 21st century, potential audiences are looking for authentic recommendations from everyday people, and the best way for your brand to share its message is through influencers. An influencer is a person who actively uses social platforms and has a certain scope of interests and a large targeted audience. They are either bloggers, journalists, celebrities, or content creators. So what is influencer marketing? Influencer marketing is the process of using external content creators/influencers to advocate and engage with your brand’s message. These influencers present content to their audience, increasing brand awareness, converting their audience into your clients, and generating high Return On Investment (ROI). So rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead pay/hire/inspire influencers to get out the word for you.
Different Types of Social Media Influencers
Nano Influencers: They are those who have a follower count of less than 10,000.
Micro-Influencers: Micro-influencers have a follower ranging from 10,000 to 100,000.
Macro Influencers: Are those who have a follower count between 100,000 and 1 million.
Mega Influencers: mega-influencers are the ones who hold followers of more than 1 million.
How Does Influencer Marketing Work?
After having an understanding of what is influencer marketing, and the types of influencers, it’s time to dive deep to see how it works. The step by step process involves.
Set Goals & Identify Your Targeted Audience
Before deliberating on the influencers you would like to collaborate with, first identify the audience you want to reach. Your business should have clear goals and detailed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), to measure and evaluate campaigns. With an influencer, you should be aiming at reaching new customers, not necessarily to make a sale right off the top. Try to identify the kind of content the target audience likes to see, and where they hang out online (different platforms). All this information will help you decide which type of influencer is best suited to partner with your brand.
Search & Select the Right Influencer
Once you have identified your audience and have a solid plan, it is time to find the right influencer. Look out for content creators who don’t just have large followings, but whose followings are engaged. Go in for influencers with lots of comments and shares on their social media posts. This means you should not only focus on influencers with millions or thousands of followers but also consider the Nano influencers. Because greater reach can be achieved by collaborating with several smaller influencers in the campaign, which together reach out to a larger number of people. With that in mind, let’s move to the next step.
Get in Contact with the Influencer and Give a Brief
This is the time to approach influencers, communicate with them, and see how it flows. Effective communication is the key to any successful business. Ensure your brand offers something unique, remember these people get approached often by different/competitive brands. Let your business brand stand out and provide value to the influencer to motivate them to participate in a campaign or support your brand. When discussing potential partnerships, provide as much information as you can about your brand. Tell them what you hope to accomplish, make it clear how the influencer will benefit, beyond the paycheck.
Collaborate with Influencer to Develop Effective Content
The next step in how influencer marketing works is cooperating with influencers to develop attractive and effective content. Once you’ve decided on the influencer(s) to use and they have agreed to learn more about your brand and share their thoughts with their followers, you need to increase the likelihood that the campaign is successful. Share brand guidelines, photography, videos, and anything that may help the influencer get to know your brand.
It’s a good idea to provide some guidelines on what you want your campaigns to look like, but don’t expect to stage-manage the entire campaign. And always provide the right information about your product/services for it will alleviate any frustration that might taint their coverage of your brand.
Measure Results
Any successful influencer marketing campaign is seen by its results. And to measure the effectiveness of a campaign, you have to understand its value in terms of Return On Investment (ROI). Most engagements and clicks on an individual post often occur the first days after it’s been published. But it takes time to see the real impact of an influencer marketing campaign in its entirety. The appropriate time to start evaluating the results is in two weeks after the post was published. Now you will be able to measure how many interactions and clicks did the post get? Note that if you don’t set your KPIs and goals from the beginning, it would be hard to measure the success of your campaign. Some tracking links and the right measurement and analysis tools make it easy to get statistics from the campaign.
What is Influencer Marketing? Why is Influencer Marketing Important?
Influencers are Highly Trusted
Trust plays an important role in the success of a marketing campaign. According to research, more than 80% of consumers trust recommendations made by their favourite influencers on social media platforms. So a business aiming to reach out to a larger population should consider influencer marketing.
Influencer Marketing Offers Huge ROI
An effective influencer marketing campaign builds trust for your brand, and when trust is gained your business starts releasing a huge Return On Investment (ROI). ROI will always be the driving factor of KPI metrics, and influencer marketing comes out on top when pushing revenue. And ROI generated through influencer marketing doubles despite no extra investment on the part of the client. Because posts made by an influencer will still be available for people to find for a longer time, whereas other ad types can fade away when your campaign ends.
It Adds Authenticity to your Brand
Influencers add an element of authenticity to your message. They build their audience solely based on content that they curate and know exactly how to win the attention of the audience. As a brand, it’s one thing to tell potential clients that ‘I’m cool, but it is more significant and powerful when a person/influencer says this brand ‘is cool’ and consumers admire that more.
Provides Insights About Your Audience
Another advantage of influencer marketing is that more people become aware of your brand, visit your website, sign up for your newsletter, follow you on social media, and more. When you work with influencers, you gather a lot of feedback in the form of likes, comments, and shares. You will get to know what people think about your products, their advantages, their requirements, and what they expect. Ensure to use these insights for your future marketing campaigns.
Influencer Marketing is Free From Ads Blocking
Audiences can’t block a bloggers’ post, even if it has a promotional nature. They won’t block influencers because their posts are interesting to them, they like to read, discuss, and engage.
It Generates Quality Leads & Reaches a Massive Audience in a Short Time
People generally feel positive about the brands of their favourite influencers. And many businesses have attested how influencers have helped generate potential leads to their site. These influencers already have an 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.
Hope this piece has answered your question on what is influencer marketing? For more content on how to grow your business, browse through the Xanda blog page, and if you need an expertise to help handle your social platforms, the Xanda team is here to assist you. Contact us for more information.