Marketing has gone beyond the conventional way to the virtual world. So while brands still create marketing campaigns on their own, they’ve realized that there are individuals with a greater reach, whose influence sells products faster and in a more cost-effective way.
They are called social media influencers, and they dominate platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, among others.
These influencers carry out what is known as social media marketing. To fully comprehend the term, you have to understand who influencers are and what power they hold.
Social Media Influencers and Marketing Defined
Influencers are individuals with a large following who can affect trends, sales of products or services. They set the bar on how far a topic can go. Their reach is long, and their words speak volumes in their sphere.
Social media marketing, on the other hand, is best defined by Jason Quey. According to him, it is a type of marketing that deals with the identification of key people in different sectors who have persuasive power over potential buyers.
Its focus is on discovering influential individuals and establishing cooperation with them to reach your target market. Influencers are people from different walks of life and age group, and they range from stay-at-home moms to business executives, and they fall into different categories.
Categories of Influencer Marketing
- Micro-Influencers
Those who fall under this head have an average of 1000 followers. Brands use them when they want to concentrate more on relationship marketing because they tend to have a one-on-one rapport with their followers. They are also more affordable and the go-to for small businesses.
- Macro-Influencers
These are influencers with an average of 100,000 followers on social media, and they have a diversified audience. Those who fall under this head equally have a well-known position in the Influencer community and have developed expertise representing and promoting brands.
- Celebrity Influencers
They have an average of about 1 million followers and above. Their reach is vast, and they have a significant impact on their audience. They represent brands frequently, create awareness, and have limitless marketing potential.
Other categories of influencers are connectors, authority, and PR influencers.
Why Influencer Marketing
There are a lot of reasons why this marketing type is the must-have for brands, and these include but are not limited to:
Influencers have a community of loyal people who trust their recommendation and opinion.
They carry out authentic adverts; that is, they create content based on what gets their followers excited and interested.
They help you reach your target audience with ease. It means that if you are into cosmetics, you can’t use an influencer whose followers are food lovers, and promotes such.
They boost your ROI and your SEO ranking. Research has shown that for every $1 spent on an influencer marketing, brands make $6.50.
Create Your Influencer Marketing Strategy
The answer to the above is YES. While influencers already have an audience for you to reach, you still require a strategy to ensure the right message is getting across to the right people. You also need a strategy, so you can track the influence on your products or services.
- Define Your Goals
Not carrying out this first step means you are going in blind. You need to lay out what your expectations are regarding the number of people you want to reach, the resulting number of sales, how to increase awareness, and enter a new market.
This would help you and your influencer work better and create the best marketing strategy for your product.
- Find the Influencer
Choosing the right influencer who’d share the values of your brand can be difficult, but it is vital. The right person has to have an in-depth knowledge of your products. So look out for the number of followers the person has, interests, age, location, and gender, and ensure you analyze the performance and match.
Note that there are a lot of spam followers on social media. Not all 100,000 followers are actual people. Some people buy followers to trick brands into giving them a marketing gig.
To discover who has a real following, check the number of interactions per 1000 followers, a fake profile will always have a low number of engagements. In finding the right influencer, also analyze the trending hashtags and see what influencers are talking about.
- Know the Influencer
Don’t just pick anyone; the success of your influencer marketing depends on how well you know the person pushing your products. Have a detailed talk and ensure that the goals and visions of your brand, align with that of the person you plan to use.
It’s not always about the numbers. Your influencer has to believe in your product for your partnership to work out.
- Select the Right Social Media Platform
Find out where your target audience is more active, and then let that inform your choice of an influencer marketer. Also, ensure that the person you plan to use has a large following in the social media platform your target audience is active on.
Also, find out the form of content that works best on the platform and include it in your campaign.
- Get the Right Content
Getting the right person is one thing, and giving out the right content is another. Brands like to use their content but to have an effective strategy, align yours with that of your influencer. The influencer already knows what works with those you are trying to reach.
Note that you must provide the necessary information needed for your influencer to produce excellent content.
- Create a Publishing Schedule
In other words, create a schedule of when posts should go out, what it should contain, and the period between one and two. You must agree with your influencer on this, to ensure that posts go out at the appropriate time.
- Keep a Close Tab on your Results
This is the last stage of your influencer marketing strategy. You need to monitor the results and effectiveness of your post by using measuring and reporting tools, and you can compare it alongside your other marketing strategies.
How to Measure Your Influencer Marketing Revenue
Measuring your influencer marketing revenue is not difficult; to do so, note down the awareness your brand has gotten using a social media listening tool.
Check the number of times your brand got mentioned, and the conversations brought about by your influencer marketing campaign. Google Trends and SEMrush are useful measuring tools, and UTM parameters are the easy ways to measure an increase in sales.
Quick Statistics
- 94% of brand owners claim that influencer marketing is more effective for their business.
- 51% of influencer marketing campaign brought in high-quality customers
- Influencer marketing is 26% more effective than conventional marketing
- 22% users of influencer marketing say it’s the best form of online marketing
- Influencer marketing retains 37% of customers
- It gets customers twice as fast as conventional search engines
- 31% of those in the US and Europe buy products that are pushed by Influencers
Influencer marketing has benefited brands a lot and has proven to be more effective than other forms of marketing. We live on a social media age, so everyone is turning to it, and the limelight is on influencers.
