Why Influencer Marketing Strategies Succeed: A Complete Expert Analysis
However, influencer marketing is more than just taking advantage of someone's image to increase sales. More commonly, influencer marketing is about establishing that individual as a trusted authority in their area of expertise and defining conversations around a certain topic; in Larry's case, paid search, content marketing, and social networking.
So, if influencer marketing is using an individual's status to influence others, but is not just being used to gain leads or increase sales.
What is it?
How can you become an influencer?
And how can you create marketing campaigns that speak to influencers in your industry?
Why is Influencer Marketing important?
Influencer marketing is closely related to social media marketing, as most opinion leaders gather their audiences from social platforms. This channel helps you reach a large audience - half of the global population uses social media.
Better yet, influencer marketing allows you to reach people you can't reach through traditional advertising.
- Two-thirds of consumers use ad blockers, but there are also those willing to take advice from influencers.
- 80% of users bought something based on an influencer's recommendation.
- Brands that have used influencer marketing have proven this channel effective.
- 89% of marketers say the ROI from influencer marketing is comparable or better than other marketing channels.
- It's no surprise that 17% of companies spend more than half of their marketing budgets on influencers.
So influencer marketing is crucial in this age of social media and advertising fatigue.
This channel helps build trust for your brand and delivers impressive results. Now, let's move on to the other advantages influencer marketing has to offer to you as a brand or individual
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Benefits of Influencer Marketing
- Increase brand awareness
- Rich content strategy
- Quality leading the generation
- Cost-effective
Influencer marketing is an effective way to improve your marketing strategy, achieve business goals, and even cut costs.
Let's dig into the details and find out the benefits influencer marketing can bring to your brand.
Increase brand awareness
40% of marketers use influencer marketing to increase brand awareness, and this strategy works great. Opinion leaders share your brand's story, mission, and values with their follower base. It automatically expands your reach and online positioning.
Rich content strategy
Influencer marketing is a winning opportunity to liven up or spread awareness of your social media posts. You can repost influencer content or encourage your followers to create user-generated content, as 24% of brands do. You can also use Top Bloggers or marketers images for other influencer marketing channels, such as targeted advertising. To avoid copyright issues, include them in the contract.
Quality lead generation for less efforts
36% of top class organizations or brands use influencer marketing to generate leads or sales for their products. 72% of them believe that this channel brings in higher quality leads than other channels. People often feel positive about the brands their favourite blogger promotes. Better yet, some types of content, such as reviews, attract more potential customers in the middle stages of the sales funnel.
Cost-effective
Other marketing channels require regular cash flow from your budget. For example, to promote your brand through search engine marketing, you must fund your account on the advertising platform. Otherwise, your ad will disappear from the search engine results page.
A well and successful influencer marketing strategy can bring in better results for a lower charge or even allow you to mix up or playthings in the future. Another note on the effectiveness of influencer marketing - on average, brands earn $5.20 for every $1 spent on this channel.
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Influencer marketing can contribute to your business by helping you boost your brand awareness and online presence, as well as ensure lead generation. Depending on your goals, you can choose from different types of influencer marketing campaigns.
Types of influencer marketing
- Social media takeover
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sponsored Content
- Unboxing products
- Brand Ambassador Program
Since influencer marketing emerged, brands and opinion leaders have developed many different types of campaigns. Let's take a look at some common tactics you can use in your influencer marketing strategy.
Social media takeover
This type of influencer marketing works effectively to grow your follower base on social media. However, it takes a lot of brilliance when a brand or organisation entrusts its account to an influencer for a stipulated period of time.
Typically, a brand allows an influencer to manage their profile in a day. Another alternative is to invite an opinion or expert panel leader to run a streamer or live video, as Miele did in the example below. They invited chefs Kyle Connaughton, Helena Rizzo, Gaggan Anand and Paco Roncero to host a series of online cooking events.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a relatively cheap and easy way to generate leads. This strategy focuses on paying an influencer for each customer that comes from their website or social media accounts. Meanwhile, you don't have to waste time selecting influencers and negotiating - just publish an affiliate program on your site and wait.
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Here's an example of affiliate marketing from the blog The Points guy, owned by an influencer, Brian Kelly. The blog is dedicated to cutting travel costs, and Brian offers ways to do that using credit cards, travel, and hotels. In addition to reviews, the blogger publishes offers from partners and receives points and benefits from each purchase.
Sponsored Content
This option of influencer marketing often shown on Instagram feeds or stories ads. Brands pay for publishing a promotional post on an influencer's account. The opinion leader will take care of content creation and come up with a post made as per the client's instructions.
In the example below, jewelry brand Stone armoury merges with Gwen Rachel, who has over 200,000 followers. The blogger took a photo of her wearing Stone jewelry and featured the company's account in the caption.
Unboxing Products
Brands often send gifts to influencers in the hope that the social media star will open and review them. It costs nothing compared to the fee that influencers charge for advertising. However, this strategy is quite risky.
First of all, the opinion leader may not rate your product at all. Another point is that negative influencer feedback often turns out to be dangerous for brands. Finally, sometimes businesses try to please bloggers but cut back on packing orders for customers, which leads to backlash. So, address these possibilities before using this tactic.
Cosmetics brand Too Faced has been impressing influencers with breathtaking gifs for years now. Here's an example - YouTuber AleLaChula gets the full collection of Too Faced products for free. The gift was so great that the influencer created an unboxing video, which garnered 45k views.
Brand Ambassador Program
Some people love specific brands so much that they are willing to promote them even for free. Influencers are no regret, so brands or companies offer them brand ambassador or community enhancer programs. This tactic works because opinion leaders honestly showcase their favorite brands.
Sportswear brand, Lululemon, works with an extensive network of ambassadors and showcases them on its social media accounts. In the example below, you can see Charlie Dark's video on the company's Instagram profile. Charlie talks about the ups and downs of 2020 and dresses his friends in Lululemon costumes.
We've explored five common types of influencer marketing. There are many of them, as influencers and integrated brands have limitless creativity. However, creating new or setting up influencer marketing or promotion for your company is just a simple fact of the algorithm. You will learn more about it.
Influencer Marketing Strategy
- Define your target audience
- Set goals and KPIs
- Find the right channel
- Determine your campaign budget
- Choose the right influencers
- Campaign setup
It's time to put your influencer marketing strategy into practice.
To get the ball rolling, follow the step-by-step instructions we've prepared for you.
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1. Define your target audience
Defining your target audience is at the core of any promotional campaign type. There are many ways to find this group of potential customers. You can find people who are similar to your best customers. Survey your customer base and identify which social media channels and influencers they like, the values they share, how they make purchasing decisions, and more.
If your goal is to attract new audiences, you need to discover them from scratch. Start by giving answers to the following queries about your potential leads or audience:
- Who are they?Determine their age, social status, income, pain points, and more.
- What is their stage in the marketing funnel? You can depend on different promotional or marketing tools, such as Ben Hunt's customer acquisitions or awareness ladder.
- What are their hobbies?To uncover them, you can research content on the platforms your potential customers like, find online forums and media, explore social media profiles, and more.
- What are their behaviours? Focus on research published by major brands and agencies. Choose to report on social media, media consumption, or influencer marketing.
Encapsulate this data in customer records to keep it and deal with it anytime you need it.
43% of people use social media to research products before buying. To take advantage of this, take a to-do approach. Determine why people search for your products and under what circumstances they use them. It will help you solve their needs with your influencer or promotional marketing campaigns.
2. Set Goals and KPIs
Like any other type of advertising campaign, influencer marketing can be used to pursue different goals. Your task is to formulate your goals clearly, as the mechanism you will use depends on it.
Remember to set key performance indicators - they help you understand whether you're getting the results you want.
Here are some of the examples of KPIs for organisation or brand promotion campaigns:
- total reach;
- total engagement;
- traffic to your website (e.g. views, unique counts, clicks);
- search preferences;
- social media mentioned
If your influencer marketing campaign targets sales or specific user actions, make them your metrics. In this case, the KPIs are the number of purchases, signups, app downloads, email signups, and more.
Avoid setting multiple goals for one piece of content – conflicting calls-to-action confuse users and lower your conversion rates.
For best results, follow our guide on conversion rate optimization.
3. Find the right channel
Influencers or Marketers agreed that specific social media platforms can be pros or cons and can be valuable for influencer marketing. According to MediaKix, Instagram is paramount to 89% of brands. As a result, more than two-thirds of marketers spend their budgets on promotions through this platform.
However, Instagram is not necessarily the best choice for you. Choose a platform by primarily relying on audience interests, business goals, and the opportunities each channel presents. For example, B2B businesses may benefit more from choosing LinkedIn. This channel accumulates 630 million experts and 90 million high-level influencers.
Take all the stats above with a grain of salt. Ultimately, the only proven way to find the perfect channel for you is to experiment. Choose several platforms where your audience can be present and run effective campaigns at a low cost to choose the best option.
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4. Determine your campaign budget
This step is necessary, as the total number of outreach campaigns depends on the budget you allot. Influencers set pricing for their promotions according to the reach of their audience base, market value, advertiser interests and target audience and so on. So a single post on an account with 1 million followers can cost you thousands of dollars.
If you're tight on budget, opinion leaders with a smaller follower base might be a better choice. They can help you achieve your goals for smaller investments. You can also check the effectiveness of influencer marketing on your brand nano and micro-influencers.
Chances are a limited budget won't allow you to achieve all the results you want with just one influencer marketing campaign. To modify your goals and KPIs according to the resources you had when you started.
5. Choose the right influencers
All work done in the previous steps will fail if you choose the wrong influencer. For a perfect match, choose an opinion leader who shares your brand values. Don't promote sustainable fashion brands through shopaholic bloggers. Choose influencers who advocate minimalism, zero waste, awareness, and more.
Another disadvantage with influencer marketing is the potential risk of scams and fake audiences on social media platforms. To reduce the risk of being scammed, check the influencer's account carefully.
See how many bots or fake subscribers signed up with the influencer.
To calculate this, use the best tools, such as trendHERO.
- Make sure followers stay up to date with influencer updates.
- You can request account statistics on engagement rates from the profile owner.
- Beware of account duplicates - double-check names and contacts.
- Make sure that the influencer's audience is loyal.
Some bloggers can rally more haters than supporters. Advertising through them won't get you new subscribers or sales, so check the comments section.
Choosing the right influencers is an arduous task. You can do it manually if you have a limited list of opinion leaders to work with. Another option is to use platforms to find and check out influencers - such as Markerly or Klear.
6. Campaign Setup
On average, content creation is the job of the influencer. However, you should clearly communicate your campaign expectations and goals if you want to achieve your goals. The best option is to create a campaign summary, including the following points.
- Define background and profile: Many influencers have many different accounts on various social media channels.
- Explain campaign goals: Provide opinion leaders with clear CTAs.
- List messaging points: Make a list of fewer than four things an influencer should say about your product.
The final recommendation is to build a contract with a blogger.
The document should clarify the details of the campaign, the tasks of the participants, the terms of content ownership, the deadline, the desired outcome and the guarantee.
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Include any points you may find important or controversial and be precise about each. Remind bloggers to work by FTC guidelines - federal rules that prohibit unfair or deceptive advertising.
7. Find Quality influencers in your industry or niche
While you may already have an idea of the promoters and diversions in your niche, you need to find - and follow - these key people to see what they're talking about.
How to find influencers
- Social media platforms are the best as well as easiest way to find influencers and look for the audience.
- Do a topic search to identify conversations and see who is pronouncing their voice.
- Follow influencers and see who they follow.
- Engage in regular conversations relevant to your industry (like the weekly #ppcchat discussion on Twitter).
Plus, you can use free online tools like BuzzSumo and Topsy to see who's sharing your content (or anyone else's), as well as how influential they are.
In Topsy, just enter the URL of a piece of content and see the results:
For BuzzSumo users, it's easy to identify influencers and the content they're sharing. Click the “Influencers” tab at the top of the page, enter your search term (in this example, “PPC”), and view the results.
You can filter or sort the social media results by several criteria, such as domain age and page authority or rank, target audience or followers, likes retweets rate, and average retweets in a day.
There are other things you can do to identify influencers in your niche. Identify conferences relevant to your industry and view a list of speakers.
Have you ever noticed that the same people tend to appear in a variety of industry publications as columnists and guest posters?
These individuals are probably influencers.
- What names do you hear over and over in your field?
- Which articles are constantly being linked back?
Even a little research will quickly produce a list of influencers you should follow and listen to.
8. Shaping the Conversation
Before you can become an influencer, it's important to realize that advocating for a cause or topic is not the same as being influential. For example, you might be the world's biggest cheerleader in content marketing, but that doesn't necessarily make you a content marketing influencer.
To be considered a true influencer in a given field, you need to shape and define the conversation, not just advocate for whatever is being discussed.
- Are you asking questions that no one has thought of (or dared to ask), or are you just repeating what others have said?
- Is your topic really new or are you publishing content about the same things as others?
- Do your ideas and perspectives challenge the existing conventions of your industry, or do they get lost in the noise?
If you want to become an influencer and reach individuals already considered influential in your field, you must define the conversation, not just nod.
9. Own Your Niche
If you are about to become an authority in your industry, you need to own your niche. It's not enough to know a lot about a few subjects - you need to focus on a specific hyper-focus area and make it yours.
A few years ago, Larry started discussing the AdWords Quality Score algorithm.
Some have dismissed his work on Quality Score, arguing that it was not important enough to warrant Larry's attention to it.
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They were wrong.
Larry's examination of Quality Score, and what it means to AdWords advertisers, is a prime example of owning your niche. Instead of publishing content (and hosting webinars, and speaking at conferences) about paid search in general, Larry owns his niche by refining his area of focus even further. to Quality Score. Today, Larry is considered to be one of the world's most knowledgeable people when it comes to paid search, but he took on a specialized topic and set out to work on proving himself to be an expert in the field. some specific areas - one that many people have overlooked. or abbreviated.
Additionally, Larry's authoritative Quality Score content even prompted Google to address the Quality Score issue in AdWords.
"When it comes to the fact that exactly how the AdWords auction works in Google AdWords, for obvious reasons, they don't want to give away the secret sauce," says Larry.
“Our quality research pointed out some main loopholes in their document and they were forced to update it from the start.
You know how I know?
They haven't updated their Quality Score information in six years.
Then, just a few months after Quality Score (I think we've published about 50 papers on this topic, as well as a few dozen seminar sessions), they update the Quality Score information and release it. The new white paper called “Resolving Quality Score” (sounds like a response to something, doesn't it?). Although I was not named during the refresh, they refuted and confirmed specific points I had made in the past. "
