Different Types of Influencers and how to Find Them ?

Having started with digital marketing, we know what it is. The basic idea of digital marketing to explain is to promote our products and businesses through online media. To attain the primary objective of digital marketing, marketers use strategies and use certain tools and techniques. One such important technique to achieve higher engagement with target audience is Influencer Marketing. 

People have been continuously hearing about Influencer Marketing. Ever wondered what influencer marketing is? Here is the answer : Influencer marketing is something that is going hand in hand with Social and Content Marketing, Marketing our product or our service with the help of celebrities. Influencer Marketing is the idea of celebrity endorsement and placing it to a modern day content-driven marketing strategy. The main difference between Influencer marketing as well as other  marketing strategies is that the results of the influencer campaign are collaborations between brands and influencers.

What is Influencer Marketing ?

Influencer marketing uses leading, popular content creators or celebrities to improve brand awareness, traffic, and increase the reach brand’s message to a target audience. The content creators already have a fan base which will inturn produce the best buyers persona for our product. The content creators already market to the ideal audience across different channels. Some of the main channels through which influencer marketing occurs are blogs, Social Media, digital media and advertisements, column writers, television etc. Customers trust their peers, friends, and people they admire more than the companies selling the products and services they buy and use which increases the chances of influencer marketing.

Influencers vs Brand Ambassador

A brand ambassador is a celebrity or renowned personality who is assigned  to work under contract to help a business achieve specific goals of the business to  increase brand awareness and increase conversions as well as sales. During the time period they will be representing the brand and the lifestyle associated with the business. A brand ambassador need not be an influencer.

A brand influencer refers to someone who has a huge fan following within a specific topic that they engage with regularly. The major types of brand influencers include micro-influencer, celebrity influencer, blog influencer, social media influencer etc.

Influencers, unlike celebrities, can be anywhere. They can be anyone and from any sector. What makes them influential is their large followings on the web as well as their social media pages. An influencer on social media can be a famous wildlife, fashion, or wedding photographer on facebook or Instagram, or a travel blogger who shares and tweets contents, or a highly followed business or professional on LinkedIn. Within any industry, there are influential people. Our duty is to find them and have a word regarding the marketing strategy. They can be easily recognized by their hundreds and thousands of followers, which in turn is the target audience of our product.

Different Types of Influencers

The different types of influencers that we do have in influencer marketing or whom we can contact for influential marketing are :

1. Micro-influencer
2. Celebrity influencer
3. Blog influencer
4. Social media influencer

Micro-influencer

Micro influencers have comparatively lesser amount of followers in their social media pages, blogs and youtube channels for their respective content. The main advantage of having micro influencers is that as their fan following base is composed of less audience it will be easy to connect with the audience who follow them regularly. The micro influencers have much higher engagement rates compared to other influencers as they have a comparatively smaller size of audience. Micro influencers can answer  questions raised by the audience about the products, and communicate with them their experience with the products, and direct users to our website for valuable actions.

Celebrity Influencer

Celebrity influencers are famous people either in the entertainment field or in the business field with huge number of fan followings in every social media. They’re widely recognized and, hence have the potential to be very successful in influencing your target audience. Since celebrity influencers can have a large number of fan followers the product can be reached to both target audience as well as those who are not in target. 

Also the product can have wide range of recognition as these influencers can have a huge fanbase, both in targeted as well as non targeted locations.

The influencer program initiated by asking celebrities to advertise our product by adding a photo with the product in their social media handles and gaining potential customers.

Blog Influencer

A blog influencer is someone who writes for their established blog and has thousands of subscribers and readers. To collaborate with a blog influencer, we have to write a guest post for their blog, and we need to  ask to be mentioned in one of their posts, or sponsor a post about one of our products or services. If we sponsor a post on the influencer’s blog, we can also provide images of our products for them to share as well.

Social Media Influencer

Social media influencers can be celebrities, bloggers or any influencer who handles their social media pages in a smooth manner and have thousands or millions of followers along each social media. The influencers in social media platforms are mainly found on social channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The main focus of influencers are on Instagram as well as YouTube which has a huge fan following. They can share content about health, beauty, travel, automobiles, fitness etc. On each social media influencers can work depending upon the type of media and files supported in those social media. For example : On YouTube, we may ask the influencers to share a video of them using our product while explaining the reasons to use the product.

Steps to Setup Influencer Marketing Strategy

• Choose the objective and the audience of the Campaign
• Review the campaign budget as well the required influencer type
• Choose the influencer  
• Measure the results and reward our influencer.

How to  Use Influencer Marketing to Grow Social Media Audience

A social media influencer is someone who promotes a product or a service through social media. A right social media influencer can help a business in gaining the right audience, traffic and good engagements for the business and posts through social media. They always create unique and valuable contents for the business which will in turn increase the conversion for the business. 

Influencers can have a lot of followers. The most celebrated and reputed social media influencer is Kendall Jenner on Instagram.

How to find the best Social Media Influencer

The  key ways to find and connect with the right influencer for our campaigns are:

1. Consider the three Rs of influence

Influence is made up of three components:

Relevance

Reach

Resonance

    2. Know who are the audience to influence

    3. Look for engagement and trust with the right audience

    4. Go for a consistent look, feel, tone, and values

Some of the best ways to measure influencer marketing is by measuring the related KPIs of Influencer marketing. The main KPIs related to influencer marketing are follower count, Reach, engagement, Clicks, Conversions and ROI- Return on Investment.

Right now the influencer programs are much focused in instagram rather than in any other social media or other influencer platforms.  Influencer marketing can be the next level of marketing in this new year. The main attractions of influencer marketing for the new year are :

• Micro-influencers will have a greater impact.
• The influencer marketing which is now a major part of instagram will be growing beyond it and covering all of social media.
• More regulations will be added to the influencers as anyone with fan following can become an influencer.
• Both employees as well as customers will be becoming influencers of the product or the service.

Influencer marketing has been in the rising tone among the business persons to grow their conversion and sales due to the rise in growth of the use of social medias and the impact of influencers on the target audience. The potential reach to the target audience of the business can be increased by identifying the right influencer. Buckle up and start using influencer marketing for better growth. Hope this Explains Different Types of Influencers