Influencer Marketing: How to Use It in Our Modern Business
From 2016 to 2021, advertising spend by influencers increased from $2 billion to $11 billion. This trust in brands proves the work of promoting through influencers. This article will explain what influencer marketing is and how it helps companies. You will learn how to build a strategy for working with influencers and track the result correctly.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is the promotion of products or services through influencers or opinion leaders. An influencer is not only a celebrity but also a blogger who specializes in his field, who manages social networks, is a famous person in a particular field. You don’t have to have millions of followers to be effective. The effectiveness of effective marketing does not depend on the number of customers. Viewer engagement is important in influential content. Now with nearly 3,000 listeners, younger bloggers are more trustworthy than others. Because they maintain intimate blogs, where “everyone has their own.”
By audience size, influencers are divided into several groups:
● Nano influencers — up to 1000 subscribers;
● Micro-influencers — from 5 to 100 thousand subscribers;
● Mid-influencers — from 100 thousand to 1 million;
● Macro-influencers — over 1 million subscribers.
The difference between effective marketing at home and direct advertising. Product promotion doesn’t look like present advertising. An influencer is a customer’s friend who simply chooses his or her preferences: the product, the location, the entertainment becomes part of the ad content and the listener faithfully realizes it. The influencer knows his audience well: what subjects and content customers like. So his account is a ready channel for communication and SMS promotion.
Even if the market is oversaturated with bloggers, the industry will not shrink. The “Blogger” query has been at the top of search engines for the last 5 years.
Influencer Marketing Strategy
Influencer promotion is a social media marketing tool, and proper marketing doesn’t exist without a strategy. You can’t just pick the most popular blogger and invite him to your ad. Even for a millionaire, if his audience doesn’t fit your fit, the return will be minimal. To start SMM campaigns through influencers, find the right influencer with the right topics, set your campaign budget and goals.
1. Find influencers and decide on the payment
If you work, it’s easy to find an influencer with the right audience, for example, with product promotion issues. For complex technical products, you need to spend more time searching.
Three ways to find an influencer in your industry:
● Use special services. Look for influencers on the topic you need through paid platforms. There are some popular ones now on the market: LabelUp, Easyprbot, etc. The tools provide a theme, account statistics, and ad prices.
● Agencies for working with influencers. For example, Famenetis already working with influencers and will find the right one for you, but they will ask for a commission for the service.
● Searching independently for queries, tags, in thematic communities, specialized media, in the lists of speakers at conferences is a cheap, but not the fastest option.
The advantage of working with influencers is the ability to work on a barter basis. In general, micro-influencers, including a small number of customers, agree to such terms.
Influencer Checker
Not all influencers are really popular. In reality, their audience may be overwhelmed.
SMM promotion is also a “dark” method. It creates a presence of success and confuses advertisers: customer-bots, fraudulent choices, custom comments. The platforms themselves fight fraud but are not effective. So you should test it yourself before collaborating with any influencer.
Boost subscribers, likes, and comments
When there are 10,000 subscribers and only 20 likes under the post, it raises doubts. Perhaps on account, there are “dead souls” in the form of bots. Lots of flawless comments: “good post”, “class”, just signs of emoji cheating. You can check the accuracy of your account using various services.
Audience engagement
The general busy rate is 8–10%. When the index is low, customers are not interested in the content; With a high percentage, one can already suspect fraud. The exception is the peak moment of growing popularity.
2. We assess the risks of working with influencers
Influencers are non-professional advertisers, many of them do not always understand what SMM is. In most cases, their content appeared just in time and the audience liked it. Not everyone is good at advertising. Could it be wrong?
Incorrect task execution
The success of your content with an influencer is not a guarantee of good advertising for your brand. Before making an offer, look for previous advertisers and ask for feedback on working with one of them, see other influencers’ ads. Are you satisfied with its quality?
How to avoid mistakes? Set a clear TOR and agree to approve the ad before publication, provide additional materials and examples. But don’t write detailed and rigorous scripts. Influencer audiences have subscribed to his content and the promotion through the script will stand out and look unnatural.
Reputational risks
In the UK, reputations are just emerging in the organization, so influencers don’t always think of their actions and deeds in a public place. There is a risk that the face of your brand will do something stupid.
3. Determine the budget
Not every influencer will agree with you on a budget and will want an amount above and beyond your budget. In this case, offer a barter plus or sell percentage. Not focusing on key influencers. Expensive is not always good. The few micro-influencers you are debating will probably yield more results than Dude’s ad.
Integrating an ad with a major blogger will have a short-term effect — watch and forget. With some influencers, you can test different ad formats and build your brand presence everywhere. For example, BIBER did on Instagram as an Instagram Influencer.
How many ads does an influencer place on a social network?
● There is an unspoken rule that the value per customer is 10 per 10,000 listeners.
● Another way is to count by real engagement. If there are only 10 thousand likes out of 100,000 customers, the price of the ad will not exceed 10 thousand rubles.
But any category is conditional and the actual price may differ from the general rule.
4. Set promotion goals
Promotion is a process that should always start with a goal. Why do you need influencers? What kind of expectations do you expect from them?
Possible options for influencer marketing goals:
● Brand Awareness — More people will know about your product and will not confuse it with others.
● Sales — Increase sales units during a promotion.
● Increase loyalty — The number of people who rely on your brand speaks positively about it.
● Engaging and retaining your audience primarily in your content leads to sales. Blogger is not a product but can advertise your resources and useful materials, which will lead to the next purchase.
● Increase the number of subscribers to your accounts.
5. Tracking campaigns with influencers
Assessing the effectiveness of influencer marketing depends on your goal.
How to evaluate sales:
● A unique promotional code for an influencer to let you know how many of his or her audience have purchased.
● By linking to UTM tags, you can not only know the sales event but also navigate the funnel side by side: by clicking on the Blogger link in the shopping cart of the online store. See Popular Analysis Systems: Yandex, Google Analytics.
● Request statistics from the influential self, but here you need to be sure of its honesty.
How to track results for other goals:
● Brand awareness can be measured by the number of searches in search engines for your brand, for example, in Google Trends. Compare results before, during, and after promotion.
● Increase brand loyalty — here you should measure the number and tone of comments under your content and blogger posts, compare the ratio of likes and dislikes on YouTube.
● Viewers’ engagement and ideas during the campaign are calculated by changing the number of likes, reviews, and content sharing. For videos on YouTube with partial integration, evaluate the dynamics of watching the video during the ad. No results — the audience responded positively to the ad.
● Increase the number of subscribers to your accounts — calculate dynamics before and after promotions and estimate customer value.
