Influencer marketing has had a major impact on a vast range of industries worldwide. It is now seemingly impossible to jump onto a social media platform without seeing an influencer promoting some new, top of the range product. Why? Because influencer marketing works. If the rise in influencers isn’t enough to sway you, the global influencer marketing industry was valued at 5.5 billion USD in 2019 and is projected to hit a massive 22 billion USD mark by 2024, according to a report by MarketsandMarkets Research.
But what is influencer marketing, and how can you make a strategy that suits your brand? Let’s dive straight in!
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a growth marketing strategy that uses product recommendations and brand endorsements from popular personalities to promote a business to their audiences. These personalities have a loyal following, usually in a particular niche, and are dedicated to creating engaging content that connects.
Influencer Marketing Hub states that 70 percent of teenagers state that they trust product recommendations from YouTube content creators more than regular celebrities. This is only one of the reasons we have seen such a rise in popularity of influencer marketing.
The key drivers that are stirring up the growth of this marketing segment are the unrivaled growth of social media platforms, the shift towards high video content consumption by audiences across the world, its affordability and high return on investment (ROI), the increasing usage of ad blockers, and more. This is why many marketers are allocating budgets for influencer marketing to accelerate their business growth.
If you’re thinking about getting started with influencer marketing yourself, an experienced influencer marketing platform can help. At our sister brand, Atisfyreach, we’re dedicated to finding the right fit influencers, matching them to the campaigns you create and managing the entire process from start to finish. This means that all you need to do is create a campaign and launch it – we’ll do the rest! Find out more by clicking the link above!
What will a good influencer bring to your brand?
Influencer marketing is a great way to gain access to massive audiences across the world. But the challenge lies in finding the right influencers to elevate your brand and create a positive impact on both your audience and your business. But finding the influencer who is the right fit for your brand is not an easy task. Here is what the right influencer will bring to the table.
Reach
One of the most important metrics when it comes to influencer marketing is the reach. A good influencer will enrich your reach to your audience segments. This is perhaps even more important now than usual as we’ve seen a rise in ad blocker use, making it difficult for organizations to reach their target audience. Influencer marketing removes this worry and connects with your audience organically.
Engagement
The most important metric to help you to gauge the authenticity and value of an influencer is the engagement they generate on their posts. More than 75 percent of marketers use this metric to measure the success of an influencer campaign, as stated by Mediakix. The number of likes, comments, and shares on their posts is something that you cannot overlook, but remember that some of these may be from bots as well.
Persuasion
The reason why influencers are called influencers is because of their ability to persuade their audience to buy products they promote. Using a combination of relatability, loyalty and a fear of missing out, influencers have the ability to subconsciously convince their audience that buying these items will make them more like or closer to the influencer themselves.
Brand loyalty
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to generate brand loyalty. When your audience sees their favorite social media personalities promoting your product, they begin to see it as a brand worth investing in. This is because of the trust they place in influencers and the authority they have in that niche.
How can you design your own influencer marketing strategy?
1. Know your goals
Before you embark on your influencer marketing journey, you need to know what your campaign goals are. Moving ahead with pre-set goals will help you see how your campaign is performing and give you actionable areas to grow.
Some goals that you may want to include for your influencer marketing campaign are:
- Brand awareness
- Boosting sales
- Increasing customer engagement
- Building brand loyalty
- Increasing lead generation
- Increasing sales
Watch the metrics that help you measure the success of your goals throughout your campaign for guaranteed success!
2. Know your audience
Understanding your audience is your key to reaching, connecting with, and engaging them. Many brands are adopting customer-centric approaches to nurture their audiences and empower the customer-brand relationship through influencer marketing to foster brand awareness and brand loyalty among customers.
You need to first understand your target market’s preferences and the issues that they’re trying to solve. Knowing your audience helps you to target the right influencers, amplify your brand awareness, be accurate with your audience targeting, create relevant valuable content for them that drives their engagement, and increase your leads and sales.
3. Know your budget
Influencer marketing has been noted to help brands achieve an incredible amount more ROI when compared to other conventional marketing approaches. But this is only the case when influencer marketing campaigns have a well considered, well structured budget.
Based on your budget, you will be able to choose the right influencers, understand the scale of your campaign, and predict your results. Influencer campaigns can either be a cost effective approach or a massive marketing campaign based on the budget you allocate. If you’re just starting out and want to test the waters, we recommend allocating a smaller budget and working with micro-influencers (which have been proven to be more effective anyway)!
4. Choose the right influencers
Working with the right influencers is tantamount to a successful marketing campaign. But before you lock in your influencers, you need to thoroughly vet them to determine if they are right for your brand.
For example, working with influencers who don’t share the same values can tarnish your brand’s reputation, losing you valuable customers and brand loyalty.
We recommend checking the following to vet your influencers:
Other brand partnerships they have/had
- Their values
- Their audience
- Their style
- Their history
- Their reach and engagement rates
5. Develop a contract and campaign guideline document
Drafting a strong contract and designing clear campaign guidelines is of utmost importance. What you include in the contract revolves around the nature of the campaign, brand-influencer relationship, and your industry. Here are the clauses that your contract should include:
- A non-disclosure agreement (NDA)
- A compensation model
- Campaign timelines
- Brand campaign guidelines
- Guidelines
- Campaign deliverables
- Consumer privacy law
- Your content rights agreement
- Brand exclusivity (optional)
- Premise for termination
Your contract will vary depending on your needs, so design it based on your brand guidelines as well as your goals.
6. Monitor campaign and performance
A report from Influencer Marketing Hub shows that businesses earn $5.78 for every dollar invested in influencer marketing when done well. To get these results for yourself, you need to measure the success of your campaigns by closely monitoring certain key performance indicators (KPIs) to know how you’re performing.
These KPIs could be your conversion rates, audience engagement rates, reach, referral traffic, or audience growth. However, it all comes down to your campaign goals. Monitoring the relevant KPIs will help you meet your campaign objectives and thereby achieve the growth that you envisioned.
7. Pay your influencers
Despite influencer marketing being one of the most popular marketing approaches in the industry, more than 86 percent of brands are still not sure how to pay their influencers as mentioned by The Drum. But this is easier than it seems. You need to pay your influencers for the results they bring to your brand. If the value they bring is of high impact, then your compensation to them should reflect this.
8. Measure your results
It is impossible to measure the success of your influencer campaign without checking its performance. Again, the parameters that you should track are based on your campaign goals. For instance, if your campaign objective is visibility, you should check the impressions count; if your objective is audience engagement, you should check the number of likes, shares, comments, brand mentions, user generated content, and more.
Without measurement, you won’t know where to optimize, when to pull funding or when to give your influencer more control. Data is the foundation of every good marketing strategy – so make sure you use it!
Influencer marketing is an excellent strategy to capture your audience’s attention and accelerate your company’s growth. While we’ve made this strategy sound like a cakewalk, it can be difficult to successfully execute as this approach requires a significant amount of effort to avoid negative results.
To get started on influencer marketing, you should first work with an accomplished influencer marketing agency to help you through the process from end-to-end. Our team over at Atisfyreach can help you design winning influencer marketing strategies and set your business on the path to growth.
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