Influencer marketing involves the marketing of products or services that leverages the popularity, expertise, or reputation of an individual. Influencer marketing is often associated with those who have large social media followings, but popularity should not be confused with influence. Influence has the power to change consumer perceptions or get their audience to do something different.
Influencer marketing explained
In simple terms, influencer marketing is a hybrid of old and modern marketing techniques. It harnesses the power of celebrity endorsements from the past with a modern, content-driven marketing strategy.
When researching potential influencers to partner with, businesses should assess the following characteristics:
Reach
Usually defined as the ability to deliver a message to a large group of people.
However, reach is less important in influencer marketing because influencers with small followings often possess higher credibility and a more targeted audience.
Credibility
Or the level of trust an influencer enjoys because of their perceived knowledge or authority in a niche.
Salesmanship
Influencers who possess salesmanship can convince others of their point of view because it is told with confidence and conviction.
Engagement
Often if you just look at metrics such as follower counts, it might be easy to fall into so-called “vanity metrics,” which don’t tell you much about the real business impact an influencer can have.
Instead, before picking up a potential influencer as a partner for your business is critical to assess the level of real engagement of the following.
Are those people, liking, re-sharing, commenting, and discussing? Is the influencer meeting with many from its core community in the real world or through live online events?
True Fans
Connected to the engagement side, it’s critical to ask whether the influencer has a group of so-called “True Fans.”
As Kevin Kelly has defined a True Fan in his masterpiece, “1,000 True Fans”
“A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.“
As long as the influencer has those true fans you can be sure, as a brand, that those fans will also go a long way to make sure that the campaign with the influencer will be successful.
Influencer marketing is also a less transactional and more authentic form of promotion (if properly assessed), in that there is more collaboration between the brand and the influencer.
Collaboration means that the goals and values of both parties need to be aligned.
Businesses must respect the influencer and how they have built their audience.
Successful collaborations result when businesses resist the temptation to change an influencer’s goals or values to suit their own purposes.
Why is influencer marketing important?
Influencer marketing is important because conventional digital marketing is now largely ignored.
As people on the web have learned to ignore digital ads in a phenomenon known as “ad blindness” given also the overwhelming volume of digital ads and use the number of such ads to consider whether to boycott certain brands.
By partnering with influencers, brands can insert themselves into consumer conversations and leverage influencer trust to reduce the chance of being ignored.
When businesses get consumers talking about their brand, they create genuine conversations that can never be replicated through traditional marketing strategies.
Examples of influencer marketing
To spread the word on the benefits of grass-fed beef, producer La Cense Beef collaborated with food-bloggers who had an audience of dedicated meat fanatics.
The company set up a website detailing the benefits so that influencers could spread the message about their brand in an informed and authentic fashion.
A less typical example of influencer marketing can be seen in the case of carmaker General Motors (GM). GM created an insider’s club for car fanatics with a deep passion and affinity for the maker.
By sharing exclusive news and offers with insider members, General Motors encouraged their most loyal supporters to spread the word about their brand.
With the rise of new creators’ platforms and content formats, influencer marketing has consolidated into a multi-billion dollar industry.
The two major platforms for influencer marketers, beyond Instagram and Facebook, have become YouTube and TikTok.
As short-form video content has taken over, with YouTube Shorts and TikToks, brands leverage upcoming influencers to sponsor their new product releases.
Take the Dunkin’ Donuts campaign with Charli D’Amelio.
After knowing the channels to locate influencers for your campaign, you need to choose one that properly fits your goals and objectives.
There are a thousand influencers available in your pool, but not all will be appropriate for your campaign.
There are general goals for influencer marketing to increase brand awareness, thereby increasing sales and revenue.
However, each business has additional targets that they aim to achieve with influencer marketing.
Some really want to reach out to their customer base in a particular age group or expand their reach from a certain sector, so you must be able to identify your goals, to adequately help you determine your choice.
Influencers can reach targeted audiences, so properly defining your goals will help you streamline your search and ensure you pick the right person for your campaign.
Below are steps you need to take in incorporating your choice with your goals and objectives.
Research
During the research phase, there are many decisions you need to make, depending on your brand strength, your audience, your budget, and your preferred means of remuneration.
You need to conduct a survey about the social media platforms your current market is well-populated to give an insight into where to focus. As a beginner in influencer marketing, it is recommended to start with a channel, even if there is no clear indication as to where you should focus. For example, fashion, beauty, and lifestyle really excel on Instagram because of the opportunity to regularly use pictures to publish content. Technology, gadgets, and mobile trends largely excel on YouTube. There is always one influencer or the other doing a review or comparison of certain gadgets and what the specifications mean; if you have built a game, then twitch is the best place to get your audience as it is exclusively for gamers.
You should also look into the type of influencers that will suit your campaign before selecting one. If you want an awareness campaign to reach millions of people without necessarily targeting a specific audience, then mega influencers is the way to go. On the other hand, if you want some high level of awareness in a more targeted audience, then you could use macro-influencers. Perhaps, you want a smaller reach, in a largely targeted audience, you should consider using micro-influencers and nano influencers. Your budget will also be determined by the type of influencer you decide to employ for your campaign, so you should look around, do a market survey of how much each of these influencers charge, and you should know what your campaign can afford. It is, however, important to consider your product type and how much money you can generate per item on average. If you sell very cheap items, it is unadvisable to select expensive influencers to enable you to get your returns quick.
Ensure that the influencers on your shortlist are “legit” – they haven’t amassed fake engagements and followers. Check through their posts painstakingly to see their follower-to-engagement ratio. Someone with 10,000 followers shouldn’t struggle to get 100 engagements; if they do, it could be a red flag of poor content, fake or inactive followers. The comments shouldn’t also be stereotyped like robots. If all the comments you see on an influencer’s posts are short and identical, it could be fake or simulated. There should be a proper flow of interaction.
Check out the influencers’ previous campaigns, what brands they have worked with, how similar those brands are to yours, and how successful the campaign turned out to be. Also, check out their posts and be sure they can communicate about you to their audience without sounding excessively promotional. You need interactions, not a robot.
Look for an advocate
Many influencers just want to make money from campaigns, and so they don’t put genuine effort into the campaigns; they just want the campaign to end as soon as possible, so they can get money from other campaigns.
This is usually dangerous to the campaign’s success, as there is usually little creativity in terms of content.
This is why the influencer you choose must be ready to dedicate effort to ensure the campaign’s success, rather than just make random posts about your product or service.
From previous campaigns of an influencer, you will get an insight into how creative he is with campaigns. If you can ensure that your choice influencer can advocate for your brand, you will totally win over his audience, and it will be evident in your sales and revenue.
Choose according to your business scope
If your business scope is small and not even beyond your country, maybe in just a few select states, it is advisable to use micro-influencers because of their closer interactions with people who form your target audience.
Even if you feel like you can afford the celebrities, there will be little effect as those influencers have a much larger scope than your audience.
If you have a brick and mortar store in Just one state in a European country, it might be out of scope to contact a celebrity as their fans are people all over the world, and many people won’t travel down to patronize you because a celebrity they like is talking about you.
However, mini influencers, nano influencers, and micro-influencers can reach out more specifically to people within your scope.
As word spreads locally, the number of customers will increase, and from there, you can think of expansion to other states, probably based on requests of people who engage posts.
Consider many engagements
Before committing to an influencer, especially micro-influencers and below, it is important to know how well they get their audience engaged.
As previously said, micro-influencers usually engage with their audiences more, so there is evident goodwill, but this engagement should be well measured in terms of percentage.
An influencer with 100,000 followers but has an average engagement rate of 10,000 likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc., is doing worse than an influencer who has 30,000 followers with an engagement rate of 7,500.
So when making decisions, it is important to properly consider followers considering engagements, don’t just choose an influencer because they have a larger audience.
How well influencers’ audience engages their posts is a testament to how valuable their content is, and hence how useful they can be to your campaign.
Ideally, the average engagements for posts on social media should be from 3% to 5% to ensure that you are dealing with a loyal set of followers.
Select from your niche
You will see many influencers with impressive numbers and previous campaigns that look good, but be sure to select from your niche for two main reasons.
You want to be sure that they can provide useful content for your brand. In the past, their content might have been great because of the knowledge they possess about the niche of those brands.
But if they don’t know much about your niche, you greatly risk a failed campaign due to poor content.
It is also possible that the influencers have gained their target audience from posting things that their followers are conversant with.
The majority of that audience followed them because of that campaign.
If your choice influencer brings up a strange topic, it might be difficult for them to relate, and they altogether ignore it.
Your target audience:
As a business owner, you could be selling directly to consumers (B2C marketing), or you may target other Businesses (B2B marketing).
In choosing an influencer for your campaign, it is important to know the influencers that are already popular with brands.
Such influencers that are popular with brands are great for B2B marketing.
If you target businesses as your customer base, your influencer must be reputable. A reputable and well-known influencer can be appropriate for this kind of campaign because fellow businesses will trust them better.
For individual campaigns, several influencers can be used, even relatively new ones, as long as there is an audience and the influencer can create quality content.
Type of remuneration
It is important to determine whether you want to give out cash, products, or both to your choice influencers for a successful campaign.
If you render a service, you can show past jobs and services you have rendered to your influencers to critique and see how much knowledge they can garner about your brand because audiences will have a lot of questions.
You definitely do not want your influencer ignoring them.
You can also give out new products for them to use and have an honest opinion about it and look at the product from a customer perspective; that way, they will relate with the customers better in their posts.
Commissions are also ways to get your influencers well invested in your campaign, you just have to reach a fair agreement with the influencer, and if you are using more than one influencer, you can make use of dedicated links for them so that each of them will have a collation system for leads that were gotten through them.
Influencers are sometimes skeptical about using commissions as the sole form of payment, but it can be mixed with other means of remuneration. If you are paying cash only, you need to ensure that you are not promoting an entirely new product.
Products already in the market but have dipped in demand can be promoted. Hence there will be fewer questions, and even fellow consumers can have the answers to the questions of others.
Key takeaways
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that utilizes those with influence in a particular industry to increase brand awareness and encourage them to take a specific course of action.
Influencer marketing relies on shared goals and values between the concerned parties, and not on transactional arrangements.
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that leverages those with influence in a particular over social media platforms to increase brand awareness via targeted campaigns. Examples comprise brands’ campaigns over Instagram or TikTok, where brands connect with influencers in various niches to launch, promote or enhance their products successfully.
What factors to take into account when picking an influencer?
A few key factors to take into account when choosing to work with an influencer are:
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
