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.
Aspect | Explanation |
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Definition | Influencer Marketing is a marketing strategy that leverages influential individuals with a substantial and engaged following on social media or other online platforms to promote products, services, or brands. It involves collaborations between brands and influencers to reach and engage with a targeted audience. |
Key Concepts | – Influencers: Individuals with significant online presence and the ability to sway the opinions and behaviors of their followers. – Sponsored Content: Paid partnerships where influencers create and share content promoting a brand or product. – Audience Engagement: The strength of an influencer’s connection with their followers. – Niche Expertise: Influencers often specialize in specific niches or industries. |
Characteristics | – Trust and Authenticity: Influencers are trusted by their followers, and their endorsements are often seen as more authentic than traditional advertising. – Diverse Platforms: Can be implemented on various platforms, including social media, blogs, YouTube, and podcasts. – Content-Centric: Focuses on creating engaging and valuable content that resonates with the influencer’s audience. – Performance-Based: Can be measured in terms of engagement, reach, and conversions. |
Examples | – Beauty influencers showcasing and reviewing cosmetics products on Instagram. – Fitness influencers promoting workout equipment and supplements on YouTube. – Travel bloggers partnering with tourism boards to feature destinations on their blogs. – Tech experts reviewing and endorsing gadgets and technology products on their websites. |
Advantages | – Authenticity: Leverages the trust and authenticity of influencers to promote products or services. – Targeted Reach: Reaches a specific and engaged audience interested in the influencer’s niche. – Content Quality: Influencers create high-quality, engaging content that resonates with their audience. – Measurable Results: Performance can be tracked and measured in terms of engagement and conversions. |
Challenges | – Cost: High-profile influencers may charge substantial fees for collaborations. – Authenticity Concerns: Maintaining authenticity can be challenging as influencers grow and engage in numerous partnerships. – Identifying the Right Influencers: Finding influencers whose audience aligns with the brand can be difficult. – Oversaturation: In some niches, there is an oversaturation of influencers, making it harder to stand out. |
Adoption Trends | Influencer Marketing continues to grow as a vital component of digital marketing strategies, with businesses of all sizes recognizing its effectiveness in reaching and engaging target audiences. |
Conclusion | Influencer Marketing harnesses the influence of individuals with a strong online presence to promote products, services, or brands. By leveraging trust, authenticity, and targeted reach, it offers an effective way to connect with specific audiences. However, it requires careful selection of influencers and maintaining authentic partnerships to be successful. |
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.
With a single video campaign, you can reach millions of young people across the world.
Types Of Influencers
Choosing an Influencer for Your Campaign
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.
Case Studies
- Nike and Colin Kaepernick: Nike’s collaboration with former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, who was known for his social justice activism, sparked significant conversation and controversy. The campaign featured the slogan “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything,” and it garnered widespread attention and support from some consumers while facing backlash from others.
- Calvin Klein and Kardashian-Jenner Family: Calvin Klein partnered with members of the Kardashian-Jenner family, including Kim Kardashian and Kendall Jenner, for their #MyCalvins campaign. This campaign featured the family wearing Calvin Klein underwear and generated substantial buzz on social media.
- Fenty Beauty by Rihanna: Rihanna’s makeup brand, Fenty Beauty, achieved great success through influencer marketing. Rihanna collaborated with makeup artists and beauty influencers of various skin tones to showcase her brand’s inclusive range of products, leading to widespread praise for its diversity.
- Wendy’s and Carter Wilkerson’s Chicken Nugget Tweet: Carter Wilkerson’s tweet asking Wendy’s how many retweets he needed for a year of free chicken nuggets went viral. Wendy’s responded with a challenge: 18 million retweets. Although he didn’t reach that goal, the campaign gained tremendous attention, showcasing the power of user-generated content.
- Daniel Wellington and Micro-Influencers: Watch brand Daniel Wellington achieved global success by collaborating with micro-influencers (individuals with smaller but engaged followings). They provided influencers with free watches in exchange for content creation, resulting in a widespread trend of “Daniel Wellington” watch photos on social media.
- Sephora and Beauty Influencers: Sephora frequently partners with beauty influencers to promote their products. Influencers create makeup tutorials, product reviews, and makeup looks using Sephora’s products, effectively showcasing their offerings to a highly engaged audience.
- GoPro’s User-Generated Content: GoPro encourages users to share their action-packed videos and photos on social media using the hashtag #GoPro. The brand then curates and shares this user-generated content on its own platforms, harnessing the enthusiasm and creativity of its customers.
- Mercedes-Benz’s Instagram Takeover: Mercedes-Benz handed over its Instagram account to photographer and influencer @CurbFreeWithCoryLee, who has a disability and travels the world. This takeover highlighted inclusivity and diversity while showcasing Mercedes-Benz vehicles in various accessible travel destinations.
- Lay’s “Do Us a Flavor” Campaign: Lay’s potato chips ran a campaign inviting consumers to create and name their own chip flavor. The winning flavor would become a limited-time product. This crowdsourced approach engaged consumers and encouraged them to share their flavor ideas on social media.
- Coca-Cola and Personalized Labels: Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign involved printing individual names on Coke bottles and cans, encouraging consumers to find and share their personalized beverages on social media, resulting in a surge of user-generated content.
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.
- Conventional digital marketing is now largely ignored by consumers. Influencer marketing is seen as a more authentic marketing strategy.
Key Highlights of Influencer Marketing:
- Definition: Influencer marketing leverages the popularity, expertise, or reputation of individuals to promote products or services. It’s not solely about social media followings but about influencing consumer behavior.
- Hybrid Marketing: Influencer marketing combines celebrity endorsements from traditional marketing with modern content-driven strategies, providing a fresh approach to promotion.
- Assessing Influencers:
- Reach: While reach matters, smaller influencers can have higher credibility and targeted audiences.
- Credibility: Influencer trust is based on their perceived expertise and authority in a niche.
- Salesmanship: Influencers who can persuade others with confidence and conviction are valuable.
- Engagement: Real engagement (likes, shares, comments) is more important than follower counts.
- True Fans: Influencers with a dedicated fan base can ensure campaign success.
- Authenticity and Collaboration: Successful influencer marketing is authentic and involves collaboration between brands and influencers with aligned goals and values.
- Importance of Influencer Marketing: Conventional digital marketing is often ignored or blocked by consumers, making influencer marketing a more effective way to engage and avoid “ad blindness.”
- Examples:
- La Cense Beef collaborated with food bloggers to promote grass-fed beef.
- General Motors created an insider’s club to engage loyal supporters.
- Dunkin’ Donuts partnered with Charli D’Amelio on TikTok for a global campaign.
- Types of Influencers:
- Mega Influencers
- Macro-influencers
- Micro-Influencers
- Nano Influencers
- Mini Influencers
- Choosing the Right Influencer:
- Research social media platforms popular with your target audience.
- Consider your budget and align it with influencer type.
- Ensure influencers have legitimate, engaged followers.
- Evaluate previous campaigns and creativity.
- Choose influencers from your niche or industry.
- Align influencers with your campaign goals.
- Determine remuneration (cash, products, commissions).
- Incorporating Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing allows you to reach targeted audiences, making it essential to define your campaign goals and objectives and choose influencers accordingly.
- Advocate for Your Brand: Look for influencers who are genuinely invested in your campaign’s success and can advocate for your brand effectively.
- Scope of Business: Consider the scale and scope of your business when selecting influencers to ensure they can reach and engage your target audience effectively.
- Engagement Matters: Focus on influencers with a good engagement rate rather than just a large follower count to ensure valuable content and interaction.
- Selecting from Your Niche: Opt for influencers who are already familiar with your industry or niche to provide relevant and compelling content.
Related Frameworks | Description | When to Apply |
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Micro-Influencer Marketing | – A form of influencer marketing that involves collaborating with individuals who have smaller, niche followings typically ranging from 1,000 to 100,000 followers. Micro-Influencers often have highly engaged audiences within specific niches or communities, making them effective for targeted marketing campaigns. | – When aiming to reach specific niche audiences or engage with hyper-targeted communities. – Leveraging Micro-Influencers to drive authentic engagement, build brand credibility, and generate conversions effectively. |
Nano-Influencer Marketing | – A subset of influencer marketing that involves partnering with individuals who have a very small but highly engaged following, typically fewer than 1,000 followers. Nano-Influencers often have a strong personal connection with their audience and can be highly influential within their close-knit communities. | – When seeking to drive word-of-mouth marketing and grassroots advocacy within tight-knit communities or local markets. – Collaborating with Nano-Influencers to tap into their authentic relationships, drive local engagement, and amplify brand messages effectively. |
Employee Advocacy Programs | – Internal initiatives that empower employees to become brand ambassadors and share company-related content, messages, or promotions with their personal networks. Employee Advocacy Programs harness the credibility and reach of employees to amplify brand messaging, increase social reach, and drive employee engagement. | – When seeking to leverage employee networks, build brand advocacy, and amplify social reach organically. – Implementing Employee Advocacy Programs to mobilize employees, enhance brand visibility, and drive employee engagement and advocacy effectively. |
Celebrity Endorsements | – A traditional marketing strategy where brands partner with celebrities, athletes, or public figures to endorse their products or services. Celebrity Endorsements leverage the fame, influence, and credibility of celebrities to create brand association, increase visibility, and drive consumer purchasing decisions. | – When aiming to generate widespread brand awareness, enhance brand perception, or attract mainstream audiences. – Leveraging Celebrity Endorsements to capitalize on celebrity status, create aspirational associations, and drive consumer affinity and purchase intent effectively. |
Advocacy Marketing | – A marketing strategy that focuses on mobilizing satisfied customers, brand enthusiasts, or industry experts to advocate for a brand or its products. Advocacy Marketing involves identifying, nurturing, and empowering advocates to share positive experiences, reviews, or recommendations with their networks. | – When seeking to harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing and peer recommendations to drive brand credibility and trust. – Implementing Advocacy Marketing initiatives to cultivate brand advocates, amplify positive sentiment, and foster community engagement effectively. |
Influencer Tiering | – A strategic approach to influencer marketing that categorizes influencers into different tiers based on their reach, engagement, and relevance to the brand or campaign objectives. Influencer Tiering allows brands to tailor their influencer partnerships and outreach strategies to maximize impact and ROI. | – When planning influencer marketing campaigns and identifying suitable influencers for collaboration. – Employing Influencer Tiering to segment influencers, allocate resources effectively, and optimize campaign performance based on specific goals and target audiences. |
Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) | – A systematic approach to managing relationships with influencers throughout the influencer marketing lifecycle, from identification and outreach to collaboration and performance tracking. Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) involves building rapport, providing value, and fostering mutually beneficial partnerships with influencers to drive campaign success. | – When executing influencer marketing campaigns and maintaining long-term relationships with influencers. – Implementing Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) tools and processes to streamline influencer workflows, track performance metrics, and optimize collaboration effectively. |
Influencer Content Creation | – A collaborative process where brands work with influencers to co-create branded content that aligns with the brand’s messaging, values, and target audience preferences. Influencer Content Creation leverages the creativity, authenticity, and storytelling skills of influencers to produce engaging and persuasive content for brand campaigns. | – When seeking to create authentic, relatable, and engaging content that resonates with target audiences. – Partnering with influencers to co-create branded content that drives brand awareness, engagement, and conversion effectively. |
Influencer Marketing Platforms | – Technology platforms or marketplaces that facilitate the discovery, management, and execution of influencer marketing campaigns. Influencer Marketing Platforms provide brands with access to influencer databases, campaign management tools, and performance analytics to streamline influencer collaboration and campaign optimization. | – When planning and executing influencer marketing campaigns at scale or across multiple channels. – Utilizing Influencer Marketing Platforms to identify influencers, streamline workflows, and measure campaign ROI effectively. |
Influencer Code of Conduct | – Guidelines or standards established by brands or industry organizations to govern ethical practices, transparency, and authenticity in influencer marketing partnerships. An Influencer Code of Conduct outlines expectations regarding disclosure, content quality, brand alignment, and compliance with regulations to ensure integrity and trust in influencer collaborations. | – When establishing partnerships with influencers and ensuring transparency, authenticity, and legal compliance in influencer marketing activities. – Adhering to an Influencer Code of Conduct to maintain brand credibility, mitigate risks, and build trust with audiences effectively. |
What are the types of influnecers?
We can break down influencers into five main categories:
What is considered influencer marketing?
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:
What's the process to follow to choose an inlfuencer for your brand?
The process to follow to choose an influence marketer in target with your brand is:
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