Influencer marketing has evolved from year to year to come to where we are at today. In the past, mostly celebrities would dominate the field but now, with the uprising of social medias, they are more and more social media influencers that come into scene.
So, what is influencer marketing and how can business marketers capitalize on this technique?
Want to find influencers? Use these tools
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing, the term that is commonly use, refers to a social media marketing technique that involves product reviews & recommendations, brand shoutouts or endorsement by social media influencers. These influencers would have high number of social followers on their social medias. As such, from just a simple social media post of mentioning our products, would have reach to many of their followers and have our brands heard.
So, who are these influencers? Anyone can be an influencer. As long as they are on any of the social medias, they can be a Facebook influencer, Twitter influencer, Instagram influencer, YouTube influencer, or even a TikTok influencer. What they need is just good content on their account that is highly likeable by the public that might gain them a follower. After awhile, they would have created a follower base, and this is where business owners can opt for their service to market their products to these high number of followers.
Usually, influencers will work around in a specific niche. It can be posting content about fashion, travel, photography, gaming, or sports.And this is good for business owners as you would have a targeted audience that is related to your niche. If you are selling travel products, you can use travel influencers who have been all around the world to endorse your products to their followers and gain traction.
Should you try influencer marketing?
The answer is yes. According to a research by Mediakix in 2019, 80% of marketers find influencer marketing to be an effective strategy for their business. Hence, it is worth to try it out to market your business as well.
Some of the benefits of influencer marketing are:
1. Reach a targeted audience
Influencers would have followers who are enthusiastic and loyal to a specific niche that both influencers and followers are looking forward to any new products or services that is relevant to their niche. This is an opportunity for business owners to grab the chance and collaborate with influencers to promote your goods to the right audience.
2. Build trust around your brand
At some point, influencer can be seen as someone who anyone look up to when it comes to a certain interest. It’s where people turn to when the subject of a certain interest came to surface. Hence, this is good as influencers, influence. And if you are able to work with certain influencers and make them trust your brand, they can make their followers feel the same.And the impact will be tremendous for you and your business.
3. Get more leads and drive sales
If the goods that you are offering is a solution that many people need or you just want to expand your brand’s name to reach more audience, through influencer marketing, you can get your business heard. When this happens, they are going to check out your website, your physical or online store, your social medias, and of course, your goods. You have gotten yourself leads here that can drive sales higher.
Types of influencers
We have influencers serving a specific niche and we also have influencers in different types of category based on their number of followers.
- Nano influencer: Influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers
- Micro influencer: Influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 followers
- Mid-tier influencer: Influencers with 50,000 to 500,000 followers
- Macro influencer: Influencers with 500,000 to 1,000,000 followers
- Mega influencer: Influencers with more than 1,000,000 followers
As you can see, from business marketers’ point of view, different types of influencers allow you to reach to different number of people. And also, you should expect to pay more if you want to reach to more people by utilizing mega influencers as compared to nano influencers.
How to use influencer marketing?
Now that you understand the basic foundation of influencer marketing, how can you utilize them properly?
1. Set goals
First, you have to ask yourself what is the goal that you want to achieve using influencer marketing as a strategy. The common goals would be to increase brand awareness and to drive more sales.
- Building brand awareness: If you are a new business, then most of the people out there won’t know about you yet. As such, you can promote your brand with the objective of letting the public know that you are one of the players in your niche as well. You can then measure the level of brand awareness through social mentions, number of followers on your social medias, number of reaches, impressions, likes or engagements.
- Drive more sales: You probably are selling several products in your niche but want to improve sales on a specific product.As such, promoting that particular product is the way to go when you collaborate with influencers. Ask them to do a product review and request to endorse them to their followers. Their followers would become potential leads if the like your products.
2. Determine your budget
In any given marketing strategy including influencer marketing, you have to set your budget. How much you are willing to spend to collaborate with influencers to market your products. As you can expect in terms of the rate of each influencer, it differs from as low as $10 per post to $10,000 per post based on number of followers. This being nano influencers to have a lower rate (lower potential reach of audience) and mega influencers have higher rate (higher potential reach of audience).
Based on influencer marketing report 2020 developed by Influencer Marketing Hub, the have tabled influencer rates to give you a rough idea of how much the rates are.
3. Choosing influencers
i. Find someone that is related to your niche
By now, you should know that the type of influencer that you should choose is the one that it related to your niche.
ii. Consider nano to mega influencers
Secondly, you would want to choose from the range of nano to mega influencers that they have in your niche.
According to your budget, you may need to start with nano influencers first if you have limited budget and work your way up when you have the budget to do so.
Also, nano influencers are good if you are about to test the water with your new products and try to gauge on the acceptance of the public on it. If you are getting enough buzz from this, you can consider influencers with bigger audience and followers.
But, if want to start with influencers with higher number of followers immediately, this is suitable from brand awareness campaign to bring awareness to your brand, products, and service.
iii. Filter your influencers
Thirdly, filter your influencers. This is because, even though your selected influencer has high number of followers indicating high potential reach, this can be from fake followers. Fake followers won’t do you any good as this basically is coming from bots or AI generated to represent them as followers.
What you ought to look at is engagement rate; this includes number of likes and comments on each post that belongs to your influencer. Higher engagement rate shows that they have real and active followers and the more likely that you will make sales from these followers.
4. Finding influencers
The last step would be finding the influencers to promote your products. This can be done in two ways.
i. Research on your own and approach them directly
You can do your own research and start finding influencer on any of the social medias that would suit you. Based on what you would have filtered, shortlist a few influencers and start approaching them via messaging or email and ask them whether they do product review or shoutouts to any brands.You can then ask them if they are willing to do one for you and what is their rate. From there, you can pretty much negotiate or agree on a rate for them to do a shoutout for you.
ii. Use influencer marketing tools to find influencers for you
Leverage on influencer marketing platform tool and find a suitable influencer from there. After you have selected your influencer,you can just contact them on the platform itself. There are several that you can try and utilize such as:
Many of businesses are using these platforms to help them with their influencer marketing campaign and you should too. Some come with influencer search, but some also come with influencer campaign analytics that will show you how has it been performing using influencers to market your products.
Conclusion
Marketing techniques are evolving as we go by day by day and one of it that we have today is influencer marketing. Previously, mainstream channel such as television or billboards were the only main platform that businesses use to get the attention of their potential clients. Now, they are everywhere on social media and influencer is one channel where businesses can go through to tap to their potential leads and drive more sales.
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