Earlier, we talked about the significance of video marketing. However, there is another marketing method that you might have heard about: influencer marketing. Let’s dissect this further.
What Is Influencer Marketing
Definitively, influencer marketing is a marketing method that uses famous people and those with large social followings as key leaders to promote your brand, message, product, or service, rather than the target market as a whole.
Rather than doing your own marketing efforts with your own following, you identify and hire individuals that have influence over potential buyers (pre-built followers), and orient marketing activities around these influencers.
Since the dawn of social media, influencer marketing has been slowly overtaking traditional advertising.
Marketing experts acknowledge its benefits. They realize that working together with influencers (people who have high numbers of followers on social media) can be really powerful. Businesses can significantly build their reach with relevant messages that are delivered by the stars in the social media world.
This has made influencer marketing grow over the past few years, and its global value is now estimated to be at 1.07 billion U.S. dollars.
Influencer marketing generally works through these stages:
1. Determining the marketing objectives by identifying the target audience, making a financial plan, and building up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs);
2. Selecting social media channels strategically depending on the objectives, the specific group of clients, and the kind of engagement required;
3. Identifying and hiring key brand or product influencers that are suitable, good, credible, and reputable to be your ambassadors. They should be polite, articulate, able to write posts that are well-researched, have dedicated audiences & positive track records, and be seen as experts;
4. Creating a marketing campaign created for those influencers, & planning and adjusting the publishing schedules to match the advertising efforts;
5. Checking and reviewing content prior to publishing;
6. Tracking key metrics that are related to reach, sales, and brand awareness.
So far, influencer marketing has been proven to be effective, simply because of the following 3 reasons:
- Social reach: a high number of people (this can be millions) will be exposed to your brand and/or product.
- Original content: marketing content that’s produced by the influencers themselves will be original, therefore it can become more effective for your brand and/or product.
- Consumer trust: followers of influencers in various social media follow them for a reason: they trust the influencers to some degree. Thus, it creates strong relationships between the influencers and their followers.
Influencer Marketing Platform
Influencers could bring great impact to your business – this can be done by using several channels, such as a blog or vlog, social media, website, etc.
By injecting your brand into these channels and the influencers’ lifestyles as the “opinion leaders”, you are essentially creating customers from the influencers’ audiences – customers who want a share in the very same lifestyle that their influencers live in.
This is a very powerful subtle marketing tactic.
Blogs
Blogs can be powerful because they engage with and influence consumers. Bloggers create conversations and people feel they can be trusted because they are “one of us”. They might not be top models, but they can be sort of like your kind next-door neighbors who you might seek advice from.
Fashion blogs are the perfect example of the potential that influencer marketing can bring. A good fashion blogger adds value and expertise because he or she discovers, evaluates, compares, and introduces products to their followers. When done right, you can even pay fashion bloggers only by sending them your products, reducing unnecessary costs.
Twitter is one of the top 10 most popular sites on the Internet. It provides the opportunity for brands to showcase themselves. A strong Twitter following gives a signal that your business or brand is attracting people.
With over 500 million tweets sent per day, Twitter influencers can be an alternative for your brand to prosper.
YouTube
When YouTube was first activated in 2005, no one believed a video-sharing platform could completely change how we consume digital video content. Today, YouTube has truly revolutionized it. Its uses range from vlogs on the simple things in life to special-themed videos such as unboxing products, and more.
Youtube even has a higher count of users than Twitter does: per January 2018, there are at least 1.57 billion active Youtube users. When done the right way, advertising on Youtube by hiring influencers can double your earnings.
Started in 2010, Instagram had more than 400 million users by the end of 2015. It is particularly popular with fashion, lifestyle, and fitness bloggers. Hosting an influencer takeover is an Instagram strategy that can be very effective. The followers of the influencers can end up following your account, therefore growing your own channel as well.
Influencer Marketing Campaigns
To give you an idea of how effective influencer marketing can be, here are some examples of projects, products, and/or business that incorporate influencers as part of their marketing tactic:
1.Sprint
Influencers: Lele Pons, Gerard Adams, Prince Royce, Bradley Martyn, and Rachel Cook (Youtube)
Sprint caused Verizon’s famous “can you hear me now?” guy to switch to Sprint – and they also worked together with artists and entrepreneurs to target a massive number of young people.
Strategically, each of the influencers in this campaign has millions of followers, making their total reach on Instagram alone a whopping 30 million followers. And since each of them generates a different following, Sprint was able to engage with an increasing amount of customers through these 5 influencers.
2.Fiji Water
Influencer: Danielle Bernstein (Instagram)
You might have heard of Fiji Water, but perhaps its Instagram campaign partner, weworewhat, is more familiar to you. We Wore What is actually a blog made by fashionista and social influencer Danielle Bernstein. Together with Fiji Water, they created Bodyworewhat, an influencer marketing campaign offering workout videos with Bernstein.
This smart campaign made good use of Bernstein’s 1.8 million followers.
3.H&M
Influencers: Julie Sariñana and Ela Velden (Instagram)
The multi-national fashion retail company, H&M, has one of the largest Instagram followings when compared to their competitors in the fashion industry. This is partly due to their influencer campaigns that involve women who reflect H&M’s style all by themselves.
Fashion blogger Julie Sariñana and model Ela Velden are two of them – they partnered with H&M for the brand’s fall 2017 catalogue. Sariñana even promoted H&M from her own Instagram account.
We’ll close this by giving you a quote:
“Our research shows that real life influencers who are passionate about what they are recommending have significantly more buying conversations, and consumers are more likely to act on their recommendations.” ~Brad Fay, COO and lead researcher of the Keller Fay Group.
Conclusion
Hence, it is clear to see why so many brands nowadays are investing and choosing influencer marketing as one of their ultimate weapons – because many people buy products based on recommendations from people they trust (influencers).
At Cyberius, we’re professionals, and very passionate about marketing your brand, product, and/or service. We will gladly assist you to find the right influencers for your business. If you need help building a marketing plan, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Created by Cyberius, a digital marketing company that specializes in content creation, online community management, and crowdfunding.
Get informative articles and reports like this one for your business, to help grow your online community, and more. Contact us at: zaneta@cyberius.com.
Loading...
Leave a Comment