How to Get Started With Influencer Marketing
Posted by Shu Wen
Thursday 29 Mar 2018
Posted by Shu Wen
Thursday 29 Mar 2018
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With social media on the rise, influencer marketing is seen to be an effective marketing strategy for most businesses. Celebrities are no longer the only and exclusive choice as influencers. At present, YouTubers, bloggers or anyone who has the influence over a big group of crowd can be considered as influencers.
In this article, you'll find out:
- Why influencer marketing
- Who to look for as influencers
- How to measure the effectiveness of your influencer campaign
Why influencer marketing?
If you have googled for influencer marketing statistics, you would probably get a long list of it and to see most of them being positive and bring profit and value to businesses. Yes, profit is the number one and the ultimate reason but breaking it down:
1. Influencers earn more trust and credibility compared to celebrities.
No matter how hard a brand sells its products or services, there is somehow a tiny bit of scepticism among the consumers. Because which brand would speak lowly about how great their brand is. That is why, social media recommendations, peer reviews and influencers opinions are likely to be their preferred choice for making a decision. They are more relatable and relevant to the buyers. This leads to the importance of choosing the right influencer that advocates for your brand (which will be discussed later).
2. Effectively Reach Marketing Goals
According to Tomoson's survey in 2015, businesses earned $6.50 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing. While eMarketers survey showed that 88% of the marketers found influencer to be extremely effective in increasing awareness.
Your marketing goals may be increasing your brand awareness, increase customer engagement with the brand or reach out to new customer segment. With that being said, your goals should be determined first before setting up influencer marketing to ensure they can be measured and are effectively being reached.
3. Overcome ad blockers
It has shown that 47% of customers used ad-blocking technology when browsing. Ad-blocker is definitely a turn-off and proves that the real opinion - the influencer rules now.
Who to look for as influencers?
One of the main challenges in influencer marketing is to source for influencers who resonate well with their brand and businesses. And this is a pivotal stage as influencers indirectly represent a brand and impact the company's overall reputation.
1. Find someone who is relevant with your brand or your niche
It is important to find someone who shares content relevant to your brand and products. For example, if you are a clothing company, you would want to find fashion bloggers as an influencer.
2. Relationship over popularity
Do not swiftly assume those with hundreds of thousands or millions reach are better off than those who has less followers. Yes, reach is an important factor in choosing your influencer but most importantly do they have a relationship with their followers or audience? In other words, how well is their engagement with their audience. If they have high engagement and relationship with their audience, the level of trust among them would be stronger and lead better conversion rate.
Step 1: What is your budget?
The cost of influencers may vary depending on its popularity and amount of reach they own. There are three types of influencers: Celebrity influencers, Macro-influencers and Micro-influencers. Micro-influencers are definitely at a lower cost but surprisingly, the engagement rate is slightly higher (2.75%) compared to macro-influencers (2.65%).
Step 2: Who are you targeting to?
Finding the right influencer is important as knowing who are their followers in order to effectively reach your target market. You may be targeting to a specific niche like vegetarians, college students or sensitive skin ladies. So it is crucial to find the right person to speak to the right people about your brand.
Step 3: Start your search for influencers on various platforms
Instagram is proven to have the most average interactions per post per 1,000 followers based on TrackMaven's report. While Bloglovin' survey shows that 55% of its micro-influencers believe Instagram to be the most effective platform for engaging with their audience and 62% ranked fashion as the top two spots on Instagram.
Source: MarketingProfs
With that being said, you should not limit your search on Instagram platforms only. Depending on the audience you are targeting and the type of industry you are in, try out on various platforms and channels like blogs, Pinterest, YouTubes and Facebook.
Step 4: Email or DM your potential influencers
Once you have found several potential influencers, start emailing and contacting them. Share with them what are your goals and terms of this partnership. Ensure you create mutual values to create meaningful and lasting relationship.
Step 5: Start communicating your campaign with your influencers
Here are some ways to encourage content creation from your influencers:
1. Giveaways Contest
This tactic is especially effective when you want to raise awareness on a particular new product or to engage with a new audience. Provide free products to the influencers through giveaway contests.
Just like how Sonia and Andy, a Youtuber couple gave away some free watches to its followers who comment, like and subscribe to their channel. So this indirectly delivers a win-win situation (mutual value as aforementioned) to both the brand and the influencers.
Source: Andymetsonia
2. Product Reviews
You can have your influencers writing reviews for your products. Make sure that the opinions are honest because that is the whole point of getting influencers at the first place - people believe them in their authenticity. So offer them your products to try so they can accurately review them.
3. Sponsored Posts
This is one of the common way brands engage with their influencers. Sponsor the influencers to post something about the brand or products.
How to measure the effectiveness of your campaign?
After all the efforts being done, measuring the effectiveness of the campaign and the ROI is something we should not take lightly.
1. Coupon Codes
Send out coupon codes to your influencers. So if there is any sales coming in, this method would be more quantifiable and easily track when the coupon code is entered.
2. Track on the number of likes, comment and shares
When a particular influencer post, track the number of likes, comment and shares to measure the engagement rate of the particular post (how well users like the post or its 'stickiness'). Manually tracking them would be a low-budget option.
3. Comment-to-buy feature on Instagram
This is a feature which requires interested buyers to comment on particular post to receive an email with a personalised link to complete their purchase.
4. Google Analytics
Find out where are your majority leads generating from? On which platform. If you have influencers on multiple social platforms, track which channel is generating the most leads. For example, if Pinterest is getting more leads for you compared to Twitter then you should shift your focus to Pinterest and request your influencers to generate more content on this platform.
There are many ways to rack the ROI depending on the type of platform you are using and the goals you set to attain. So wrapping up, influencer marketing is no doubt one of the rising and popular marketing advertising channel. Do not step back if this platform is potential for your business growth. Start now!
