What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing involves partnering with content creators, social media influencers and public figures to promote product or services to their viewers. They have loyal and engaged audience that enables brands to take credibility of the Influencers.
In Influencer Marketing, social media personalities recommend our product or services on social media in the form of sponsored post, product review and collaboration. This works well as the personal recommendation of the influencer and the purchasing power of influencer’s audience matters.
Types of Influencers
1. Mega Influencers
Mega Influencers have 1 Million+ followers as they are mostly top creators, public figures and celebrities. The primarily platforms are Instagram, YouTube and other mainstream platforms. Mega Influencers are top creators, athletes, musicians and actors. They have wide reach which gives great exposure to a brand and has a celebrity status among audience which boosts brand’s credibility. Indeed, they are too costly and may have less engagement on sponsored content in some cases. Smaller businesses should never go with mega influencers in influencer marketing.
2. Macro Influencers
In influencer marketing, macro influencers are the best choice for brands. Macro Influencers have 100k to 1 Million followers as they are mostly content creators, athletes, podcasters and musicians or rappers. They are primarily on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and other mainstream platform. They have strong presence in their niche or industry and have great expertise in their field. Macro Influencer have large and targeted audience which is niche specific. Whereas they are less expensive then mega influencers but they are still costly in their specific industry.
3. Micro Influencers
Micro Influencers have 10k to 100k followers as they are mostly content creators, bloggers, specialist and artists which have some name in the industry. They are primarily on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and other mainstream platform. They have more engaged and active audience then other type of influencers. MIcro Influencers are too enthusiast for the work and building themself to get at the level of mega or macro influencers. They have high engagement rate with affordability and uniqueness. Micro Influencer have limited reach and cannot reach vast audience like mega and macro influencers. Moreover, they are more time consuming for brands. Smaller businesses have a great chance here to jump into influencer marketing.
4. Nano Influencers
Nano Influencers have 1k to 10k followers as they are mostly beginner content creators and social media users with strong connections with a particular community. They are primarily on platforms like Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms. Nano Influencers are used for local marketing and has very close following. They are cost effective and has high engagement with people following them. Likely, they are cost effective and has mostly have personal connection with their followers. Moreover, they have too limited audience and have less experience in professional collaborations.
How to Create a Strategy for Influencer Marketing?
1. Set your Goals
Define your measurable goals that what you want to achieve through influencer marketing.. Goals can be increasing brand visibility, getting likes, shares or comments, increasing followers, building community through organic reach. Moreover, it can be generating leads and getting sales or conversions through influencer marketing.
2. Recognize your Target Audience
You have to define a specific audience you want to target to achieve your goals. Indeed, target audience can be researched by making buyer persona (demographics, behaviour and interest). We can identify their problems and desires so that it helps us to market brand, service or product through influencer marketing.
3. Choose a Mainstream Platform
You have to choose a mainstream platform according to your target audience and needs. Therefore, different platforms have different mindset of audience. As we can see, LinkedIn is used for professional networking, Instagram for high brand visibility and lifestyle content, Facebook for good community building, paid advertising, YouTube for higher visibility and credibility.
4. Set a Budget
Influencer marketing budget depends on the type of influencer you choose as it can be mega, macro, micro or nano. Therefore, do a budget consideration in which we consider influencers fees, initiatives like free products or other perks and content creation cost of creating high-quality and long-term videos or posts. We can also choose composition model in which we consider pay-per-post (PPP), affiliate marketing, free products (may be accepted by micro and nano influencers) and brand ambassadors for long-term partnership.
5. Choose a Right Influencer
Indeed, choose a right influencer who share your brand’s value and his or her followers match your target audience. Main factors to be remembered while choosing a influencer is firstly relevancy as the influencer should be lined up with the niche or industry. Second is engagement rate where we check the likes, shares, comments and how is the audience interaction. Third is authenticity where influencer’s content is genuine and trustworthy. Fourth is Reach as it depends on the type of influencer we choose (mega, macro, micro or nano).
6. Create a Content Strategy
Firstly, select a type of Influencer Content like sponsored posts where influencer promotes product or service through image, videos or stories. Second is product reviews and tutorials where influencer uses and explains about the product or service in the video. Third is giveaways and contests and fourth can be unboxing videos. Fifth can be promoting product or service on live sessions and Q&A’s through influencers page or channel. Sixth can be affiliate marketing where we share referral codes to audience and drive traffic and generate leads or sales.
7. Creating Influencer Brief
Providing influencer a clear brief giving campaign overview, key messages to communicate the core messages, content guidelines that defines content type and tone. Lastly providing call-to-action (CTA) and timeline for posting content.
8. Disclosure Guidelines
Influencer must follow the necessary guidelines to ensure transparency with the brand and maintain trust with the audience. They should clear all the connection with brand using hashtags in the like #sponsered and brand name in the post or video.
9. Monitor the Campaign
Hence, after launching the campaign, brand need to measure the metrics like reach and impressions, engagement, driven traffic, leads or conversion and return-on-investment (ROI).
10. Evaluate the Campaign
Analyze all the results and see if all the objectives are cleared or not. See if it worked or not, take feedbacks for influence that how audience engaged on the campaign. Lastly refine the strategy for upcoming campaigns.
Conclusion
Finally through this article, we got to know how to promote your brand through influencer marketing and all the major and minor pointers to remember. We got to know the different type of influencers and how to use them in influencer marketing. Moreover, we learned how to build influencer marketing strategy for promoting a brand, product or service.
