What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing wherein popular individuals promote a product by mentioning a brand’s products/services, or posting about the product/service’s features in order to reach out to a wider section of the intended target population. Influencer marketing has seen a drastic rise in the past five years because of a substantial surge in the number of social media users belonging to diverse age groups. In fact, Instagram alone has 1bn users wherein more than 60% of the users log in to their Instagram accounts regularly. On the other hand, there are nearly 1.49bn active, daily Facebook users. The ability to access this large pool of potential customers has urged many of the major brands such as Shein, Samsung, Audi, and many others to opt for influencer marketing, coupled with creating and operating their own social media accounts. As it happens, it is believed that influencer marketing can help boost your company’s return on investment 11 times, when compared to using traditional marketing strategies.
Popular Influencer Marketing Cases
Multiple brands have reached out to popular influencers and YouTube stars to promote their products, and have even heavily paid them to do so. Sun Peaks Resort, a ski resort in British Columbia resorted to the idea of influencers marketing by asking Canada’s top adventure photographer and Instagram influencer, Callum Snape, to post stunning images of the resort’s top seasonal attractions, run Facebook videos, and post Instagram stories. This stimulated 200,000+ article reviews of 3 minutes or more, and considerably raised interest amongst Sun Peaks’ target market. In addition, according to Travel Mindset, in order to boost Microsoft’s campaign for encouraging women to participate in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects/areas, they partnered with National Geographic to post 30 Instagram images by renowned wildlife photographers on International Women’s day. The photos depicted female scientists and outdoor adventures, which generated more than 3.5 million likes in a single day. Similarly, Walmart ventured into the concept of influencer marketing when it asked famous influencers such as Logan Paul to post regarding their new charitable initiative, Feeding America. It was claimed that Walmart would donate $0.90 to Feeding America for every like, share, or #FightHunger comment on each Instagrammer’s posts.
These examples convey that popular brands have utilised influencer marketing, and have seen positive outcomes. They mainly managed to do so by reserving a considerable marketing budget, designing appealing social media posts, and by also connecting with the right set of influencers.
Tips for Successful Influencer Marketing
- Develop a plan – It is essential to start off by designing a basic blueprint of what you want to achieve through your influencer marketing strategy. Who do you want to target? What message do you want to convey? Your competitors’ actions. What is your budget? Answering these questions will lend you a sense of direction and enable you to avoid making impulsive decisions in the latter stages.
- Design a Management Strategy – Since influencer marketing campaigns have to be ultimately run by your marketing team, it is crucial to assign this role to a specific team and training them accordingly. Delegating responsibilities to the right individual will also help ensure that the influencer marketing strategy is being handled deftly.
- Decide a Goal and a Message – You also need to possess a clear vision of the message you aim to convey. This step may also help you choose the right influencer. Some influencers may have millions of followers, but you may intend to reach out to only a specific section of the followers. In that case, designing a specific message will be the key as it will allow you to reach out to your particular target audience, allowing for greater returns.
- Spend Time and Money on Research – Paying influencers for each post can be fairly expensive, with an average price of $271 per post. Therefore, you would want to avoid spending on the wrong strategy by first researching the market conditions. Does your target market actually use social media? What are your customers’ demographics? These will permit you to select the right influencer, making your investment more sensible.
- Review and Make Changes – No plan or strategy is perfect in the first round. Thus, it is highly significant for organisations and marketing teams to closely review their influencer marketing strategy and look for possible errors. This will help them identify gaps in the strategy, and bridge the gaps before it’s too late.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it can be surmised that influencer marketing strategies have been highly effective up to this point, allowing the industry to be worth almost $5-$10bn by 2020. Numerous companies have used this strategy, and are continuing to do so as the number of social media users keep rising. Nevertheless, for your strategy to be completely successful, you need to be able to design the right plan, select the right influencers, and make sure that adequate human and financial resources are available to oversee an impactful and smooth implementation of your influencer marketing strategy.
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