Why do you feel like buying from the brand endorsed by someone with a good number of followers on Instagram? Or say some other social media?
Simply because you trust the product recommended by the Influencer.
Surprisingly, about 49% of the customers’ purchasing decisions depend on Influencer Marketing. It clearly demonstrates how important social media is and how it has been making a difference in the overall digital marketing scenario.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer Marketing is simply a marketing strategy where the products are referred or endorsed by influencers. Influencers in simpler terms are those people who are renowned in social media. They have relatively more followers in social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, tik-tok, YouTube.
You might think of influencers as celebrities. In some cases they can be. But not necessarily all the influencers are celebrities.
There has been somewhat a paradigm shift in the way marketers will do advertisements. Social media and digital marketing has disrupted the way products are marketed and advertised.
Why is Influencer Marketing relevant? What are its Benefits?
We now barely hear someone taking their purchasing decision watching a television ad or following a billboard advertisement. Rather people are happy to shop for a product endorsed by a social media influencer.
People trust more when they get referral from someone who they trust.
The most important thing one should have to accelerate their sales is building a huge client base. Now we all know that the best client base is formed by leveraging social media platforms.
From blogs to Instagram stories, and even tik-toks and you tube videos, influencers are getting sponsorships and are working paid promotional campaigns with different brands.
Will you be able to build the audience base on yourself and Will you create the content that will attract the audience yourself? It is important and tricky to play your cards right!
Decide, will it be logical for your business to use the client base built by Influencers? Or will it be a good idea to offer it to someone who has a large audience and rely on them on the content creation part too?
Some people might want to create the content themselves and ask the social media influencers to publish it in influencers social pages. But make sure that the content is qualitative enough so that Influencers want to promote and endorse it.
There are ample benefits of Influencer Marketing. The best part of Influencer Marketing is that you can use the existing client base and accelerate your sales.
Narrowing down the benefits of Affiliate marketing here are some of the benefits that Affiliate marketing offers :
- Affiliate Marketing helps to connect with a larger audience.
- Affiliate Marketing helps to improve effective content strategy.
- It helps a brand understand the consumer expectations.
- It can be a great tool for Search Engine Optimization.
Influencer Marketing Strategy
Influencer Marketing Strategy entails the processes from defining your budget & objectives, selecting right influencer to designing and evaluating the Influencer marketing campaign.
Planning/ Setting Objectives
First of all make sure you have considered some definite purposes of associating with the Influencers. The objectives might be different for various brands.
For some new brands just getting introduced, the goals might be simply to make the consumers aware of the brand. For some, brand awareness might not be a big thing, so they might be interested in increasing the engagement in social media platforms from where they could expect some good conversions.
Finding Right Influencers
Influencer Marketers have different names depending on the numbers of people that follow them. As mentioned in Simplilearn, the types of Influencers are:
- Mega-Influencers
- Macro-Influencers
- Mid-Tier Influencers
- Micro-Influencers
- Nano-Influencers
| Influencers | Followers | Effectiveness |
| Mega | More than 1 million | high Marketing budget, reach to larger audience, brand awareness, higher engagement rates |
| Macro | 500k to 1 million | Larger audience but not much engagement |
| Mid-Tier | 50k to 500k | Brand awareness and reach |
| Micro | 10k to 50k | Fewer targeted niche to gain trust |
| Nano | 1k to 1ok | Product testing; low marketing budget |
Apart from the number of followers, the different categories of Influencers might have different costing, terms and conditions, content creation strategy, engagement modality.
But we should keep in mind that in the end numbers matter. Reaching out to the right audience is what makes more sales conversions. Finding the right influencers is very important as different influencers will have their own domain knowledge and audiences.
Before connecting to the influencers you should be sure of the budget, purpose of Influencer Marketing campaign and social media platform where you think of running the campaign.
It is even crucial to search the influencers depending upon the location of the audience to target the content that you are expecting from the influencers.
You can look into and check with the influencers that your competitors are collaborating with. It is always a good idea to search with a hashtag in Instagram and tok-toks. Nowadays marketers can use different tools to find and contact the influencers directly on the basis of keywords, niches, target audience, location.
Some of the most used tools are Awario, Upfluence and HypeAuditor.
Once you find the right Influencer to collaborate with, you can simply approach them for your product. If things like the terms of payment, project timeline works out to be fine for both of you, kick start the campaign.
The Future of Influencer Marketing?
It is anticipated that the Influencer marketing industry will reach $16 B in 2022 from around $13 billion in 2021. The growing engagements in Social Media is a clear base for anticipation that Social media marketing will be growing in the near Future.
It is obvious that there has been growth in new social media platforms like tik tok. The present available platforms are always coming up with new engagements ways like shorts in youtube and reels in instagram.
So, there is no doubt more brands will be inclined towards Influencer marketing in near future. However, there might be some changes in the way brands will associate with Influencers or the way brands will approach Influencers .
To make it clearer, Brands might want to get associated with those influencers who have specific knowledge about the niche or say the follower base who can be targeted.
Micro and Nano Influencers are expected to grow more than the celebrity influencers and Mega Influencers because of their engagement in social media and the time they spend with their followers.
What do the numbers say ?
48% of the world Population are engaged in some sort of social media and out of them 54% are making purchase decisions which are influenced by social media.( source : shopify.com )
$1 spent on influencer Marketing has earned on an average of $ 5.8 of promotional publicity. ( source: influencermarketing hub.com )
Final thoughts…
With the use of social media platforms, Influencer marketing has proved to be one of the effective marketing strategies with fascinating results.
But it is always advisable to start with a small budget and certain predefined goals. Once the conversions are good enough and strategies work out, you can broaden your product line.
So, seek out and connect with Influencer marketer over social media platforms to discuss your influencer marketing goals and expectations clearly before your invest.