What is Influencer Marketing ?
Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing. It includes affirmation and product/service advertisements by influencers, individuals, and organizations that have a perceived degree of awareness or social impact in their field.
Influencer marketing is marketing to, with, and through influencers to drive brand messages to your and their target audiences.
Influencer marketing is similar to word-of-mouth marketing, but it doesn’t rely solely on specific recommendations.
Influencers can come from a wide range of places. Any individual, group, brand, or place could potentially be an influencer.
10 Influencer Marketing Benefits
- Increase brand awareness and reach
- Build credibility and trust
- Enrich your content strategy
- Win-win long-term partnerships
- Boost SEO, ROI, and bottom line
- Drive purchases decisions
- Increase sales
- Cost-effective & Saves Time
- Unlimited Sharing Potential On Social Platforms
- Suitable for any Business
Considerations
When engaging in influencer marketing, consider the following:
Reach and relevance. When using influencers, make sure that you are not overly concerned with their reach. What you really want is their relevance. Reach is great but, ultimately, if a very low percentage of that reach is relevant to you, then it doesn’t really warrant incorporating that influencer into your marketing strategy. So, balance your relevancy and reach objectives.
Peer recommendations. Peer recommendations are fantastic, but ultimately you need to disclose if these are paid-for recommendations.
Partnering with influencers is a number one marketing strategy for many brands. These are the benefits of influencer marketing:
- Reach a bigger audience
- Build trust for your brand
- Grow your social following
- Increase site traffic
- Get more leads
- Drive sales
How does influencer marketing work?
Some essential concepts shape influencer marketing strategies. We are talking about audience reach, different markets, and the content influencers generate.
Types of content
There are different ways to reach an audience. Influencers generate content of all kinds, on different platforms, always considering which of these channels your audience is in.
Brands also need to consider the types of content they want their products and services to be promoted. This way, the audience can perfectly understand and visualize the campaigns.
The main types of content are:
- Instagram posts and stories;
- social media posts;
- YouTube vlogs;
- podcasts;
- blog posts.
10 important influencer platforms for companies of any size
- Buzzbird
- Famebit
- OpenInfluence
- Facebook Brand Collabs Manager
- Hashtag Love
- ReachHero
- Hitchon
- Hypr
- Revinfluence
- Influence.vision
Difference between Social Media Marketing and Influencer Marketing
Social Media Marketing – Think On-Channel
Social Media Marketing primarily refers to brands using their own social media accounts to promote themselves by authoring their own posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. It’s mainly about marketing yourself via channels that you control, hence the term on-channel marketing. Be they text-based posts, videos, infographics, creative photographs or any other content types you can imagine, if you post it on your own account, it’s on-channel marketing. The same goes for boosting posts and paying for ads on social media networks to directly promote your goods and services.
Of course, social media marketing should also be about listening to the greater conversations out there and directly (and speedily) responding to communications from your followers, and even inserting yourself and your brand into conversations across social networks and media gathering places.
Influencer Marketing – Think Off-Channel
Influencer Marketing is focused on getting other people with significant followings to promote your brand or product to their followers – hence the term influencers. Almost all of the time this involves paying them directly or compensating them with goods or services. This form of paid marketing must be clearly marked on social media networks by the influencers as being “paid” or “sponsored” or simply as an “ad.” And since the influencers are posting on their own social media accounts, this is referred to as “off-channel” social marketing, because these are channels that you, the brand, do not control, the way you control your own Facebook and Twitter accounts.
The key here is to encourage influencers to post in their own authentic voices when they are carrying your water. Authenticity matters most when connecting to their audiences, by sharing their own experiences, opinions and preferences and directly relating them to your product or brand messages. These influencers can reach audiences in ways that you typically cannot, and you can benefit from the credibility they have established with their followers. Here, too, the content can take the form of text, video, photography, etc.
This is a great way to drive engagements around your brand’s content to generate clicks, likes, shares and comments from your target customers. It should come as no surprise, then, that influencer marketing is on the rise among companies and brands of all types.
WHAT IS THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNEL FOR INFLUENCER MARKETING?
THE MOST POPULAR INFLUENCER MARKETING CHANNELS
- Instagram: 89%
- YouTube: 70%
- Facebook: 45%
- Blogs: 44%
- Twitter: 33%
THE LEAST POPULAR INFLUENCER MARKETING CHANNELS
- Snapchat: 62%
- LinkedIn: 55%
- Twitch: 48%
- Pinterest: 42%
- Twitter: 32%
TYPES OF INFLUENCER MARKETING CONTENT FORMATS
Once you determine what you want to say, the next question is how to best deliver your message. Here are several of the most popular types of influencer marketing formats, by channel:
- Instagram: Instagram Post, Instagram Story, Instagram Video, IGTV
- YouTube: YouTube Video, YouTube Live
- Facebook: Facebook Post, Facebook Video, Facebook Live
- Twitter: Twitter Post, Twitter Video
- Blogs: Blog Post
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn Post, LinkedIn Video, LinkedIn Pulse
- Twitch: Twitch Livestream