In Influencer Marketing, a celebrity or an authority in an industry-specific connects with your company and lends credibility to your services, brand, or product. As the celebrity or athlete is famous, their association with your brand makes it even more popular and targets a broader audience within the marketplace. The appreciation, followers have for their Influencer gets passed on to the brand. The channels used for Influencer Marketing to engage brands are eMails, Websites, Social media, Events, Phonebook, Referral Marketing, etc. Define common goals such as Social Reach & Relevance and CTA Direct Response Marketing. Get valuable ROI from your campaigns by making choices for the right ambassador to represent your brand. Measure the success of your Influencer Marketing Campaigns by defining Metrics & KPIs.
Internet Celebrity has a large following on social media marketing channels such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, Twitter, etc.
Influencer Marketing Basics
Improve your brand with Influencer Marketing. Analyze Influencers and create a strategy for your brand before you can approach them. Test, learn and then screen them to identify the right influencer. How the Influencers drive the brand message to their audience can generate a lot of organic traffic, increase brand awareness and sales. Opt for micro-influencers so that you do not exhaust your budget by betting on Celebrities /Macro-Influencers. The micro-influencers are best suited for social media on a regional scale. They integrate with the culture as they have a hold on the local market. Moreover, relevant micro-influencer can be reliable and more suited for your brand.
Issues related to traditional marketing like billboards, newspapers and television commercials can be overcome with Influencer Marketing. Here brands and influencers work together in a campaign to expand the campaigns’ reach. Before starting a campaign know the audience for your product, brand, and/ or services that you want to reach through your channels. As you are aware of your Company you are sure to know who your customers are? If not then you need to construct buyer persona profiles composing of demographics of customers for your brand.
Influencer Marketing: Types of Influencers
As a brand with diverse strategies in place, know which type of influencer fig 2 is a perfect fit for your brand. Find a list of influencers on social media who has established creditworthiness in his particular industry. Brands now see engagement with their content in terms of brand loyalty and with increasing ROIs, the significance of differentiation of the types of influencers cannot be ruled out.
Nano Influencers
Nano Influencers are used for those purchases made without much thought and include products such as smartphones and small electronic gadgets, lifestyle, fashion, beauty, and cosmetics. These social media followers have around +/- 5000 users that reach their community through its fan community followings. For example, Beauty & cosmetic businesses reach their audience by roping in members from college campuses, working women, and home mom groups by turning them into advocates for their brand. Nano Influencers are cost-effective that can follow a word-of-mouth strategy for brands to follow.
Micro-Influencers
Micro-Influencers are influencers with smaller followers between 10,000 – 100,000. Such influencers are definitely not celebrities, politicians or icons. They are real people online with a powerful voice carrying distinct advantages related to smaller audiences. Micro-influencers lend a high level of trust and a day to day direct communication with their smaller audiences. Engagement rate increases as a result of the smaller followings. Partner with more micro-followers as they come with a smaller price tag and achieve the reach of macro influencers at a substantially low cost. Kavya Dsouza fig3 – Kavya Dsouza @streakhuefall is a Micro-Influencer for the Niche- fashion & beauty blogger and stylist -‘Streakhuefall’
Macro-Influencers
Macro Influencers have a following of 100,000 – 1000,000. They are the social media personas with an enthusiasm for a particular topic. They cannot be categorized in the celebrity class of influencers but have a large and loyal fan base. Moreover, their reach is high in its authority market segment. Businesses can partner with macro-influencers for their high- quality content. It is easy to connect with them as they are continuously seeking new opportunities. An example of Macro Influencer is Mary Kom fig 4 – MC Mary Kom OLY – @mcmary.kom an Athlete Boxer eg Advertising Campaign ‘Nestle- Everyday’.
Mega-Influencers
A few real-life celebrities enjoy the status of a mega influencer. Following is more than 1000,000+ with everyone following their social media channels. Mega Influencers have a passive audience which means ‘a large following does not entail an equally large engagement’. As is evident they partner with brands with a high price tag. Due to a massive follower base brand awareness is possible with the masses. They set a trend worldwide and can introduce new brands, and products in their network thus transforming brands into a motion. Contact with Mega Influencers for paid endorsements through their representatives. An example of a Mega Influencer fig5 – Neha Kakkar – @nehakakkar – a Bollywood female singer eg ‘Soul of the Musicians’ campaign by Audio Brand ‘boAt’.
Influencer Marketing: Finding the Right Influencers
A great place to start with would be Databases. Here you have to put much effort to evaluate each influencer and contact them directly. Find appropriate hashtags and use them to search on digital networks such as Twitter and Instagram. To reduce the time spent on researching profiles of influencers connect with Marketplaces. An Influencer Marketplaces eg Pulp Key are online platforms connecting businesses with influencers in identical industries or social media channels eg Instagram cosmetic & beauty influencers. Research on YouTube if you have knowledge of subjects your audience would be searching for. Brands and Agencies have found Influencers by conducting searches on Google.
Make the right selection of an Ambassador who qualifies for your brand from your fan followings. eg A dentist makes a credible brand ambassador for Sensodyne toothpaste. Influencer Marketing Agencies play an important role in assigning the right influencer with the right brand. Some Influencer Marketing Agencies are Socio Influencer and BlogWeet.
Influencer Marketing: Collaboration with Influencers
Reach a bigger audience, increase sales and convey your message by collaborating with Influencers to get your brand noticed. Not only film stars are influencers but today bloggers, models, YouTubers, and Instagrammers collaborate with various brands. Use Influencer marketing as a tool for your social media marketing strategy. To succeed with a limited budget find ways to collaborate with Influencers. Execute a successful marketing campaign involving:-
Collaborate with Influencers
It is easy to contact Influencers for long term collaboration for your campaign. Work with a nano influencer and create a real relationship with their followers. Reach users by establishing trust which micro-influencers have with their followers. Many consumer-related businesses run marketing campaigns by collaborating with 100s of micro-influencer followers to broadcast their message and reach a large audience. Get more from a small group of micro-influencers than one macro-influencers. Micro-influencers come with a cost, but they are still affordable as compared with a macro or mega influencer.
Establish contacts with many Influencers
For SMBs contact more micro-influencers for your campaign. Average out the pricing and strike a package bargain that suits your budget.
Pricing & Remuneration Model
While on a budget for collaborating with micro-bloggers you have an option to discuss the price and terms. When collaborating with an Influencer you can come to terms regarding payment based on PPC (Pay per post), CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition) and/ or CPE (cost per engagement for comments, likes, shares, etc)
Influencer Marketing ROI
Measuring an Influencer Marketing Campaign will depend on what goals and KPIs you have set and what metrics are used to measure them? Influencer Marketing can have many goals but the most common ones for any business can be fine-tuned to Brand Awareness and CTA Direct Response. Here is where your KPIs such as Social Reach and Conversions come in. These KPIs serve a purpose in deciding the metrics you will use for measuring ROI fig 6 for your ‘Influencer Marketing Campaigns’. Evaluate the performance of each influencer. Take decisions on whether an influencer is delivering. If not discontinue and try with other influencers for optimum results. Use Influencer marketing software eg TapInfluence, Grin, etc to accurately track your campaign performance and the performance of your influencers.
Social Reach & Relevance Metrics
Reach and conversion goes hand in hand. For the campaign period, track Impressions of your blog posts using Google Analytics by comparing new v/s returning visitors and Social Media Analytics. To succeed with this goal track the people reached in your campaign. How many from the reached people became aware of your brand. Monitor the quantum of traffic the campaign drives to your site. Referral traffic gives you insights about your campaign’s reach. Track Subscribers and Audience Growth using social media channels site analytics and email lists. How many new followers resulted in new signups? Brand Engagements measures the relationship between a brand and its audience in terms of loyalty and actions taken eg- clicks, likes, comments, shares, mentions & hashtags, video views, etc. Use BuzzSumo, a free tool to measure engagement.
Direct Messaging allows you to sent private messages to create long term connections between followers. It also makes it possible to network with Influencers. Pitch a press release issued to the news media about your campaign that has audiences that match your follower demographics.
Sales & Non Sales Conversion Rates Metrics
By setting up promotion codes, links & landing pages, UTM parameters, for the campaign, track the traffic sources of users that converted during the period of the campaign. Monitor conversion rates based on after prospects complete the desired action eg buying a service or a product, Signup for a course, the clicks to links or URLs and/ or download an ebook
