Everything you need to know about Influencer Marketing in 2023.

"A brand is no longer what they tell the customer it is; it is what the customers tell each other."??

During our last online session with Wendy Greenwood , we got an opportunity to meet Ashley Walsh . She is an account director of North Strategic, a part of the Publicis group, and has over a decade of marketing experience. Lately, she has been an industry expert in influencer marketing.

She shared her experiences and knowledge about influencer marketing. It did not take long for me to understand that the world of influencer marketing is much deeper than it appears on the surface.?

Here are a few essential things that we discussed during the sessions that are worth sharing:

How do brands select influencers for their marketing needs?

First, she talked about how influencers are categorized into four major groups depending on the number of followers that they have.?

The brand has to make now a call of whether they want a macro-influencer or a nano-influencer. It depends on the brand image, the target audience they want to reach, and the type of personalities they want their brand to be associated with.

Selecting the right influencer also depends on measurable metrics other than the number of followers, like their reach, which location they are based on, and their engagement rate.?

It also depends on the influencer's niche; the brand and the influencer selected must be from a similar place for a successful campaign.?

What are some recent trends in the influencer marketing industry?

Creator-led short–form video content: We are already experiencing short format videos in the form of Instagram reels, youtube shorts, and TikTok videos taking over the social media world. Suddenly everything and everyone is focused more on this short video-style content. People enjoy watching it, and the influencers enjoy creating them; the social media platform enjoys promoting them organically, and now the brands want a piece of the pie too.

AI virtual influencer: For the people who need to be made aware of AI influencers; they are virtual personalities managed by brands or media agencies and created using computer graphics and machine learning algorithms. They are not real people with social media profiles, they are just like virtual unreal people, and all their posts and content are designed on a computer. The benefit of using AI influencers is that because they are just virtual beings, it is straightforward to get the desired results with their sponsored/branded content.?

What was the learning from the case study activity?

Selecting an Influencer is critical: The case study activity helped me understand the importance of and get hands-on experience in choosing the right influencers for a particular brand or marketing campaign. Selecting the influencers is a conscious choice we, as a market, must make while planning our influencer marketing strategies.

The right type of content: During the case study, we realized it is crucial to select the right kind and style of content for influencer marketing. The content developed depends majorly on the brand, the product, and the goal they want to achieve.?

Strategies inside Influencer marketing: The brand can choose from several methods inside the realm of influencer marketing. For example, brands can use branded giveaways to motivate their audience to perform the action they want them to take. On the other hand, the brand can give a discount code to influencers they are working with to drive sales.?

What do I think of Influencer Marketing?

As a marketer, It is my job to stay at the top of the trends. Without a doubt, social media marketing is one of the most critical and powerful spaces companies/brands can use to market their products and services. Influencer marketing is one of the central pillars of social media marketing.

I understand the importance of social media marketing, and I would love to work with influencers and brands that want to shift their focus to influencer marketing. While a marketer, I am also a passionate photographer and have tried my luck to be a content creator. I understand both sides of the coin and will be good at it.?

Final vital takeaways:-?

1. Tools: There are tools like Fluency that are specifically designed tool for influencer marketing. It has a massive database of influencers from many different niches that we can flip through and choose. It also has real-time analytics to help us gauge our campaigns.
2. Amplifying influencer content: Recently, we have seen an overall drop in the engagement of all the major social media platforms. Due to this, there has been a need to amplify the reach of influencer-generated content. This is done using dark posting, re-sharing their content on the brand's social media profiles, and running paid ads on the influencer-generated content.
3. Influencer-generated content is majorly used in the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, but it can also be used for consideration and conversion stages if tweaked correctly.
4. Defining creative guidelines: While using influencer marketing, it is essential to define and clarify innovative policies with the influencers. The brand should be able to get the desired result they need while respecting and using the influencer's creative abilities; brands should not try to stifle their creative process.?
5. Validating Influencers: It is essential to ensure that the influencers you are working with are authentic and have a real following. There are tools in the market that we, as a call, can use to check if their followers are bots, if they had a sudden spike in engagement, or if something seems unnatural.

Influencer marketing is the future and is going nowhere in the coming years. Brands and companies need to devise creative ways to get the maximum benefit from this new-age marketing tactic.?