Influencer Marketing 101

Influencer marketing is a term bounded round a lot these days and even though some people and businesses are very well versed in the area, there are those who lack the understanding of what influencer marketing really is.

To provide some context, influencers have been around for a long time. They are essentially influential figures who have a voice in a certain space, who are trusted or followed for select reasons… Whether that be because people aspire to be them, find them funny, find them endearing or just simply know of them… Just think back to the 1930’s… influencers were radio broadcasters… then it moved to the likes of TV and Film stars… then it evolved to sports professionals and musicians and now it has branched out to people with influence on the social platforms. Influencers come from all different niches, with different size followings, from various countries and with various value propositions.

If you are thinking of looking to utilise influencers for your business and are not sure how to identify the right personnel, how to reach out to them, or how to measure success then this may be worth a read…. I have tried to break this down as best I can. 

Finding the right influencers for your business

The very first thing you need to do is to breakdown your business values, your brand identity and understand what the main objective is in utilising influencers. For example if you are a beauty brand that aims to empower women then you have to find empowering women which align to your identity and speaks to an audience that is similar to yours. The key to a successful influencer strategy is to really understand who you are, as a business, what your ethos is and what messaging you have been pushing out previously. Aligning all of this with similar like minded individuals within the space is crucial. 

Finding influencers if you don’t already know the space can be difficult. Using an agency that specialises in this could potentially be worthwhile, however not always essential. 

Here are a few tips in identifying relevant people. Firstly take a look at competitors social profiles and see if they are using anyone, I am not saying that these are the best people to use but you get an understanding of who is already operating in the same market as you. Utilise google as well. If you are a men’s hair care brand for example, then type into google 'Men's hair care influencers.' There may be a few sites with a list of guys who have done campaigns with hair care products or even with “great hair” etc. You can then go onto their social profile to check them out and see the type of content and level of engagement they have. Instagram will also automatically suggest similar people to that person if you click follow on their account. It is not the most efficient way to do things but it is a method you could look to use. You could also search by specific hashtags for example #menshair #haircare and see what the top performing posts are in that space. You can also utilise social influencer tools that help you identify people within the space who have large followings within certain demographics or regions - you may be best reaching out to an agency for this as they will already be paying for the relevant software programs to find these influencers. 

What about the number of followers of an influencer..?

If you asked a kid 15 years ago what they wanted to be when they grow up it would have been a musician, a footballer or an actress or actor, nowadays the response would more likely be a Youtuber, an influencer or a vlogger. Times have changed and a lot of people want a slice of the cake. There are a number of tactics that people deploy to make themselves look more influential and more followed than they actually are. So here are a few things to help look out for… Take a look at the number of likes compared to the number of followers. There is no direct correlation however if someone has 50k Followers and gets 200 likes, chances are they have bought followers. But nowadays you can also buy likes… some tips to identify if they have bought fake likes is to take a look at the profiles of the people who have liked their images and check whether they are profiles that are fake/spammy or accounts with no posting activity - if they have a high proportion of these chances are they have fake likes. You can also look at the comments ratio - if they have a number of likes and no comments then chances are they again could be fake likes or have zero engagement which is also a sign of a bad influencer. But you can also buy fake comments.... so how do you identify if someone has fake comments? If they are getting fairly generic comments like.. “love this picture”, “great shot” etc - it is more than likely they are in an automated commenting group where an bot auto comments on peoples pictures and vice versa. 

Take a look at social blade and type in the influencers followers activity. If there has at any point been a huge spike in followers there has probably been account manipulation meaning they have bought fake followers. 

Once you have found an influencer how do you engage with them? 

There is no specific right or wrong way to do this. If you come across an influencer on instagram for example you can directly message them on there, or if they have an email drop them an email. Some of the larger influencers will have management companies now a days and will redirect you to them or potentially even have their managers email in their bio. Chances are if they have a manager most of the correspondence will come through them. 

Influencers won’t always get back to you either. Probably for a number of reasons.. They don’t see your message, they don’t like your brand or products, they don’t think you will have the budgets to work with them, or they just can’t be bothered…. Sometimes it may be better to work with agencies as they will have pre existing relationships with certain influencers and will have an idea on who is good to work with and who has a really engaged and active audience. 

Do I have to pay an influencer? 

Not all influencers will need paying some will do it for free products or services. But this will always depend on who the influencer is and their motivation for doing what they do. Some influencers may differ from company to company depending on who they are working with. Meaning for one brand they may want paying and for a brand they really like they may do something for just a free product. However chances are if they have a substantial following they will want paying as more than likely it will be their income stream.

If you are engaging with an influencer for financial exchange I would suggest getting a contract signed and if you are sending free products you may also want to get a contract in place. If you engage with an influencer and ask them to share a picture of your product in exchange for free products or services and don’t send a contract there is nothing legally binding and if they chose not to share then there is not a lot you can do. So either get some sort of contract sorted or work with an agency to handle the influencer management. 

How do you agree terms and conditions? 

Getting a formalised contract that can be tailored for the influencers you work with can be done by a professional or there may be some free online templates that you can utilise. 

So what ROI can I expect from using an Influencer?

Don’t expect that influencers will always drive a positive ROI on spend!

This is one of the biggest challenges for businesses - they expect that just because they have stuck a product on an influencer that the sales should start to roll in. Influencers can however bring more value than just sales alone. Using an influencer to showcase your product and sharing this with their followers is a form of reaching a highly targeted audience and the return will always depend on a few factors.. the product or service you offer, cost, availability, demand amongst other things. 

Using influencers can be a great strategy for brand awareness - and you may see an uplift in sales, however you may not. One thing you would hope to see is more profile views on your social page and an increase in traffic to your website. Firstly make sure your social profile is engaging and inspiring, the last thing you want to do is drive awareness to your social media account and for people to bounce straight off because it looks like a shower of shit. The more engaging your profile is the more likely you are to get people to have a look around and potentially go through to your site. If you are lucky enough for people to land on your site then obviously make sure the landing page from social is optimised for the campaign or strategy you are running. You obviously cannot expect every one to buy at their first touch point of your business.

What the influencers essentially do is create visibility of your brand to their audience which will then usually lead to people visiting your site in turn increasing consideration for the brand but it can be up to you to try and convert into a sale. If someone lands on your page and then leaves make sure you have the processes in place to retarget those individuals with ads based on their user journey on the site.

If the influencer engaged on a campaign is allowed some creative freedom and allowed to make the placement of the product look authentic and genuine this can be more valuable than setting strict rules and regulations and will look less like an ad.

Rules around influencers and Ads. 

I am not going to go into the ASA guidelines - however if you want to read more then you can check this out. https://adespresso.com/blog/influencer-marketing-guidelines/

Brand Ambassadors V Influencers 

What is a brand ambassador I hear you ask? 

A brand ambassador is someone who represents your brand for a sustained period of time and is an advocate for your products or service. An influencer is usually someone who just showcases your product to their audience for a fee or free product. 

So how do you create brand ambassadors? One of the best examples of a brand ambassador scheme is to look at Gymshark and what they have done. They have found individuals in the bodybuilding and workout space who are aligned to their brand guidelines, vision and goals who all have a fairly substantial following. They agree longer term deals in becoming a Gymshark athlete and put them on an non compete so they are not advertising every other athleisure brand.

But what if you don’t have the budget to pay these huge influencers and turn them into a brand ambassador? 

Well I run a side business, called Airofin, which is a brand that creates technical sportswear for triathletes, runners and cyclists. We have over 500 ambassadors for the brand in over 40 countries that represent us in races, training and via social media. With a combined following of 1,057,500 on instagram alone how much did this cost…..?

NOTHING. 

When I started out I didn’t have the money to advertise in the traditional sense the only option was to advertise via free platforms in an organic way. But as always the challenge is how do you get your product out there, if there is no demand. You have to create it. 

I knew my products had been made with great fabrics and my designs were unique and different to what was out there, but they needed social proofing by the individuals that I was aiming to reach. Because I did not have the funds to pay people with large followings in the niche I was looking to target and the fact that most of the athletes in the space already had large sponsors paying them I devised an ambassador programme. 

Now there are ambassador programmes out there which provide discount on the clothes in exchange for social media posts and tags in images but I knew there was limited value exchange in something like this. I wanted to provide a lot more value than I was getting back from my athletes. So I created an ambassador programme where anyone who joined would get the following; 

• Solid discount of anything from our website (www.airofin.com) - However they were not obligated to buy anything from the start - they could join the team and see if it was right for them. 
• Discount from some of the partner companies we work with. These range from - Bike company (Coluer Bikes) - Bike Wheel Company (Hiro Wheels) - Energy Gel Company - (Pro4mance) - Nutrition partner (Pulsin Protein) - Running Shoe Partner (Hoka One) - Cycling shoe partner (E-vers Cycling Shoes) and selected discount on race entries to a number of events primarily in the UK but also select races in Europe as well. The team received between 15%-30% OFF these brands.
• As soon as someone joined the team we gave them a free 12 week Running(Marathon) / Cycling / Swimming or Ironman programme (or all of them if they wanted them all)- these programmes were all designed by professional coaches for athletes at intermediate level of each sport. 
• They got access to our Facebook members group where we have a team coach who is a professional triathlete and can provide solid advice in anything related to running, cycling, swimming, triathlon and even performance nutrition and will answer everyone's questions in a video format each week. 
• We run a training camp once a year so our ambassadors can meet and train together with professional coaches leading this in one of our European destinations. 
• We also arrange to meet up at certain races within the UK 
• We also share any of their amazing pictures to our audience of 36,000 on instagram or via our other social channels we operate. 

And in return we expect nothing. 

We do ask if they get any opportunity take some photos in our stuff that they tag us in it and if they do like the stuff to please recommend it to anyone who is looking for new performance wear. But like I said - they can get all of the benefits without having to purchase any of our products. By giving far more value as a business we find that these ambassadors aren’t forced to say how good we are or how good our stuff is they do it because they genuinely believe it. 

Take a look at our instagram to see some of the amazing stuff that we get back from the athletes…. 

https://www.instagram.com/airofin_athletic/

And here is an example of some content one of our amazing athletes did for next to nothing… 

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfc9oEph11i/?taken-by=airofin_athletic

We also have been featured in one of the campaign videos for our of our brand partners.. Coluer bikes - all they wanted in exchange of this was a custom kit to be made with their logo on 

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bjr_WSRFEcg/?taken-by=airofin_athletic

Creating this takes time and patience. But many businesses want and need results straight away. You have to think long term and like Bill Gate’s says “Macro patience, micro speed” meaning most people overestimate what they can do in 1 year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years”

Micro Influencers v Macro influencers?

The final thing to touch upon is Micro v Macro when it comes to influencer marketing. And the answer is simple. It depends on your business and the objectives.

In the ambassador scheme above you have seen how I created a strategy where I had over a 1 million reach on Instagram with them posting regularly wearing the brand Airofin. To use an influencer with over 1 million in my particular niche would have been very expensive, however if you have the budgets it may be something to explore.

Utilising micro influencers can be a great way of getting a series of content pieces and opening up you brand to a number of different audience sets. However Utilising one major influencer can be great for doing a larger campaign or activation where you need one main hero influencer. You can also look at utilising one macro influencer with a series of seeded micro influencers as well. If you are not sure as a business what the best strategy would be, test using smaller scale influencers to save on cost and measure the return on brand uplift, sentiment, engagement or sales and see whether it would be worth scaling up. Alternatively you can always discuss with an agency who will put an efficient strategy together. 

There is probably lots of stuff I haven’t covered in this however if you found it informative please share or tag someone who may find it relevant or useful. 

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach me via linked-in or email.

Harry.