Influencer Marketing. How Your Brand Can Benefit From It

Smart business owners don’t put all eggs in one basket and use multiple channels to advertise their brand. There are so many miscellaneous ways to promote your products, and having tried most (or all) of them you’ll for sure find your goldmine. Today I want to tell you about the kind of marketing that became one of the best-performing ones in omnichannel strategy for thousands of businesses. It’s influencer marketing.

You most likely know what “influencer marketing” means. It’s when a product (or a service) is promoted by a popular social media blogger who has a lot of active followers. But it might be interesting for you to find out what types of influencers there are, what key things you should keep in mind when choosing one, how to measure influencer marketing effectiveness, and how to amplify reach in case of success.

Let’s start with the types of influencers. We (as well as most of the marketers out there) love to classify them by the number of followers.?

Those who have about 25 - 40k followers can be called micro-influencers. Collaboration with them is usually pretty cost-effective because in most cases their audience is highly engaged whereas their ad pricing is low or they are even ready to promote your brand in exchange for your product.

Those who have 50k followers and more are considered to be mid-level influencers. It’s still easy to reach out to them via DM and communicate directly. And they don’t charge too much for their ads.?

Especially if compared to those who have 500k followers and more. These bloggers can be called macro-influencers. And they do influence people's decisions and lifestyle in general. They usually have an assistant or an SM specialist who would filter all the incoming offers for them, so it’s not that easy to talk directly to a macro-influencer.

And since I’ve classified them by their audience size you may think that it’s the main criteria when looking for an influencer. But it’s not. The first thing you should consider is the niche their blog is focused on or at least related to. Of course, it should be closely connected with your business's niche. And when you define that it is, you should also check whether this influencer has ever promoted your competitors.

The next thing you should check is their content. It should align with your brand’s vision, messaging, and style. For example, if you’re a luxury lingerie brand and the influencer you’ve found mostly posts funny vines, they won’t probably fit your style. Or, if one of your company’s differential peculiarities is that all products are made from recycled materials, and the blogger you’re about to work with does something that is against sustainable living, collaborating with them can only hurt your reputation.

Your next move should be checking their engagement rate. You can calculate it manually by dividing the total number of engagements (likes, comments and shares) by the total number of followers and then multiplying it by 100 to make this number a percentage. But we’re in the 21st century, after all, so just use an online engagement rate calculator. Usually, engagement rate of 6% and above is considered to be good, but it differs depending on the niche and audience size.

And the last thing to take into account would be their audience size. You may say that the more people see your ad the better, and you’re right. But you can go beyond the influencer's audience still using authentic content they’ve produced. Guess how? That’s right, you smart marketer, by using whitelisting on Facebook. For those who haven’t tried this feature before, what you do is run a promotional post right from a blogger’s account. Well, technically you do it through the Ads Manager but it shows up as (a very native) ad in users’ feed because it’s basically this blogger’s post. But when they click on the CTA button, they will land wherever you want them to. You can get a special influencer’s code to be able to make their post an ad, or you can get access to their account and do media buying right from there. With the help of whitelisting you cover not only their audience but many many more users.?

That’s why the number of influencer’s followers is not that much important. If you like the way they’ve presented your product/brand and you see that it’s effective, you can try running it as an ad. But how do you know if it’s effective or not? You can generate a discount code specifically for the influencer and ask them to encourage their audience to use it. With the help of a code, it’s easy to track the number of purchases that were made thanks to collaboration with a particular blogger. If you’re a single-product store, or, let’s say, you want to promote only a best-seller, it’s even easier in terms of measurement. You can create a landing page and ask an influencer to send users there. This way you’ll be able to track the number of visitors and calculate the conversion rate more accurately. And then, amplify reach with the help of whitelisting. A piece of cake!

Influencer generated content always looks very authentic and credible and so has high engagement rates and CTRs. So as a bonus, you’ll probably also have lower CPM. What’s more, quite often influencers not just tell viewers about a product or show it, but basically recommend it, that’s why IGC also works as a social proof.?

Influencer marketing is something that has proven itself to be effective for thousands of businesses. That’s why it’s going to be even more popular in the nearest future. And if you haven’t tried influencer marketing before, I think, you definitely should.