Beginner guide to influencer marketing

Why work with Influencers?

The inadequacy of traditional advertising

The availability of highspeed Internet in most areas of the globe has resulted in significant growth in its usage. Then, social media arrived. Facilitated by the development of technology and mobile devices, these platforms have conquered the world. These days, it is the primary part of everyday life, enabling the majority of people to communicate freely. Consequently, consumer behaviour has gone through some changes, forming this modern, more valueminded society, in which we live today. Customers have become wiser, more informed, and a lot more self-sufficient. This has caused a great switch of power from a company to the consumer. While brands in the past used to have control over the market, now they have to comply with consumers'requirements, in order to persuade them to buy.

How has advertising changed?

The traditional advertising channels are getting outdated and cannot benefit your company in the way they did in the past. There is a shift to be seen from print media, TV ads, and radio podcasts to the presence on social media platforms. Traditional promotional materials are now considered to be disappointed, untrustworthy, and are often ignored. Because of that, it is a matter of success for companies to adopt new practices of targeting customers.

Influencer marketing can save you!

Here comes IM as a great opportunity for businesses to make their products and services stand out from the competition. It is more cost-effective, companies achieve higher ROI, increased traffic to their website, and gain customers of higher quality. Even though paid media might not be completely gone, paying greater attention to creation of user-generated content can take your business on another level.

The main motivation of a corporation is to generate profit for its shareholders, and people know this. Because of that, a lot of corporate messages and ads get ignored, believed to be deceitful, and unreliable. This is why IM is a key part of long-term success. Due to influencer's authenticity and credibility, their followers are likely to achieve a purchase, because their peer guarantees for the product.

Create word-of mouth

People have never been more connected to each other! Back in the past, word-of-mouth happened only on a limited degree. Now it has drastically expanded due to social media and the ease of communication. Cord-of-mouth is believed to be the best organics type of marketing. Brands have to consider what people talk about them behind their backs.

The standard of consumer experience has increased, and it is crucial for businesses to create quality content, which people want to share. An influencer can take part in the process of spreading this content, by introducing it to their audience and raising awareness for your products.

Target your audience

Working with influencers allow a business to expose products to their audience, which is most likely to show interest in it. By conducting a research beforehand, a marketer can choose the right influencer with the most attractive follower base.

Based on different criteria like demographics, behavioural and psychographic, companies can target relevant customer segments, which is a promise for improved business performance.

Find the right Influencer?

In order to prepare for a marketing campaign, you need to set clear objectives and pick up the right tools to achieve them. IM makes no difference. You have to elaborate on clear goals and find relevant influencers for your business if you want to achieve success with the campaign. With the growing number of social media users, the amount of influencers is increasing as well. As a company, you might feel lost in the pool of influencers among various platforms. Choosing to collaborate with the wrong individual, will cost you a lot of time, money, and effort. Because of that, after considering your target audience for the campaign, you have to make up your mind for the right influencer.

How to discover the right influencer?

Overall, there are 3 ways to discover the right influencers for your campaigns:

• Find them manually
• Use tools
• Use agencies

To begin with, the places where you can discover famous personalities to collaborate with. The first thing to do, it to go to social media platforms, which you believe might be relevant to the general business strategy and the objective your team has set. You can follow the profiles you find interesting, look at the images. Ask yourself are they relevant, covering the industry you work in, scroll through the likes and comments, to gain more insights about the influencer’s audience. Is this what you are looking for?

When you are looking to get started with finding your first influencers manually, you can start by using the Instagram tag search or just start browsing profiles that you already know and people in their network. Before jumping into collaborations based on beautiful content and the number of followers, remember to at least ask for screenshots of their audience and performance. Another metric you can look up yourself is their engagement rate which is: (likes + comments) / number of followers

Tools:

There are many tools out there on the market where you can get started without investing thousands of dollars. Many of those tools can give you insights in the follower audience, engagement rates compared to the market average and follower- and engagement growth.

Agencies:

An agency or influencer network platform can save you a lot of trouble by filtering the enormous influencer base instead of you. They can do the dirty work instead of you, and provide ready-to-use data about people, whom your company can collaborate with.

Metrics speak for influencers

There are many metrics floating around when talking about Influencers; Followers, Engagements, Likes, Comments, Mentions, Reach, Impressions, Conversions to name a few. The most important metrics to consider depends on your campaign purpose and goals. If you want to increase brand awareness a combination of impressions in the right audience group combined with engagement will be great metrics. However, if you are looking for conversions, consider looking at cost per impression in your persona target group against the influencer's audience group, combined with previous knowledge of conversions and clicks. Followers as a metric don't mean anything, two influencers with 100.000 followers might reach two completely different audience numbers, one may only reach around 20.000 per post on Instagram, where the other could reach 80.000 - it all depends on their audience demography and activity.

Conclusion

Technology has changed the world we are living in today. People have access to more information and communication is easier than ever. This has resulted in a change of behavior of the typical consumer. Now they perceive brands differently. Traditional advertising is losing its power over people's minds. Companies have to win their customer's trust, in order to complete a purchase. Businesses must find new methods to present themselves in an original and creative way. Influencers can help with that. They are authentic, inspirational and people love them for who they are. Do not stay behind your competitors, take advantage of the rise of social media, and implement an influencer marketing strategy.