Influencer marketing and everything you need to know
Experts of fame
To begin with, I would like to mention that we imagine influencers as people with millions of followers on Instagram or TikTok. Relaxed, perfect life, the only concern is which filter to use. I wonder if the following has ever happened to them (because I know it has happened to me): they walk down the street, shoot a story for Instagram, greet their fans and boom. Street traffic sign. Do they then take a day off? Are they trying new filters to cover the bruise? If you ask me, they lead an interesting life that would definitely be worth trying
Jokes aside, influencers or fame experts are someone who has the power to influence the thoughts and the decisions in the lives of others. Decisions like buying lipstick in shade 305 or 160. They have power because they have acquired authority, knowledge, position and relationship in society. Does this mean that my mom is the influencer of the family? In a way yes, but I won’t talk about that type of influencer. I will stick to the topic of Social Media Influencers.
Who are the influencers of social media?
As I already mentioned, influencers are people who have the power to influence people’s life or purchasing decisions. We find influencers on social networks such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok,… They can also be people in politics, people on television, famous singers, etc. They have an audience behind them that identifies with them, they follow the trends they do and the like.
Influencers through social networks have gained authority because they regularly publish posts on a certain topic. They encourage people to participate and follow their content.
Due to the existence of influencers, a new branch of marketing is developing, so-called “influencer marketing”. Influencer marketing means cooperation between a brand and a well-known influencer. In these types of campaigns, a celebrity promotes their products or services through their or a brand’s profile. He gets some value in return. Preferably cash value or free product samples. Brands use this new type of marketing to gain and improve market recognition. The negative side of influencer marketing is that the audience that follows the influencer often ignores the brand name and can defy recognition. Often young people focus more on the appearance of the influencer, what he wore,… They mainly care about their opinion.
The fact that an influencer can be anyone is fascinating to me. For example a celebrity like Justin Bieber is not born twice. An influencer can be a blogger who writes about travels, and places she has visited, an influencer can be a make-up artist on YouTube, an influencer is also a CEO of a company who has a LinkedIn profile. After all, influencers are ordinary people who have 10,000 to 1 million followers behind them and help them answer their problems or questions that bother them. They publish the most interesting posts, people rejoice in their stories and closely identify with them. A like or a reply (by an influencer) to a comment will brighten up a fan’s whole day, if not the rest of his life.
What kind of influential people exists?
In order to make this blog post more interesting, I decided to research what categories/types we divide influencers into. Some of the most common methods are by the level of influence, number of followers, and what kind of content they share. I will stick to the category of the number of followers, and below I will give examples of my dear influencers.
Mega-influencers
So one example of a mega-influencer and my favorite is the one and only Kylie Jenner. As I mentioned that they often have their own agents who arrange marketing work for them, so she has her mother known as Kris Jenner. They became famous through their reality show and because of their engagement on social networks. So today, Kylie is the most followed influencer in the world after Cristiano Ronaldo.
Macro-influencers
Macro influencers are influencers with 40,000–1 million followers on social networks. They are located slightly lower than mega influencers and are also more affordable for brands. Today it is easy to reach them and get in touch with them because there are more of them than mega influencers.
Macro influencers can be celebrities, athletes, actors, models, … with their reputation and position, they gain followers on social networks. They help brands gain reach. One example of a macro influencer who, given his reputation, has gained a number of fans is Croatian football player Joško Gvardiol. Because of his skills and knowledge in football, people started loving him as well as his brands. He is also attractive, which is what a quality influencer should be.
Micro-influencers
In the social networks and social media course, we learned about influencers. We mentioned micro-influencers, they are “ordinary people” who became famous because of their knowledge of a topic. We consider micro-influencers those who have 1,000–40,000 followers. The advantage of them is that they often promote brands for free. They are becoming more common and recognizable. In addition, they say that people trust them more because of the smaller number of followers. With mega and macro influencers, there are doubts about the truth of what they say, that it is not just about money.
I can say that Pamela Perkić is an excellent example of a micro-influencer. Her career as an influencer grew out of her Instagram profile, through which she published what was important and interesting to her. As I have already mentioned, micro-influencers become famous because of their knowledge of a topic, so Pamela touched on numerous hot topics through her content and emphasized how important it is to work on yourself. Many women feel better with her.
Influencer marketing in practice (collaboration)¹
Below I list several examples of influencer collaboration in which brands have made the most of the advantages that influencer marketing brings.
1. Dunkin’ Donuts on National donut day
For National Donut Day, they decided to surprise their customers with special offers. These special offers also include 8 popular influencers. They launched a Snapchat campaign and for a day acquired a Dunkin’ Donuts profile through which they created visually appealing content. In this way, the influencers encouraged their audience to follow Dunkin’ Donuts on all social networks and thus visit their branches for their special offer. This campaign achieves the following results:
- they gained 10x more followers in one month than they used to gain in one month
- it reached 3M people
- 40K user-generated content
2. Dior, 67 shades of skin
Dior implemented an influencer campaign with the help of the Buttermilk agency. A new powder with 67 unique shades was created. They chose as many influencers (67) as match one of the powder colors. They achieved:
- 2.66M reach
- gold winner of the best beauty campaign, 2020 Influencer marketing awards
3. GymShark- Change your life
GymShark is taking the opportunity for a 66-day challenge involving TikTok influencers. The goal of the challenge is to change people’s habits for the better, encourage them to lead a healthy life, which was successful because they achieved:
- 241.3M views(#gymshark66)- TikTok
- 750K user-generated content on Instagram
Everything that influencer marketing is not²
Previously, I touched on the topic of general items of influencer marketing, how it works, who participates in the new branch of marketing. I think it would be useful to go through some useful information that speaks and better explains influencer marketing. The best way to learn is from mistakes, so I’m going to explain a few items that were wrongly explained about what influencer marketing really is.
With influencer marketing, we do not achieve results overnight. Most people believe this because influencers have a large audience behind them. An influencer marketing campaign is the same principle of achieving results as engaging in content marketing. A long and slow process that requires patience and trust. We compete with the competition, we want to acquire a number of loyal customers who will remember the name of our brand and products. Influencer marketing exists and is here to create creative and inspiring content for these loyal customers, to provide them with new and unseen things. Because of the large audience that influencers have behind them, brands often think that a large number will make some impact. They won’t. Our goal as a brand is to create certain intentions and actions in customers, and this is not achieved by the number of followers. It is a long way to gain loyalty, and for this reason, we as a brand should be loyal to our users and provide them with the right message at the right time.
Conclusion
We learned that influencer marketing is a branch that involves collaboration between a brand and an influencer. Due to the identification of people with their idols, this often works in favor of brands because users want to take advantage of said opportunities and act as influencers. If we deal with influencer marketing, it can often be tricky, but it is very profitable to achieve some long-term results. I would highly recommend all brands to try out influencer marketing at least once because we can learn a lot and use it for future and future actions.
[1] https://blog.ainfluencer.com/influencer-marketing-campaigns/
[2] https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing/#toc-3
