What your boss would like to know about influencer marketing

To be successful, visible and popular, a brand has to check all new trends. It is important to stay up to date and be on the same page with consumers. The freshest wave in digital advertising is influencer marketing. If you still haven’t tried influencer marketing — here are the answers for the most frequently asked questions that you need to share with your boss.

What is actually influencer marketing?

There are billions of channels in social media. Bloggers and vloggers talking about interesting things or showing beautiful pictures gather huge audiences. When a channel owner talks about a product — he promotes it to all of his followers. When a brand works with bloggers and vloggers (influencers) to make an unobtrusive advertisement for a product — it is called “influencer marketing”.

What is the difference between traditional and influencer marketing?

There are so many advertisements in our daily life that people are ad blind and tired of them. That’s why different ad-blockers became so popular. A research shows that users don’t see almost 54% of all advertisements placed on websites. However, when an influencer recommends a product on his channel it doesn’t look like an advertisement. 92% of customers admit that they rely on an opinion of a popular person when it comes to a buying decision. So, an influencer can deliver the brand’s message to an audience in a more natural and trustable way.

Is influencer marketing really effective?

It is hard to measure the effectiveness of a marketing strategy. Efficiency depends on your goals, your niche, and chosen influencers. However, according to the SocialMedia.Market research, more than 50% of marketers will increase the part of the budget given for influencer marketing in 2018. Thousands of brand owners used influencer marketing in earlier years and will use it further.

What influencers to focus on?

In rough numbers, influencers are split up into categories according to the size of their audience. It may seem that the bigger the audience — the better, but it doesn’t work like that. In fact, the bigger audience an influencer has — the less engagement it provides. Influencers with over 1 million followers think more about further expanding it and not about interacting with subscribers. On the other hand, a post made by a celebrity will gain more attention and will be much more prestigious. A big company with a large budget could cooperate with macro-influencers, while middle-scaled and small businesses should better choose micro-influencers that have a limited but actively engaging audience.

How to find a proper influencer?

“Hunting” an influencer is a time and effort consuming process. You would have to check lots of channels to find a perfect niche influencer whose content and position fits your brand. You could look for details on our “How to find micro-influencers” article.

How to measure the influencer campaign success?

There are few rates that give a clear understanding whether the influencer post gave your brand proper promotion:

· Audience activity. You have to check how many people reached the post.

· Users’ engagement. The more likes, comments, and reposts subscribers make — the better it is for a brand.

· Community awareness. It’s important to check the volume of brand mentions and relevant posts in influencers audience

· Customers’ activity. You have to measure the traffic of consumers that visited your site thanks to influencer’s recommendation.

Do influencers need to be paid?

A significant part of influencers prefers to get money for their posts, but it really depends on the influencer. Some of them would agree to receive a discount, bonuses or free products/services. The type of compensation could be negotiated individually with each influencer. The price of a post could also differ and depends on your budget and the scale of influencer’s audience.

How could influencer marketing help your business?

A research shows that every dollar spent on influencer advertising campaigns creates $11.69 in return. More than 4 billion of internet users like posts on Instagram every day. It is hard to find someone who doesn’t have an account on Facebook. Unobtrusive advertising via social media is a future of digital marketing. Influencer marketing campaign will boost your brand visibility and bring you more leads.

Influencer marketing is a buzzword like “blockchain” and “neuro-webs”. Marketers all over the world use it in their advertising strategies and gain profit. If you haven’t used it for your brand — it is never too late to try a new approach to promote your products.