Influencer marketing has significantly risen in popularity in recent years, as influencers have become the new “celebrities”, with cult followings who want to wear what they wear, do what they do and use brands they use.

With social media being one of the biggest platforms in the world, with nearly half the world’s population using it daily, it’s not surprising that influencers have become so popular.

Influencers play a vital role in customer decision making and greatly impact the relationships that brands have with their customers. Building strong, loyal audiences that trust them and engage with them on a daily basis, influencers have the ideal audience for brands to leverage.

Using influencers of any size, has a number of benefits for brands, including: 

Building Brand Awareness and Trust

By working with an influencer your brand has the potential to be noticed by a wider, new audience and because you are associated with, and recommended by, someone they trust, they will be more likely to purchase from you in the future.

Gaining High Quality Content

Some brands work with influencers on content creation, getting them to create videos, images or blogs in exchange for payment or product exchange. This gives your brand high quality, engaging content to use across platforms, as well as building connections with influencers and audiences.

Connecting to Target Audience

If you find the right influencer – someone who aligns with your brand’s values and has the same target market as your brand – you are able to access a large group of people within your target market who are already engaged with an influencer. This also saves you time and money building up a warm audience via ads and other marketing strategies.

A lot of brands have been skeptical about using influencer marketing in the past, however, in recent years it is becoming a go-to marketing tool for many brands.

Here are some recent statistics from Shopify: 

• Over half the population follow influencers on social media
• In 2021, Influencer marketing was a $13.8 billion industry – a 42% increase from the previous year
• 61% of consumers say they trust influencer recommendations
• 97% of marketers consider Instagram the best platform for influencer marketing
• 77% of marketers use micro influencers as their influencer of choice
• Influencer marketing on Instagram has grown by 48% in one year
• 60% of marketers say that influencer marketing has a higher ROI than traditional forms of marketing 
• Businesses roughly made $5.20 back for every $1 spent on influencers

So how do you find an influencer that fits your brand? Firstly, you must decide on what type of influencers you want to work with.

There are four main different types of influencers:

Nano Influencers: 

These influencers have followings that range between 1K to 5K and usually have a high engagement rate of about 5%. They usually produce more authentic and natural content as they are typically your “girl (or boy) next door type”. They are also the most trusted type of influencer amongst Gen Z.

Micro influencers: 

Usually have around 5K to 20K followers with an average 3% engagement rate. They usually have a specific niche or have expertise in a specific industry, and therefore work well with brands who fit their niches. They have gained credibility from these audiences and have experience working with brands.

Macro influencers: 

These bigger influencers have around 20K to 1 million followers with an average engagement rate of 1.5%. They are usually full-time content creators and charge much more to work with brands. They have larger, loyal audiences, but not as much engagement as smaller influencers. 

Mega influencers (celebrities):

These influencers are usually the big celebrities such as our Kim Kardashian’s and Arianna Grande’s with cult followings that would bring a brand who worked with them, global recognition. Similar to the traditional method of celebrity endorsement and priced extremely high.

It is widely suggested that the best strategy for influencer marketing is to use a mixture of different types of influencers in your campaign. This allows you to reach a wider range of people and be more specific on who you are trying to reach. 

However, who you use depends on who you are trying to reach. A recent article showcased in Social Media Today by Studio ID  found that 82% of Gen Z students are much more distrustful of influencers with big followings as they don’t feel the advertising is authentic. Instead, they look to the nano influencers to make genuine recommendations that they trust and consider when purchasing from brands.

So, deciding who your target market is and creating a niche, customer avatar, is vital to a successful influencer marketing campaign. To find the right influencer for your brand, you have to know your audience on a deeper level.

• What generation do they belong to?
• What do they value?
• What are their interests?
• Who do they follow?
• What platforms do they use?
• And so much more.

Once you are clear on who your audience is, you must then consider what you are hoping to achieve with an influencer campaign and set clear, SMART goals and objectives. 

Setting Campaign Goals

Firstly, you need to decide what you want to achieve with your influencer campaign. Are you hoping to build your brand awareness? Increase sales? Drive traffic to your website?

Having clear goals with any marketing campaign is essential to be able to track success and will also help guide you on which types of influencers will be best to work with. If you’re wanting to reach global audiences, you may want to invest in bigger influencers who have a global reach.

If you want to reach local consumers and build your brand awareness, it would be worthwhile using micro influencers in your local area. 

Determine Your Budget

Is your business going to allocate a budget towards paying influencers to promote your products? If so, the amount to allocate depends on the influencer size. As a general rule, nano influencers charge anywhere between $75-$300 per post, whilst micro influencers charge around $300-$600 and macro influencers charge anywhere between $550 and $1,000 depending on how big their following is.

Another avenue is product exchange or “contra collaboration” which is where brands gift a product (or service) to an influencer to review and create content with. The gifted product or service, is considered payment, and is exchanged for either a review or content. This is a much more popular tactic used for nano influencers with smaller followings.

Decide on Ideal Influencer

Once you have determined your budget for your influencer campaign and decided on a payment method (monetary or gift exchange, or a mixture of both), you then decide what kind of influencers you want to work with.

You may decide to use a mixture of influencers of all sizes, or stick to one type. All the different types of influencers have pros and cons, listed above.

You must also determine other parameters around which influencers you choose to work with such as, what type of engagement they generate, what demographics their audience is, what brand values they have, what industry they are an expert in, and more.

Confirm Deliverables and Requirements

You then need to decide what you actually want from the influencer – your offering. You need to determine your deliverables and requirements.

For example, you might ask the influencer for 2 in-feed post, and 2 Stories on Instagram over a weekly period. You can either provide them with a caption to use, or let them craft their own for you to approve. You can give them campaign hashtags, call to actions to use on certain posts, and more.

You should also share your branding messages, campaign objectives, reference images, and anything they can use to be able to get a sense of your brand. 

You should also make very clear rules and deadlines, such as, you must keep your in-feed posts live for a minimum of 60 days, or you must include a link on your Stories (and provide them link you want them to use). 

You should give them a clear deadline of when to send their content to you to review and approve, and a clear date and time for them to post them. 

Determine Measurement

How will you measure the success of your campaign? There are a few ways to measure influencer campaigns.

The first and easiest way is to ask the influencer to provide screenshots of their insights of the post to you by a certain time (x amount of days or weeks after posting). This should be a clear requirement in the proposal or contract you send to them. 

You can also set up UTM parameters on Google URL builder if your campaign is sales-based or has a conversion goal. This can measure clicks and landing page visits that have been sent via your influencer.

Brands sometimes give influencers discount codes to give their followers, where they can track sales through that code. The downside to this is that it only measures sales and not other metrics such as traffic, or reach.

A common ROI formula is unit cost per result, where you divide your budget by your influencer’s result. For example, if your goal was to reach 100,000 new people on Instagram with a budget of $1,000, your unit cost per result would be $0.01 ($1,000/100,000). 

Finding and Contacting Influencers

Now you have all of your information, you need to find your influencers. There are a number of ways to do this.

The first way is to manually search. Use hashtags in your niche to find influencers content that aligns with your brand. Alternatively, look at what influencers other brands in your industry have worked with before. You can also try searching “content creator” and similar terms to utilise keywords used in influencers Instagram bios.

The second way is to use an agency or program. Influencer agencies will take a cut out of your influencer budget, but are created to link brands to influencers that fit their description. This is a great option for brands with bigger budgets. Brands with smaller budgets may opt for online programs that are much cheaper, and achieve the same result.

Brands can also use Facebook community groups to reach out with their brief. This is often done in groups that are specifically made for people wanting to become influencers or influencers looking for work.

So, to work with an influencer, or not to work with an influencer?

Our final tips to you are:

• Make sure you are very clear on what you want from the influencer in your brief to them
• Be very careful what influencers you choose to work with and ensure they align with your brand
• Choose metrics that measure your campaign goals 
• Always look into the quality of followers (and followers vs engagement ratio) before deciding on an influencer

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References: 

https://influencermarketingagency.com/10-benefits-of-influencer-marketing.html

https://www.shopify.com.au/blog/influencer-marketing-statistics#:~:text=The%20influencer%20marketing%20industry%20is,from%20%249.7%20billion%20in%202020.

https://resources.industrydive.com/how-are-brands-reaching-gen-z?utm_source=SMT&utm_medium=Library&utm_campaign=SB&utm_term=Social+Media+Today+Weekender&ignoremxtracking=mxtrue&mxcpi=6b946734-e89d-49a9-8101-5bd3005bf253&omt=1&result=success

https://theright.fit/for-clients/influencer-guidance