What is Influencer Marketing, and How Does it Work?

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Most niches will need to influence marketing on the same day. The business needs to choose an opinion leader and consider a cooperation strategy. In this material, we will understand how to select an influencer and get the most excellent outcomes for your business from integrations.

What is the influence of marketing?

Influence marketing is influence marketing; its essence is the company’s interaction with opinion leaders to promote goods and services. Influence on the audience is achieved through the personal recommendations of an influencer with public authority.

Influence marketing has several features:

  • Nativeness – the range of the integrations does not go beyond the general style of the blog and is oriented towards the benefit of the audience;
  • Live traffic – from the blogger page; you can lead leads to the site, to the personal accounts of business owners, etc.;
  • Feedback – after integrating into the influencer’s account, you can see the audience’s general reactions and reviews.

Perfect influencer marketing has an educational, informative, and media character. Unlike traditional advertising, it does not sell “to your face,” so it does not cause rejection.

Using influence marketing, you can solve the following tasks:

  • Introduce the audience to the new product;
  • Reveal product capabilities;
  • Show the benefits of the purchase;
  • process objections;
  • Increase trust in the company;
  • Maintain a positive brand image;
  • Increase sales.

Influencers work – who is it?

Influencers are not only stars and celebrities; they can be ordinary people who create engaging content for their circle of communication: popular users of social networks, experts in various fields, journalists, analysts, company owners, etc.

When choosing influential people for cooperation, they first focus on the niche. The influencer’s profile should correspond to the direction and values of the brand to attract the target audience.

Cooperation with influencers

For an influencer marketer, choosing the right opinion leader and carefully considering what content should be produced. 

Let’s figure out where to find and how to choose an opinion leader.

How to start influencer marketing

First of all, you should decide on:

  • Integration goals – reputational ones are more quickly achieved through celebrities. You can turn to macro-influencers for an extensive reach, a quick increase in sales, and instant recognition. Micro bloggers are also suitable for strengthening positioning. They gather a small audience that pays maximum attention to the content, discusses and shares the posts;
  • The scale of advertising campaigns – whether you are aiming for one-time cooperation or several consecutive integrations;
  • Budget – what category of bloggers do you plan to influencers work with? The larger the blogger’s audience, the more expensive the integration.

Here, a detailed portrait of the client will also come in handy: you need to clearly understand who your buyer is and how much he is willing to spend. Even if a company wants to achieve the effect of word of mouth, millionaire bloggers should be chosen according to the niche, not just based on the audience reach. In the Instagram profile of Irina Shayk (14.7 million), you will not find posts from mass store Topshop; instead, you will see luxury brands Versace, Prada, etc.

Where to find influencers

People interested in the company’s products can be present on any platform and media resource: Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Telegram. It is not necessarily one social network: there will likely be several of them. The choice of a site largely depends on the field of business. For example, a narrowly focused Twitch is suitable for an audience of gamers. And for beauty industry brands, you can find thought leaders on most platforms.

According to a study by the Influencer Marketing Hub, 68% of brands consider Instagram an essential part of their influencer marketing strategy. TikTok occupies the second place: 45% of respondents use this social network to work with influencers.

An example is the story of Ben Francis, the founder of the sportswear brand Gymshark. He promoted his startup only through fitness bloggers on TikTok and Instagram. The entrepreneur gave free products to athletes, which they showed off on social networks, and soon Gymshark’s sales increased 10 times (from $450 to $4500 per day).

How to choose an influencer

When choosing an opinion leader, they pay attention to the audience’s reach and engagement and the content’s profitability. The quality of followers increases as their number decreases in the blogger’s profile.

To ensure that the chosen blogger’s followers are engaged, it is necessary to analyze the profile statistics, posts, and data on the interaction with the content. The audience’s activity in likes, comments, reposts, and saves will show its involvement. If a blogger has 100,000 followers and the reach is 5,000, then advertising will be ineffective.

You can choose an account and agree on cooperation with the help of exchanges, for example, GetBlogger, EPIC STARS, Vlogster, Brand Collabs Manager, and check for fraud – through search services trendHERO, HypeAuditor.

It will not be superfluous to explore the blog yourself:

  • The Activity of the author – if an Instagram or TikTok blogger does not post anything for three weeks, this indicates his instability. For YouTube, a release once a month is an acceptable frequency;
  • the number of publications and the age of the profile – if the account has up to 80 publications and more than 100,000 subscribers – it is an obvious sign that the audience was not gathered naturally;
  • follower activity – for Instagram, a good indicator is one comment per 100-150 likes, and the average number of views of the latest videos is at least 20-30% of the total number of followers. In Telegram, pictures are essential: if a year ago posts received 100,000 views, and now less than 50,000, then there is a negative trend in the development of the channel;
  • quality of the audience – who writes comments: live accounts or bots. You can select 20 random active followers and track whether their comments are bought or natural responses. Similar comments are a sign of cheating;
  • some ads – the blogger profile should not have too many integrations. On YouTube, one-and-a-half-hour releases can be added to 2 advertising inserts, on Instagram – no more than 30% of the entire content;
  • quality of integrations – analysis of already existing advertising content will give an understanding of what is an influencer product can be produced due to collaboration.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is one of the most effective promotion channels. It is not only a tool for increasing profits, but also working with the brand’s reputation, generating interest in the product, and increasing recognition. Let each collaboration with digital influencer definition bring you a huge flow of interested leads, and they will help you convert them into regular customers!