Half a century ago, influencer marketing companies were forced to spend unimaginable budgets for attracting famous personalities. For example, it is possible to recall the large-scale campaigns of tobacco corporations with Clint Eastwood in the main role, as well as other celebrities, who convinced the whole world that smoking is a sign of masculinity, sexuality, and maturity. Today, against the backdrop of an explosive growth of the spread of social networks and mobile devices, it is possible to observe the second birth of advertising through popular personalities.
What is Influencer Marketing
Influence marketing is the power of persuasion, which is applicable in any business sector. Many companies are convinced that this is one of the best ways to increase the degree of confidence in their product on the part of the consumer. Indeed, the fact remains unchallenged and is that one of the effects of influencer marketing through recommendations from experts, authorities, celebrities is business development and sales growth. It also fosters brand awareness.
Already in the title itself, the main goal of this tactic is displayed. Influence marketing is called so for the reason that it has a strong belief power that is based on the concept that users are more likely to buy your products or use the service if they receive a recommendation from a person they trust. This is not just a new tool for promoting a product. This is a new philosophy. The emphasis is not on advertising but on the individual. In view of the persistent "immunity" to direct advertising, representatives of B2C (and even B2B) are trying to find new forms of interaction with consumers, and opinion leaders play an important role here.
Direct advertising interrupts the viewing of content, while this type of marketing is based on native advertising, which is part of the content, without interfering with user interaction. For this reason, one of the benefits of influencer marketing is the almost complete absence of the effect of sudden irritation.
51% of marketers consider this tool to be one of the most effective, and the general recognition of the influence of marketing is due to a whole range of advantages:
- Efficiency. The opinion of a professional is listened to by 86% of users, 20% of whom are "millennials" (people under 20 years old). This age category prefers to immediately do the job: high school graduates and students more actively buy electronic gadgets, clothes, shoes, home products online.
- Unobtrusiveness. An article or review of the opinion leader does not disgust the user, who is more likely to be "tempted" by hidden messages than by direct advertising, which has bored everyone.
- Success. This type of marketing is 53% more effective than direct advertising. In a day we meet 3000-4000 advertising messages. Gradually, users develop "banner blindness." We purposely do not notice direct advertising. Influence marketing successfully penetrates the "shell" and encourages the purchase of 53% of users, of those who ignored the advertising content.
- Purposefulness. Marketing of influence is focused on a certain target audience. People from the selected segment get what they are looking for, so influence marketing always hits the target.
But one of the most important properties of marketing of influence is that it attracts competent clients who are focused on the result and are not afraid to use innovative methods to achieve the set goal.
What are the Key Components of Influencer Marketing?
There are three types of influential people. These are celebrities, macro-influences, and micro-influences.
Celebrities, for example, are athletes, musicians, and actors whom you are accustomed to seeing. They have more than 1 million followers with a level of 2-5% per post. In general, they have the highest coverage, but, as a rule, the lowest interaction. Also, because of their great attractiveness, they are rarely suitable for reaching a specific target audience. Advertising through such celebrities is akin to buying TV ads on a large network.
Macro-influencers are bloggers, journalists and opinion leaders with a subscriber number of 10,000 to 1 million. They involve from 5% to 25% of the audience per message. They are "most relevant for promotion in narrow categories - like a few key trends of lifestyle, fashion business, etc.
Micro-influentials are niche opinion leaders with a number of followers from 500 to 10,000, but they involve 25-50% of the audience in the post.
5 Steps to an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy
Before implementing this type of marketing in practice, you need to formulate and implement an appropriate strategy. It consists of five stages:
- Drawing a portrait of an audience. This is a key stage. You know your customers better than anyone else. Describe a few of them in the most detailed way: sex, age, an approximate way of life and interests, what they do at work and in their free time, life values and principles, what they dream about and what they do not like.
- Search for authorities Choose leaders of opinions correctly: evaluate their target audience and its activity. To find the right leader, you need to carefully review blogs, forums, and pages on social networks, evaluate the target audience of the authority, its activity. Choose a person who has active "followers". They will not only put the cherished "like", and make a repost, but also raise a buzz around the post. Due to this excitement, the maximum number of people will know about your brand.
- Creation of a marketing campaign. It is necessary to create a marketing move "under the blogger" in order to attract his attention and to motivate him to take part in your action or in a special offer. After you have obtained the consent of authority, proceed to the next stage.
- Development of an additional marketing strategy. It is a guide for opinion leaders on the specifics of reviews, a frequency of publications and communication with the target audience.
- The final stage is tracking the results of the marketing campaign: the number of "likes", reposts and comments.