What is Influencer Marketing: How to Develop Your Strategy

What Is An Influencer

In general, influencers are popular content creators who have the ability to affect the behavior of their followers’ thanks to their authority and reputation.

Many well-known brands are eager to collaborate with mega-influencers who have more than a million followers. This form of cooperation is also known as influencer marketing, which typically implies a brand paying an influencer for mentions or promotions of their products.

Becoming a social media influencer often requires time and effort because the competition is high and everyone wants a piece of the pie.

The audience influencers gather determines many times the amount of money that they can make. Nevertheless, it is probably worth the efforts because of all the exposure the product/service might end up having that eventually can drive sales to incredible new highs.

What is Influencer Marketing

This is nothing more than social media marketing that allows influencers, or people with enough followers in a certain niche, to mention and endorse products or services and expose those same products or services to their fans.

Consumers trust influencers and that is the reason this type of marketing works. Once followers see an influencer promoting brands’ product, they will be more likely to trust this brand and its products and services.

What Does That Mean in Today’s World?

Nowadays, there are influencers in every niche and so, standing out from the crowd became increasingly harder. Five or six years ago, if you had an interesting page aesthetic and a good cause, you could become an influencer.

However, today things are a bit different.

Everyone has the ability to make their profile shine, and have interesting subjects. So what can you do to improve your visibility and reach your target audience?

A return to the origins seems to be the answer.

The new generation of influencers is creating the trend of posting simple things straight out of their camera phone. Where having the perfect shot, or being an expert on editing no longer convince most people.

This makes sense, because, much like every new industry out there, we tend to saturate the market to the point of exhaustion, and then, when there’s no more place to evolve and expand, we retract and look for innovation through simpler methods.

That is what is happening today on social media, where genuine posts and less elaborate promotion seems to attract more people.

What is The Value of Influencer Marketing

It is no secret that influencer marketing, especially on Instagram, gives results.
However, with a variety of social media platforms out there, you don’t have to limit yourself. Choose only social channels that your target audience uses.

Being able to capitalize and understand what other social media platforms have to offer is extremely important for what comes next to the influencer profession.

There are other demographics and industries at play on other platforms and it is important to understand what those are.

A study indicates that 89% of people surveyed believe that the influencer marketing ROI is greater than paying for other types of marketing and the tendency is to grow their budget for influencer marketing in the future.

Creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy

Influencer marketing, much like any marketing strategy, comes from thoughtful planning.
There has to be a goal in what you are trying to project with your brand through influencer marketing and not just having the best influencer you can find and spending your entire budget on them.

Dividing your strategy between more than one influencer might also help you with your campaign.
Because you usually pay per post, having multiple influencers working on different markets, or target audiences, but still relevant to your brand, product or service might be beneficial.

Another way to find an influencer is to sign up for an Partner Network. It takes just a few steps to begin:

  • Choose publishers with suitable traffic and give them special affiliate links;
  • They promote your products and services and lead customers to you through those links;
  • If a customer makes an order, you pay the publisher a commission;
  • Admitad takes into account only completed orders. In other words, you pay nothing if a customer doesn’t buy a product or return it.

How to Start an Influencer Marketing Strategy

The first thing to take care of is finding the right influencers. For that, focusing on the social media platform that is used by your target audience is crucial.

Do research to understand what is the best platform for your business, and if this is all new to you, stick with a single platform to start with.

The right platform will depend on your niche and audience.

For example, if your brand is in the fashion industry, perhaps Instagram, or even YouTube might be your best choice. If you are in the video game industry, then perhaps Twitch is the most relevant platform for you to start.

The type of influencers you will go for also matter. Generally, there are four types of influencers:

  • Nano: 10k followers or less;
  • Micro-influencers that have a gathering between 10k – 100k;
  • Macro: these folks have a following between 100k – 1m;
  • Mega-influencers have more than 1m+ and have the potential to reach millions of people.

Depending on the audience that you want to reach and your budget, you will need to decide what you are going for.

In order to help you choose, knowing the expected ROI when hiring influencers is important.
What is your goal once you hire an influencer? Is it to expose a new product or service to more people? Or is it to consolidate your brand?

Whatever you do, research is the most important part when choosing an influencer for your brand.

Set a Budget

Before you start planning your budget, here are some results from published research that involves the cost of influencer marketing on Instagram:

  • The average price per post on Instagram is $271
  • The average price for micro-influencers is $83 per post
  • For influencers with more than 100K, the average price is $784 per post

Now you have a better idea of the average price brands pay to have an influencer use or post their products, let’s learn how to set up a budget.

To run an influencer marketing program you need to understand that you will have to be on top of the campaign until it ends.

You will also need to plan the time you are going to take to execute and review your program.
These campaigns are not automated like many others and so, making sure the influencer posts your product at the right time is important.

To make things easier for you, Admitad has a number of tools for developing your business and getting the results you want. Admitad’s total sales reached $5.1 billion in 2020.

Set Your Goals

You need to know what your brand is in need of. Is it a larger follower base in a certain demographic, or is it more exposure to the industry and a specific market?

You need to know exactly what your brand’s objective is in order to understand the path that you need to follow.

The two main reasons brands hire influencers are to create brand awareness and increase their sales, but sometimes you need to approach these campaigns differently to achieve the same or better results.

The influencers you choose have also an impact on your goals because they have access to niches of people that might interest your product, services, or brand.

The message you want to transmit with your influencer is also relevant and sometimes is better to go for a different approach than the typical sales pitch that many brands seem to go for.

Instead, you can have the influencer make the post in a conversational way, where a personal narrative might have a bigger influence on your audience.

The way the message you want to transmit is conveyed is another thing that you can explore in order to reach a larger audience.

You have to be very clear in the message you want to send, and make sure that the influencers you use know about it and know how to approach and deliver that message.

How to Reach Influencers

Research is again the way to go when you are looking to reach out to influencers. There are a few things that you should keep in mind when searching for influencers:

  • Do they have experience with brands in the same industry? If they do that full-time, they should be able to show you a portfolio containing their work so you can analyze what they have done so far.
  • Having experience in similar services or products is also an important aspect. Much like experience in the same industry, if an influencer already worked with a similar product, they can show you their portfolio and you can go from there.
  • Ensure they are not a scam. Go through their feed, and click on a few posts to understand if their work is real. If you find spam-like comments and they barely have any engagement compared to their followers that means the account is probably not legit.

If you are targeting micro-influencers, a simple direct message on the platform might suffice and you can start engaging with them.

For influencers with more followers, you might need to email their contact information such as their agents, if you want to enter in contact with them.

You don’t need to contact influencers directly or choose the right time for promotion when you’re partnering with Admitad. Once you sign up, verified influencers with unique audiences in your niche will start promoting your services/products. So easy!

Review Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

You need to review your influencer marketing strategy before you launch it.

Plan and define the important dates so you know when to post the right content at the right time, as well as have the ability to measure the progress of your campaign.

Don’t be afraid to change your planning drastically while you are doing your review. The more research you do, and the more time you spend analyzing your brand, campaign, influencer, and product, the better insight you have and the better decisions you will make.

Just make sure you don’t decide to change the plan of your campaign a day before it is supposed to be launched, or if you do, try to change one step at a time.

Tracking Your Campaigns

There are many ways you can track your influencer marketing campaign and measure its success.
The most obvious one is to create a hashtag that your influencer, or influencers use and you can easily track it just by searching for the hashtag.

There is also marketing software that allows you to track specific hashtags and keywords that have more insights. This also allows you to have better control of how you want your campaign to develop.

Such software also helps you with your campaign through constant reporting, management of messages, identification of niches, and tracking.

Not all campaigns are successful, but having the power to oversee how it is going while the campaign is running and having the ability to change its course if you are not seeing the results you want, it’s extremely important.

Otherwise, you might see the money, time, and opportunity spent on the campaign being wasted.
When you work with Partner Network, you can clearly identify orders that came from our network. Data deduplication helps avoid double payments. If something goes wrong, you’ll be the first to know!

Wrapping Up. How To Build An Influencer Marketing Strategy

Influencer marketing evolved tremendously over the last decade and influencers became one of the most important professions when it comes to marketing and exposing new brands to new audiences.

The value of the right influencer nowadays is a lot more important than hiring the first influencer that you can find. You need to cater to their skills and niche to work with your brand and products.

You are probably better off with an influencer with fewer followers that caters to your niche and products than having an influencer with thousands of followers but the niche they are usually working with has nothing to do with your brand, products, or services.

Once again, research is the only way you can have a successful social media influencer campaign. The more in line your influencers are with your brand the more engagement you will have.