Influencer marketing in business
Influencer marketing is a modern promotional tool, which appeared quite recently. Despite this, it is gaining in popularity and in practice proves to be very effective. Influencer marketing is based on the idea of public presentation and praise, approval of the product by an influential person, the leader of public opinion. This type of promotion always involves two stakeholders - the brand and the authority figure for the target audience.
With the right and thoughtful approach and careful preparation, influencer marketing will help to achieve significant results in the future. It is with its help that you can nurture not just an audience of loyal customers, but a real community of followers and brand advocates.
Neglecting to work with opinion leaders today is a bad tone, this type of promotion should have a place of honor in your online marketing strategy.
Are opinion leaders always famous people and celebrities? No. An authority on the social network can be a mom of two kids from Instagram, a gadget reviewer from YouTube, or a highly specialized expert in a particular field from LinkedIn. There are leaders and influencers in every field - a brand just needs to find them and make an affiliate contact. An external, but not the only indicator of authority, is the number of the leader's audience - the subscribers of his page in the social network. Sometimes it's tens of thousands, and sometimes it's several hundred thousand and even millions of followers. And with the right choice of authority, all these people are your target audience, which you want to reach with your advertising message.
Features of influencer marketing
The main feature of influencer marketing is to shorten the brand path when reaching its target audience. So, with the traditional approach to promotion, a brand is first identified, gains consumer trust, and gathers a base of interested people and followers. And only then becomes an authority that can influence decision-making. In reality, this journey can take a long time - from 1 year.
With influencer marketing, the brand immediately appeals to a person with already recognized influence. Such a leader has already gathered an active audience around him or her, who not only consumes the content of his or her authorship, but is involved in interaction with him or her: writing messages, commenting, expressing their opinion, evaluating and distributing the content.
To evaluate the effectiveness of collaboration, key performance indicators include the number of sales, the dynamics of a target audience activity and the number of clicks on the product or clicks to the site.
Ways of working with leaders
During the implementation of such a tool with leaders, a lot of ways of working with them and organizing cooperation with bloggers have been invented. According to our experts, the most common and effective forms of influencer marketing implementation are:
- sponsored blog posts
- branded content seeding in social networks
- content creation by opinion leaders.
The goals that brands set
The goals that brands can pursue by turning to influencer marketing can be varied, but the main ones are usually the following:
- increase in the number of perfect sales;
- increasing the level of knowledge of target consumers about the brand, awareness of its offerings (brand awareness);
- increase in the level of trust to the brand
- accessible conveyance to the audience of useful information about the brand products (for example, in the niche of home appliances, electrical goods and tools, cosmetics) and showing how to use them;
- improving the position of the brand site in a search engine (search engines assign a certain rank to sites based on a mass of criteria, including the number and quality of resources that link to your site in their pages)
- expanding the brand's social media subscriber base, spreading branded content and increasing the number of interactions with it;
- receiving qualitative and real feedback, leveling the negative (influential people will help to debunk the popular, but not corresponding to reality opinion about the shortcomings or dangers of using a product or service).
65% of brands around the world already appreciate the benefits of working with opinion leaders and are actively using influencer marketing in their promotions.
50% of brands allocate spending on influencer marketing as a separate item in the advertising budget.
25% of companies allocate more than $1 million annually for promotion with the help of bloggers on the Internet.