As a marketer, it’s important to stay updated with the changes in the market, to be able to quickly adapt new trends and stay on top of it. One of the marketing trends that have emerged in the last couple of years, in particular as social media has exploded, is influencer marketing.
If you are still new to influencer marketing, we advise you to read our complete guide to influencer marketing before jumping into this one.
In this article, I’ll be listing Top 5 Things You Don’t Know About Influencer Marketing. Read these five tips to ensure that you are up to date with how this effective marketing tactic works, and how you can best leverage it for your marketing.
1. Micro-influencers are the new influencers
When influencer marketing first started to gain traction, brands were focusing on using celebrities and people with huge followings on social media to market their products. The more the merrier, at least in a follower sense. And it made sense, because technically, the more followers an influencer has, the larger their reach is, and thus the greater impact the campaign will have. However, looking for the influencers with as many followers as possible is not necessarily the best recipe for success today.
Now, a transition and shift have slowly happened in the influencer marketing space, where brands are transitioning from celebrities and major influencers to micro-influencers. In other words, marketers have started to realize that more is not necessarily more.
And that is absolutely true because here’s the deal:
While the influencers that have a ton of followers will naturally reach more people with your message, they also charge a ton of money for a campaign. First of all, this makes influencer marketing unreachable for smaller companies that don’t have millions of dollars to spend on campaigns like Coca-Cola, Gucci, or Adidas has. As a result, the only way for smaller companies to be able to take advantage of the huge benefits that influencer marketing can bring is by working with influencers that don’t have millions of followers.
But the truth is that micro-influencers, while they have a smaller audience, also tend to have a more engaged audience and community. Because the community is smaller, the micro-influencer is able to build a relationship with the followers on a more personal level. As a result, they are able to impact their audience in a completely different way, because the audience values and listens to what the influencer has to say.
So, while you pay less for a micro-influencer campaign, you can still make a substantial impact with the campaign. So percentage-wise, since the micro-influencer has a more engaged audience, you can get more bang for your buck.
“Because the micro-influencers usually have an audience that is genuinely interested in what the influencer has to say, the micro-influencers can provide an incredible ROI that large influencers and other marketing sources can compete with.”
This means that although you are spending less because they are cheaper than celebrities, you can (with the same amount of money) use several micro-influencers to reach an audience of the same size but with a considerably higher ROI.
2. Brands are increasing their influencer marketing budgets
59 percent of marketers will increase influencer marketing budgets in 2016.
In 2016, most marketers spent between $25,000 – $50,000 per influencer marketing program, which survey respondents report will double to $50,000 – $100,000 per program in 2017.
This means that the competition among brands for the good influencers is getting bigger.
This means that it is more important than ever to find suitable and relevant influencers for your campaigns. This means influencers that actually reach the people you want to reach. Because when you do, chances are, your campaign will be so much more successful. Why would you want to pay to reach people who won’t buy from you, and couldn’t care less about what you have to offer.
There are many influencer directories out there that can help you identify the influencers that are relevant for your company. If you have the time and skillset to search, filter, and identify influencers yourself, you can, of course, do this. To learn how read our article on how to identify suitable influencers.
If you don’t have the possibility of increasing your influencer marketing budget, you can gain leverage over your competitors by targeting your niche´s best influencers.
If you can do both- you can be sure to gain huge traction and results from your influencer marketing campaign.
3. Brands must trust the influencers
This is a big issue that many marketers don’t know how to deal with.
When starting an influencer marketing campaign, the influencers usually create the content and writes the captions to the posts that they’re going to make.
The big issue is that brands are trying to be in charge of everything, from caption to content.
The golden rule that all marketers should live by is the following:
Let your influencer do what they do best but always review the content.
The influencers are the people who know their audience the best. They know what ticks their followers’ boxes, they know what their followers like to see and what ultimately will give your brand the best results. It is not the brand that knows these kinds of things and unfortunately, too many marketers believe they do.
I repeat, Let your influencer do what they do best but always review the content.
The issue when brands try to be in charge of what the influencer is going to say and post is that the campaign comes off as uncredible. And as a result, people won’t trust the message that the campaign mediates.
4. Influencers can charge brands up to $550,00 per post on social media
According to D’Marie Analytics, Selena Gomez is currently worth $550,000 per post on social media.
Selena Gomez, who is the second most followed person on Instagram with 116 Million followers is reported to charge brands $550,00 to make a marketing post.
But, while the major celebrities on social media can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can, as demonstrated work with smaller influencers like micro-influencers and get much more bang for your buck.
5. Not all influencers are charging cash
Social media influencers are not only people who are charging $500,00 per post on social media.
There are also influencers that can make marketing posts for your brand on their social media in return for other things than money.
The influencers that normally satisfy with other things than cold hard cash is micro-influencers because they don’t have a following as large as the big influencers out there. This means that their promotions on social media will naturally cost less.
Micro-influencers that are already in love with your brand are influencers who are most likely to satisfy with things other than just cash from you for a post. It can be gift cards, coupons or products.
If you have a restricted marketing budget, finding influencers who can market your brand in return for only your products can be an excellent way for you to still get your brand out there and reach a new audience. For example, if your favorite brand reaches out to you and offers to give you free products in exchange for promotion on your social media, wouldn’t you accept it?
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is a marketing tactic that has exploded in popularity over the years due to the fact that it actually works. But just like with anything, you need to know how to use it in order to get good results. Hopefully, these tips have made you more knowledgeable about influencer marketing and how you can leverage it to get marketing results worthwhile.
