Influencer marketing – time to join the party?

Every year we seem to go through a cycle of the next big thing in Digital Marketing and judging by the articles landing in my inbox of late, influencer marketing is THE big thing to focus on right now. Influencer marketing is not a particularly new concept. Driven by social media, brands have had to shift tack in order to appear in people’s feeds with the introduction of Facebook and Instagram’s algorithm which controls the content that is delivered into your feed. In order to combat this, people have turned to highly influential individuals on social media in order to reach out to their target audience with a different kind of message.

Influencer marketing is growing

A simple search on Google Trends shows us how much influencer marketing is growing worldwide. Those who jumped on board early have been reaping the benefits since early 2015 but I think we can expect so see this growth trend continue well into 2017 until we reach a saturation point with the amount of influencer content we are seeing in our feeds.

We can see that influencer marketing still has a long way to go before it catches up with content marketing which really started to spike between 2012-2013 and has been on a steady growth pattern since then. I think over time we will start to see influencer marketing bridge the gap but this could take another 5 years before they come closer together.

Why is influencer marketing growing in popularity?

One of the biggest shifts has been the way that people are engaging with content and this is now predominantly on a mobile device. Apps like Snapchat, Instagram and the good old faithful, Facebook are getting more exposure today than ever before and the type of content that people are engaging with on these platforms is beginning to change also. Brands are having to adapt and change, matching their consumer’s expectations with the content they are delivering and one thing that is clear is that people respond to content published by individuals and celebrities way more than they do when it comes directly from the brand.

In order to combat this mismatch, brands are turning to these powerful individuals and celebrities and ‘partnering’ with them in order to get their content in front of their target audience and hence the birth of influencer marketing.

It’s all about authenticity

As we know, organic reach on social media platforms is fully saturated. The chances of your post been seen organically have dramatically decreased over the past 12 months and there is only so far a sponsored post can take you when it immediately screams out that it is a sponsored post to the end user. That’s why a shift in approach has been required and in order to reach their audience whilst remaining ‘authentic’, brands are reaching out to key influencers who can help to get their product in front of consumers’ eyes.

What makes someone an influencer?

At a recent conference we attended, we found that there is a cut-off point where a person almost grows ‘too’ influential and at that point, their engagement numbers start to drop off. They gain a following so large that maintaining a high engagement rate becomes impossible so finding the right influencer is not necessarily about finding the person with the most followers. Finding the best influencer is about finding the person who best aligns with your business goals and that is achieving a consistently high level of engagement with the content they are producing. This group of people with just the right number of followers is often referred to as ‘micro-influencers’.

These micro influencers still have the time and ability to converse with their followers, to provide recommendations and to engage with them. Once they become too big, with too many followers, we start to see this engagement drop off. The same goes for celebrities. Whilst it may be great to get some celebrity endorsement for your product on Instagram for example, when was the last time you saw a celebrity with more than 5m followers get involved in an actual conversation with them in the comments section?

Where is influencer marketing been used?

Perhaps the biggest platform which is growing right now for influencer marketing is Instagram but still out in position number one is sponsored blog posts. According to Curalate, sponsored blog posts account for 54% influencer marketing, Instagram 42%, Facebook collaborations 32% and Twitter promotions 29%. When they looked at engagement, Instagram was the king with a much stronger social amplification rate than any other social platform.

5 Steps to success

If you are new to the influencer marketing scene or you want to dip your toe, do so with some caution. Influencer marketing is not for every brand and there are definitely ways it can backfire if you don’t have a well thought out plan for what you want to achieve. Here are five steps to success:

1.      Build a strategy

Like with every digital marketing activity, treat influencer marketing the same and figure out exactly what it is that you want to achieve. Have you seen diminishing results from your paid and organic social activity? Are you struggling to reach your target audience? Once you know the why you can then start to focus on the how.

Finding the right influencer for your brand is to understand that just because someone has 1m+ followers doesn’t mean that they are all going to be interested in your brand/product. Do your research and find out more about your potential influencers and their existing audiences by reading comments and delving into their profiles to see who else they are following.

2.      Identify your influencers

You probably have a reasonable idea about some of the influential advocates for your brand currently – those fans who always engage with your content, post comments and generally have nothing but positive things to say about you. But do you ever dig into their profile and find out more about them? Amongst your existing fans you may already have some influential followers so make this your starting point. Another smart place to get started on finding influencers is by using search tools like Grin. Grin is an influencer search engine that has organized thousands of influencers by metrics that matter to advertisers. With tools like this it’s easy to identify the right influencers for your program with ease.

After that, it’s time to put in the hard yards and find those people who provide the best match to your brand and fit the influencer profile – enough followers and engagement that they respond to comments but not too many that they have outgrown their own followers and have stop engaging themselves.

3.      Build the relationship

The chances are the person you choose to partner with as an influencer is already into your brand. They love what you do and they are excited to be involved and working with you. Make sure you nurture this. Don’t treat them as a faceless freelancer. Treat them as a friend and this will help to retain the authenticity of their posts. Don’t make the posts they are pushing out forced. Make it so they can’t wait to say positive things about your brand.

4.      Make it a two way street

Whilst you may want to push out some key messages through your influencer, make sure it’s not just a one way street. After all, these guys have built up a pretty healthy following of their own so they know what works and what doesn’t. The last thing you want to do is have a negative impact on their own profile so be open to ideas and collaborate with them rather than dictate. This will help to build the relationship and again, it will make things much more authentic.

5.      Measure

Measuring the success of influencer marketing posts can be tricky as they are typically not interested in the metrics themselves. For you though it is still important to be able to measure the impact of your partnership to ensure things are working out. There are ways to measure the success of your influencer marketing without getting them onto a business platform. Things like unique promo codes or a hashtag campaign allow you to curate the results of a campaign without needing anything further from your influencer. Part of your strategy work should involve putting goals in place and deciding from the offset how you are going to measure them.

So there you have it. Hopefully this post has given you some ideas if you are not yet using influencer marketing as well as providing some guidance on how to get the most out of an influencer marketing strategy. If you want to find out more about the power of influencer marketing, give us a call and we will be happy to meet up to discuss things further.

Make sure you leave us a comment below if you have any positive or negative experiences of influencer marketing as it’s always great to hear examples.