Influencer marketing being seemingly everywhere due to the reach of social media, it has become one of the if not the best ways for a product or brand to increase its customer base. Nowadays people can’t go without checking the various social media sites that they have and companies have taken advantage of this fact to help promote what they are selling. While once considered a fad strategy of marketing that was not expected to last as long as it has, influencer-inspired marketing has become mainstream over the last few years growing at a steady rate coinciding with the social media explosion that has taken over the world. Despite its mainstream status Influencer marketing strategy is still relatively new to most people so let us look at what it is.
Influencer marketing is a new-age marketing strategy that uses social media to expand its reach to consumers. People who have quite a considerable reach and number of followers are hired by companies, products, and brands to promote it to their followers. Influencer marketing is an off-shoot of celebrity endorsements but for the modern consumer. In the modern-day people who create content in the form of blogs, videos, and so on are almost as valuable to a company as a celebrity endorsement is. Influencers have built a relationship with their audience over a period of time and are in a position to use that trust to refer a product to them.
So who can be an Influencer?
Influencers are different from celebrities who also sometimes endorse products. While celebrities are famous for various activities like acting, singing, and dancing who then leveraged their popularity to get deals with companies and brands to promote their products. Influencers are people who have a dedicated following who possess the power to influence people to try or buy a product. This influence they have over their audience’s spending habits is the result of the influencer’s knowledge and position they have with the product. Influencers are also viewed as experts of niche interest and can guide their audience towards the product or service.
What are the different types of influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing has different types of influencers present who are hired by companies and brands. Influencers can be differentiated by the niche or content they promote and the size of the audience.
Influencer based on Content can be mainly divided into these types:
Parenting Influencers: This influencer provides tips and tricks to new parents and families regarding parenting and everything related to raising kids. These influencers usually promote toys, clothing brands, and educational services.
Fashion Influencers: These influencers promote clothing brands and accessories to their audience and gained a reputation due to their fashion sense. Most of their content is centred on reviews of fashion products and shopping hauls.
Beauty Influencers: These influencers grew their audience through beauty tips, makeup tutorials, and product reviews. These influencers promote beauty products like makeup, hair care products, and skincare products.
Travel Influencers: Travel influencers review travel-related brands like airlines and vacation planners to their audience. They additionally suggest vacationer locations and exercises for their adherents to test. They additionally give travel deceives, hacks, and tips to their crowd.
Gaming Influencers: These influencers usually interact with their audience through videos and streams of them playing games. They give tips to their crowd in regards to games and surveys about games. They promote games, gaming-related products, and gaming accessories.
Sports and Fitness Influencer: These influencers promote physical activities involving sports, working out, and other activities. They promote workout gear, sports equipment, supplement products, workout plans, eating plans, and foods.
Job Referrals: - Referring a job to others is also a kind of influence marketing in which you suggest or refer your friend certain kind of job. Also earn money by referring jobs to your friends. There are so many platforms are available in the market such as Jobsdive.com, which offers the job referral programs, where you can earn money upto $10 by referring jobs to others.
Influencers involved in Influencer marketing can
be also separated on the size of their audiences such as:
- Nano Influencers: These influencers constantly engage
with a thousand to ten thousand followers. They are a cost-effective
option for brands and companies.
- Micro-Influencers: These influencers have at least a
hundred thousand followers and help companies and brands in acquiring more
focused leads.
- Macro Influencers: These influencers are semi-famous in
their own right and have an audience of nearly one million followers. Due
to the sheer size of their followers, brands can rely on them to promote
the product as much as possible.
- Mega Influencers: They are practically celebrity
endorsements but if a company has the budget to afford one, they will have
no problem in getting their product to be promoted to the most amounts of
people.
Here are some Influencer Marketing strategies and influencer marketing tips and tricks an influencer can adopt to become a bible option for a brand or company to partner up with:
- To become an expert or successful at something requires time and patience and this is the same for influencers starting out. It’s going to take time to build an audience and get them to bond with the influencer in such a manner that a person can later influence their audience’s spending habits. The influencer has to demonstrate their credibility in regards to the niche and product.
- The influencer has to put their efforts into being
genuine, accessible, and responsive. Social media has increased
influencer’s accessibility with their audience and has so many different
avenues to interact with them. When the audience feels a connection
with the influencer through their accessibility, they are more likely to
buy or try a product an influencer recommends.
- Influencers have to build and sustain a happy community
of their audience. The community built of the influencer’s audience is
really important to any influencer marketing strategy that an influencer
will use. If there is a community present, it results in a wider reach of
the product and builds a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging will
encourage the audience to buy into whatever the influencer is referring to
as they will want to buy the product as they would want to feel like part
of the community.
- The influencer should try to master the niche and
become an authority in that field. With audiences following an influencer
because they have traits and features that differentiate them from the
millions of others on social media. This niche mastery is an extension of
them and the audiences will gravitate towards them because it is putting
even more eyeballs on the product.
Influencer Market Impact is evident through so many success stories for various different brands and companies in promoting their product. Let us look at some statistics and facts that illustrate the impact influencer marketing have:
Brands and companies using influencers to promote the product realize it is one the most cost-effective marketing strategies available to them. Influencer marketing has a cost to the value of eighteen dollars to every dollar spent. Therefore it is a great way to increase brand awareness and increase sales.
Nearly every brand out there utilizes some form
of influencer marketing. With all the content options available out
there, there is a nearly endless supply of ways to interact with an audience
and convince them to buy into a product. The majority of the brands that have
used influencer marketing have stated that they consider it an effective
marketing technique.
Fourteen percent of eighteen to
twenty-four-year-olds and eleven percent of those in the millennial age bought
a product or service due to a referral from an influencer.
More than seventy percent of brands that use
influencers say the quality and traffic from that marketing strategy is better
than another marketing strategy.
The rise of social media dominating our lives has greatly benefited influencer marketing strategy and influencers promoting a product. With people requiring a certain level of social trust before they buy a product through a referral that they have a bond with, it makes sense for influencer marketing to be the go-to strategy for brands and companies of today to get new customers.