What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is an upgraded mixture of old and new marketing tools, taking the idea of celebrity endorsement and putting it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign, the main difference is that the results of the influencer marketing campaign are usually collaborations between brands and influencers.
Influencer marketing offers brands the potential to bring together their marketing, sales, PR, digital marketing, social media, and product through powerful and relevant relationship-based communication. Both the return on investment and marketing potential of influencer marketing are immense.
What is an Influencer?
There is a theory about influencers that they are someone with a large social media following. This theory confuses influence with popularity. The process of influencing requires a specific result: change in thinking or behavior. An influencer is someone who has the power to influence the perception of people or gets them to do something different for a change.
In the marketing sense, an influencer is someone who helps other people buy things from you. The value of influence over customers for marketing purposes is not a very novel idea.
But as online customer conversations continue to evolve so rapidly, influencers are playing an important role in breaking online clutter, creating relevant chatter and bringing trust to the table for different brands and marketers alike.
What is Influence?
Social influence centers on compliance and persuasion in a social environment. In the influencer marketing context, influence is less about arguments and coercion to a particular point of view and more about interactions between various persons and communities. Influence is often equated to advocacy, but may also be a little negative, so, it is related to concepts of promoters or marketing managers.
How to do influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing includes several different aspects which require a certain skill set and some basic rules.
Consider your approach in influencer marketing
- Get organized
- Define your strategy
- Plan and budget
- Spend time on research
Develop a schedule for marketing
- Does the influencer prefer monthly or quarterly calls or newsletters?
- Integrate with your PR schedule and product release schedule.
- Communicate on behalf of key executives. Plan travel schedules and arrange meetings.
How does payment work in IM?
Influencer marketing is broken into two sub-categories: earned influencer marketing and paid influencer marketing.
Earned influencer marketing
Earned influencer marketing stems from unpaid relationships with influencers or third-party content that is promoted by the influencer their personal growth.
Paid marketing
Paid influencer marketing can be a form of sponsorship, pre-roll advertisements or testimonial messaging and can appear at any point in the content. Budgets vary all the time and are usually based on the audience reach of the influencer. Most of the influencers are paid before a marketing campaign hit the market while others are paid after the marketing campaign has run its course.
How to choose a good influencer?
A good influencer must have a combination of three main factors: reach, contextual credibility, and salesmanship. The higher these three factors, the higher is the influence potential of a person.
Reach
Reach is defined as the ability to deliver a particular message to a large number of an audience. This can be the audience of a TV show, the number of social media followers or the readership of a publication. Reach is important but insufficient. A person with a small number of social followers but high credibility and salesmanship are called micro-influencers.
Contextual Credibility
Contextual credibility is the level of trust and authority given by the audience based on the influencer’s knowledge and expertise on a particular topic. A star fitness expert will have high credibility in recommending workout routines and hygiene but low credibility in fashion and politics.
Salesmanship
Salesmanship is the presence of communications style that provides the influencer an edge and the ability to understand and embrace a specific point of view. There are some influencers with extraordinary power to convince other people of their point of view. They have an ability to explain things in convincing ways, a perfect sales pitch, and they deliver their points of view with full confidence.