Influencers play an important role in shaping customer perception and driving brand awareness. This industry is projected to grow to $30 billion. Identifying the correct influencer can help your business efforts and increase your brand awareness and engagement. If you find a relevant influencer, it most importantly helps in building trust. 61% of customers trust influencer recommendations more easily. According to a study, trust between companies and customers has fallen to its lowest level since 2017.
Influencer marketing is not a new concept; for decades, brands have partnered with celebrities to build trust, such as Nike collaborating with Michael Jordan. The right investment can help level up your position in the market and build trust and credibility with your audience. According to a survey, 56% of millennials and 58% of Gen Z purchased a product based on social media influencer or content creators’ recommendations.
In this article, we’ll learn what influencer marketing is and its types. Also, what are the tips for identifying and partnering with relevant influencers, and how to measure their impact?
What is Influencer marketing and its types?
Influencer marketing is a social media strategy that uses product mention and endorsement from influencers. These individuals have a loyal fan following and are often viewed as experts in their respective niche. Influencer marketing works because their followers trust them, and their recommendations serve as social proof to your brand’s potential customers.
There are mostly four types of influencers.
- Mega Influencers: These individuals have a huge fan following of over 1 million. It can include famous actors, musicians, and sports personalities. They are ideal for a large-scale brand awareness campaign.
- Macro-Influencers: These individuals have the following between 100,000 to 1 million followers. These are established personalities in their respective fields.
- Micro-Influencers: These individuals have the following between 10,000 to 100,000 followers. Their followers are highly engaged and loyal. They can have a strong presence on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. It is best for capturing a niche audience.
- Nano-Influencers: These individuals have the following between 1,000 to 10,000 followers. They have a close connection with their followers. It is ideal if you want to target a specific community or demographics. According to a report, 44% of brands prefer to partner with nano influencers.
What is Influencer marketing and its types?
Here are some of the tips you can use for identifying potential influencers that can benefit your business
- Lasting Impact: Look for macroinvestors with high engagement in your niche. Analyze their content and how well their audience engages or connects with them. Focus on their engagement, conversion, and traffic rate, not the fleeting metrics.
- Social Media Listening Tools: Use social media listening tools to find influencers that align with your industry. Analyse their engagement rate, content, audience demographics, etc.
- YouTube: YouTube is a wonderful platform if you are looking for experts or influencers. It has a lot of subject matter experts who may not be mainstream media but have knowledge and expertise. If your potential customers are listening or can listen to them in the future, you can collaborate with them.
- Relationship: Identify influencers within your niche that align with your brand and its values. Look for influencers who have a strong following and presence. They can expand your reach as their established audience can trust your products and services. Building a strong, positive relationship with influencers helps in improving the effectiveness of your collaboration.
- Audience Data: It is important to maintain traffic and cookie records of your business because they relate to social media and the web. It can be correlated to each sale. While selecting an influencer, request their audience data. It enables cross-reference metrics that you can compare with your business audience.
- Data Analytics: Analyzing social media metrics and audience engagement can help in identifying influencers who resonate with your target audience. It ensures a genuine connection and reach.
How to Measure the Impact of Influencer Marketing
You can measure the impact of influencer marketing by tracking the following key performance indicators
- Brand Awareness: The primary goal of influencer marketing is to increase brand awareness. You can focus on impressions, which is often referred to as reach. It tracks the number of times users view your brand-related content. Estimate the audience size accordingly.
- Affiliate Links: Some agencies employ affiliate links, unique URLs for sharing recommendations and monitoring website traffic or sales to see the effectiveness of influencers. You can give a custom link to each influencer to check how many clicks one can achieve.
- Engagement: Metrics like number of views, organic search, etc, can help in measuring customer engagement. Quantify your customer’s interest and interactions. It checks how well your content resonates.
- Conversion: It measures the completed transaction, sign-ups, etc, attributed to influencer activity.
- Brand Mention: Analyze the brand mentions, hashtags,and how much it has increased post the collaboration. Also, study the tone and sentiment of users.
- Return on Investment: Analyze the complete revenue generated from the collaboration. Did this collaboration fulfil your brand goals and recover your budget?
Influencer marketing is powerful because of its reach, but not all partnerships result positively. You must select an influencer who aligns well with your brand values. You should try to build a strong relationship with influencers and collaborate together to create engaging and relevant content. Lumia 360 provides digital solutions to small and medium enterprises. Our strategies resulted in improving the page rank of the website and increasing the engagement rate. To know more about our strategies, email info@lumia360.com or call 514-668-5599.
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