With the increasing popularity of social media, new ways of communicating and creating strategies have also arisen. Advertising and marketing have evolved hand in hand with technology and have been adapting to new changes. In this digitised environment, “influencers” who could also be referred to as opinion leaders have appeared on social networks.
Influencers are born on platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok. Nowadays, different types of influencers have appeared, such as nano influencers and micro influencers, but what exactly do they do? What is their function? To put it simply, they develop their own personal brand and create content on a certain topic, be it fashion, sports, food, entertainment. Influencers normally share their day-to-day life while showing what they like most about the products they are advertising. In doing this they have managed to captivate thousands and millions of people.
Brands have detected the importance of this phenomenon and have started to use “influencer marketing”. This year, three quarters of brands will devote part of their budget to using this new tool. Currently, there are already agencies that are responsible for connecting brands with influencers and choosing the most suitable profile for the brand. The aim is for the influencer to be able to transmit the brand’s values through their own content.
By using influencer marketing, businesses seek to attract and retain new customers, as well as to sell to them. A global study by GWI states that 28% of 16-23 year olds follow influencers on social media along with 23% of 24-30 year olds. Now is definitely the time to embrace influencer marketing so we wanted to give you some tips on how it works:
What should we keep in mind?
Firstly we need to figure out what kind of influencer we want: celebrities, experts on a specific topic, social media stars or a person with many followers, there are plenty of different types of influencer. Unfortunately, you can’t just choose an influencer just because they are well known, you need to know that their values coincide with yours in order to transmit the right message. For example: It may not be ideal for a brand of wedding dresses to have Cristiano Ronaldo, because although he could provide a stratospheric reach, he may not reach the desired audience or he may not be aligned with the values we want to convey.
So, we need to ask ourselves:
- What audience do we want to reach?
- What is our brand story?
- What message do we want to convey?
- What is interesting to the audience we want to reach?
Strategy
Everything we have mentioned in the previous point is following a strategy. That’s what marketing is all about: research, create a strategy and create tactics. But, the problem is always the same, you want to get results fast but you end up not spending enough time planning a good strategy. This will help us choose exactly who we want to transmit our message to and to ensure our target audience connects both with us and with the influencer, as they are the ambassadors of our brand.
Find a niche
Once we are clear on the above points, we need to think about: the reach we want to have and the niche we want to specialise in. This will help us to define who the best person is to be our brand ambassador and make it clear along with what we want to achieve and what audience we want to reach. There are different platforms that can help you measure the impact of your influencer in order to obtain potential reach data (an essential tool). These niches help us to identify specific sections of our target audience based on lifestyle, interests and tastes.
Content we want to communicate
Content is still king, so once we know which ambassador we are going to work with and what values we want to transmit to our audience, we can start with the content. The best marketers recommend that influencers should first try the product and find what they like about it so that they can effectively convey a positive message. The aim is for everything to flow in an organic and authentic way (consumers can tell when somebody is simply being paid to sell them something).
To do this, we can use tools like storytelling using first hand accounts of the product experience as our strategy to connect with the public. Other resources we can use:
- Live videos, they are spontaneous and feel more authentic. The brand experience is shared in the moment which makes the target audience see it as an everyday and normal situation and not something scripted or fabricated.
- Behind the scenes content: with Instagram stories we can show how everything is made and they can see the influencer’s life, allowing for more intimacy which ultimately leads to trust.
Measures to be Effective
The last and most important tip is to measure the size of our audience and the reach we have already achieved. In an influencer marketing campaign everything is measurable and quantifiable.
To evaluate the success of your influencers, you can use tracking through URLs and coupons, so you can see how many clicks you are getting along with how many people have used the product and if it met expectations.
We can determine the effectiveness of the campaign with certain KPIs such as: comments on posts and stories along with visits, saved items, clicks on URLs and search intent.
All this helps us to know if our influencer campaign has been a success or if it will need to be improved in the future. We should always check if we have achieved our objectives and keep in mind that influencer marketing is an aspect that can be worked on, especially in consumer brands.
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