How do you as a business alter your communication towards a more humanistic approach, using media channels that your potential customers use in their everyday lives?
This is the issue influencer marketing seeks to accommodate; namely to give a product or brand a human voice and sender. Influencer marketing is the mouth-to-mouth principle transferred to the digital age. Through collaboration with influencers, a company can reach new or existing target groups – more directly.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a fast and efficient way for business to reach end user. The term can be defined as marketing through influential individuals to a highly committed audience. With influencer marketing, the sender is not the company itself, but instead a real person (influencer) who is in close contact with his/her followers, and thus knows what the consequences will be.
Influencer Marketing is trustworthy and acts in its basic form of credibility, authenticity and word of mouth. There is therefore no B2B or B2C, but to a greater extent H2H (human to human).
By using, for example, bloggers, vloggers, Instagrammers, or YouTubers, you can achieve business goals like conversions, signups and sales. There are many reasons to use influencer marketing:
- Ability to access new audiences
- Unique high-quality content about your brand
- Increased level of knowledge
- Stronger and more direct relation to the target group
- Greater credibility and loyalty towards your brand
As the graphics show, there are different types of influencers. Each influencer campaign or project will always be balancing its influencer mix to be most beneficial for the specific brand. However, everything indicates that in most cases there will be an overweight in the number of micro-influencers. There are many reasons for this, for example:
- Smaller influencers tend to have greater integrity than the commercial bloggers
- Communication towards your target audience is directed more accurately through the influencer
- Your message is sent to a very homogeneous audience
- It’s cost-effective
- Micro-influencers speak to their followers at eye level
- Greater relevance in the quality of content that is created about your brand
- With influencer marketing, you get authentic storytelling that bases in attracts sincere interest from the influencer him/herself. Therefore, the communication will then accommodate a large amount of personality and passion, which affects the influencer’s followers – and thus your business.
In particular, micro–influencers are very skilled at creating a high engagement rate on their content, despite having a limited number of followers. That’s what makes micro–influencers so unique and valuable. A product recommendation from a micro–influencer is therefore very similar to a recommendation by one of your closest friends who have tested the product or service and now cannot live without it. The end-users feel that they have a close relationship between them and the influencer, and therefore the followers can and will ask questions about the product or service directly to the influencer. This way, typical barriers that appear during the buying process, such as basic doubts that end-users often face when presented to a new product are answered, will be met by a genuine and authentic source of communication, that the potential customers already rely on. In the end, this ultimately means a higher conversion rate and direct sales.
Influencers on Instagram
Micro-influencers can be found at almost any media channel, but one social media channel in particular tops them all. Instagram is said by many to be the place that holds the most social influencers, and for good reason: Instagram is the ideal platform to display products and experience’s. Instagram is a highly visual social media channel, where beautiful and high-quality content is the supporting element. With all the new features within the Instagram app that support conversions sign-ups and direct sales, there’s no reason not to include Instagram in your influencer marketing mix.
But in regards the marketing mix/containing influencers, it should be mentioned that Instagram never can or should stand alone, like Facebook, YouTube or Pinterest.
Influencer marketing is strongest in combination with advertising, affiliate blogs – and of course, it should fit in the organized concept and the company’s overall plan.
What does it take to get started?
Influencer marketing is mainly about daring to lose some of the control of your content and brand message. It is very important to have an understanding that the influencer must have creative freedom. It requires a personal relationship and an in-depth knowledge of the individual influencers in order to gain value and a high ROI. Which is why most companies collaborate with agencies that maintain experience and an established influencer network.
