Influencer marketing is an easy way to greatly increase your social media presence. When an influencer with a lot of reach promotes your product or service, it’s only natural that you’ll get a lot more exposure.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that you outsource, where you use influencers with often a larger reach than your own company. The goal may be to increase the reach for your existing audience. But also think about reaching a new target group when you offer a new product.
Influencers are often, as the word suggests, influential in a particular field. This could be fashion, travel or food. Often, influencers focus on a category and create content that ties into it.
Often influencers are active on different social media channels. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are obviously the most popular, but YouTube and lately Tiktok are also popular media.
There are also influencers with a smaller, more specialized reach. These so-called micro influencers will not necessarily have a lot of followers, but they will be exactly the target group you are looking for. Often, the followers in this case are also very loyal to the influencer, which makes it attractive to collaborate with this influencer or even suggest making the influencer a brand ambassador.
Brand Ambassador
Brand ambassadors are people who represent a particular brand and are very important for effective influencer marketing. With a good brand ambassador you can effectively reach your target group. For this, it is better to find a micro influencer who is a good match for your target group. Macro influencers will have many of these schemes, which takes away from the authenticity of your brand.
There are also “free” brand ambassadors. These are fans of your product
or service that promote your brand without compensation. This organic
way of promoting often works best, but in these cases you will
product should speak for itself.
Influencer marketing strategy
There are different types of marketing strategies where you use influencer marketing. Which one is most suitable depends on what your goal is. Is your goal to create brand awareness? Then your choice of influencer and strategy will be different than if you want to build a connection with your target audience.
Below, we list four influencer marketing strategies that are widely implemented.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is the “classic” form of influencer marketing: you pay the influencer in money or products and they will then promote your product in a blog or social media post on their platform. This is especially effective when you want to get more visitors to your website.
Attribution
With a simple name mention to the right influencer, you can easily increase your brand awareness. For example, think of a social post that tags your company when it comes to a relevant topic. This is often an organic form of influencer marketing as well, where the influencer provides a number of recommended suppliers for a certain product, for example.
Discount codes
This form of influencer marketing is something you see more and more. Especially with influencers who have another form of an online platform in addition to social media. Think for example of the streamer platform of Twitch or Youtube.
This form of influencer marketing is something you see more and more. Especially with influencers who have another form of an online platform in addition to social media. Think for example of the streamer platform of Twitch or Youtube.
A good example is the VPN provider NordVPN. This company has approached many different major streamers and influencers with the option of offering a discount code. The influencer then gets a small percent of the purchase as a reward.
Because NordVPN is especially appealing to people who are already reasonably familiar with the internet and its privacy concerns, it was a smart move to promote through influencers who were well-known in the online gaming/youtube world.
Due to the heavy investment in influencer marketing, NordVPN had grown tremendously in a short period of time. In less than half a year, the company’s value grew from $5.5M to $7.8M; a good example
Giveaways
What you’ve undoubtedly also seen are giveaways, for example in the form of a contest or a raffle among followers or comments. The influencer then receives a number of products which are then given away to followers. This is also very interesting for the influencer itself, as you can easily create a lot of engagement by, for example, raffling off products among the comments posted on a social media post or among the followers.
Types of influencers
Mega influencers
Mega influencers are often global celebrities with millions of followers. These influencers will be of no interest to the vast majority of businesses and often downright unaffordable. Think of people like Elon Musk or Cristiano Ronaldo.
Macro influencers
Macro influencers are a little more realistic, but still a hefty investment for the average business. These influencers have a reach of hundreds of thousands to a million followers. These are often people with a strong online identity who owe their fame to social media, while mega influencers would already be world famous without social media. So you can expect these influencers to put more time and effort into their online content.
Meso influencers
Meso influencers are right in between. Often these influencers have a reach of 50,000 to 100,000 followers. These influencers are fairly flexible and align with different influencer marketing strategies. They tend to be a lot more interactive with followers than the macro and mega influencers, but still have a large reach.
Micro influencers
Micro influencers are especially interesting for SMEs with a limited budget. These are often specialists who are particularly well known in their niche. Therefore, they will create a lot of engagement and are very familiar with what the target audience wants. They typically have 5,000 to 50,000 followers.
Nano influencers
Nano influencers are the influencers with (surprisingly!) the smallest number of followers. These are even more specialized than the micro influencers and often have a very loyal audience. These influencers often do not have the goal of gaining the largest possible audience, but are more focused on gathering and sharing specialized information about a particular topic.
In short
Always make sure you have a clear strategy for your influencer marketing. The importance of influencer marketing will only increase in the future, but so will the price tag that comes with it. So you’ll need to create a targeted social media plan and find the right influencer for your influencer marketing.
All types of influencers can mean a lot to your business. Although you may think that more reach = more success, this is not so. You ultimately want to get followers who are actually interested in your product.
If you as a gaming company pay Beyoncé to promote your new game, this will probably not lead to the best results for example. On the other hand, Nike or Apple will prefer to use a mega influencer instead of a micro influencer, because these brands are popular with a very broad audience.