Influencer marketing began to develop with the rise of social networks and the appearance of influencers. Find out what it is and how you can incorporate it into your digital strategy to achieve better results.
Influence marketing began to develop with the rise of social networks and the appearance of new players in the digital world: influencers. These are people who have managed, thanks to the networks, to create a community around their profiles, usually thousands and sometimes even millions of people. It didn’t take long for brands to realize the incredible communication potential of these profiles, and influencer marketing was born. What at first were timid collaborations and attempts by brands, today has become one of the most effective marketing channels for companies. So much so that the influence industry will be worth $15 million by the year 2022, according to industry forecasts.
What is an influence campaign?
An influence campaign is a collaboration with influencers that a company carries out with the intention of achieving specific objectives. In exchange for their work, the company offers a consideration to the influencer. Depending on the type of influencer in question, we will talk about compensation in the form of a product or financial compensation.
Currently, there are four types of influencers with whom it is possible to carry out influence campaigns:
- Celebrities: celebrities can also be considered influencers when they have a careful and consistent presence on social networks. Actors, singers, soccer players… they usually gather millions of followers on social networks and collaborate with prestigious brands. A few years ago, brands tried to hire these personalities to appear in their television commercials. To this day, appearing on the Instagram stories of Cristiano Ronaldo or Kim Kardashian is the goal of a large number of brands.
- Macroinfluencers: Macroinfluencers have more than 100K followers on the networks and some of them even have more followers than certain celebrities. The fundamental difference is that the macroinfluencer makes a living from his work in the networks. Collaborations with these profiles are very expensive, in terms of demand and economics, but they have a massive reach.
- Microinfluencers: these profiles accumulate between 5k and 100k followers in networks. Their communities are “smaller” than those of the macros, but in return they are much more interactive and authentic. The relationship between the micro-influencer and his community is much closer, which results in a greater power of prescription in these small actors.
- Nanoinfluencers: we define a “nanoinfluencer” as a profile with 5k followers or less. These are passionate consumers who share their experiences on social networks with a very close community. Despite the small size of their audience, these profiles should not be overlooked, since the impact of their recommendations is much higher in their small community.
The most effective way to incorporate influencer marketing into your digital strategy is through a campaign with micro-influencers. The strength of micro-influencers lies in their numbers, since it is possible to collaborate with many micro-influencers for a small cost. Micro-influencers collaborate with brands that share their values or for which they feel a special affinity. The way to compensate them for a collaboration is by sending a branded product with a personalized message, which makes them much more affordable and attractive than macro profiles.
How do I incorporate an influencer campaign into my digital marketing strategy?
The first step in launching an influencer marketing campaign is to be clear about what your objective is. Do you want to increase your sales? Gain in notoriety? Promote a product launch? Defining a clear objective is the most important step, since the choice of influencers and the brief that you are going to send them with the details of the campaign depend on it.
Let’s say, for example, that you are going to launch a new product. For the launch you will carry out different marketing actions such as an advertisement on television, advertisements and clippings in the press… To incorporate an influence campaign into your product promotion strategy, you must follow the following steps:
- When choosing influencers, make sure they fit your brand image and beyond, the image of the new product.
- In the brief, do not hesitate to inform them of the different marketing actions that are going to be carried out so that they understand the objective of the campaign and what is expected of them.
- Make sure that the message that your influencers are going to communicate is the same as the one that you are communicating through the rest of the marketing channels.
- Finally, feel free to reuse content generated by these creators. Think about posting their photos on your own profile on social networks, if they have made videos, use them for a spot on YouTube, etc. By following these steps you will be able to launch an influence campaign in line with the rest of your actions and reach a much wider audience. When done correctly, collaborations with influencers can be prolonged over time, and this is the ideal in an influencer marketing strategy: Locate influencers who have a community similar to your target audience and start a long-term relationship with them. Little by little, you will have access to a faithful number of influencers that you can count on for your campaigns and in whom you can fully trust thanks to your full collaborations and their knowledge of your brand.
A few words of caution
Influence campaigns are still a relative novelty for most companies and sectors. Sometimes it can be not very intuitive and there are errors that it is better not to fall into if we want to get the most out of our campaigns.
- Wanting to cover too much in a single campaign: When launching influencer campaigns, it is best to limit yourself to one objective per campaign. Very often we expect too much from our influencer campaigns and we want to simultaneously increase our sales and the number of followers on our profile, communicate a new product and increase our awareness… Like any other marketing channel, influencer has its limitations and it works. better with concrete and quantifiable objectives. What do you have more than one objective to achieve in this way? Launch as many campaigns as necessary.
- Not determining your KPIs from the beginning: influencer marketing has its own KPIs that will help you estimate the effectiveness of your marketing actions in this area, the engagement rate, the voice part, the impressions, the reach… To measure success of your campaign correctly, determine your KPIs from the beginning to be able to observe their evolution.
- Do not establish a relationship with your influencers: influencers gather around them your target audience and your customers, precisely who you want your marketing messages to reach. The success of your influence campaigns depends to a large extent on the choice of influencers who will represent your brand. Make the effort to maintain a relationship with them even after the collaboration has ended: if they have worked well and you have obtained the expected results with them, you are interested in strengthening ties to guarantee future collaborations.
Now you have the information you need to launch your own influencer marketing campaigns. As with everything, the best way to learn is by doing, but we hope this article has helped you get off on the right foot.