Today's businesses need to take to heart a few simple influencer marketing tips to stay relevant now and in the future.
The influencer marketing world has changed the way we buy things. Sixty-seven percent of marketers are using some form of influencer marketing to promote their brand. It’s all about leveraging an influencer’s reach to support your brand, promote your product, or create content. The focus is to increase brand awareness, leading to sales.
Most marketers say influencer marketing is the best way to attract higher-quality customers to their brand. In fact, 22% of these marketers consider influencer marketing as the most cost-effective channel for acquiring customers.
In addition, 89% of marketers claim that influencer marketing generates much better ROI than other marketing methods. Social media users tend to recommend products to family and friends. Nearly 40% of people buy a product after they saw it used by an influencer on any social media platform.
Here are the top five tips to help you get started with influencer marketing.
Most micro-influencers focus on a specific niche, create their own content, and manage their accounts themselves, conveying a personal tone that resonates with followers. Approximately 82% of consumers are most likely to buy a product at the recommendation of a micro-influencer. For this reason alone, one of the best influencer marketing tips is to work with micro-influencers to help you better communicate with your target audience.
Additionally, micro-influencers are generally more affordable than influencers with millions of followers. Most micro-influencers on Instagram charge less than $500 for promoting a product. In 2020, 46.4% of brand mentions featuring the hashtag #ads were published by Instagram influencers with 1k-20k followers.
Also, as they have a small following, they tend to build a more personal connection with their followers. Their audiences tend to buy products based on their recommendations much more than those of a macro-influencer.
Brands can benefit by collaborating with a micro-influencer for their influencer marketing campaign. For example, Amanda Frederickson collaborated with Lowe’s Home Improvement. She shared some recipes using all the foods one can grow using Lowe’s products.
There’s an ongoing increase in the number of people and brands using social media platforms to buy or promote their products. Therefore, it makes sense to be more creative while creating your influencer marketing strategies and campaigns. This gives brands an edge to pull the audience toward their product and outperform competitors.
For example, VideoLeap collaborated with Kevin Parry, a famous video creator with 1.1 million followers on Instagram. VideoLeap is a video editing app that easily combines clips, adds text, artistic effects, and edits videos using an iPhone or iPad.
The idea was to demonstrate how easy and fun it is to create high-quality videos with VideoLeap by using light tricks. Parry created a top-quality trick video using VideoLeap software and added value by explaining the process. The day he chose made all the difference. He chose to post the video on April Fool’s Day. The video had more than 200,000 views in just 20 days.
Today, new social media platforms are always being developed. For example, TikTok is now a mainstream marketing platform with more than 800 million users, 75% of whom are active each day.
TikTok offers various ad formats to create awareness about your product, brand, or service. These include Brand Takeover, TopView ads, In-Feed Ad, Branded Hashtag Challenge, and Branded Effect.
There are other social media formats that are gaining popularity, such as Instagram Reels, IGTV. Now, the trend continues to gain steam, so using emerging platforms can become an extremely profitable investment.
For their launch on TikTok, Fendi was looking to increase its awareness and engagement. They decided to launch the “F is For” campaign on TikTok to play on their values. These included family, fearlessness, freedom, friendship, and the future. The campaign resulted in 15,000 new followers and over 4 million views.
Nowadays, brands are prioritizing building long-term relationships with influencers while collaborating with them.
Consequently, long-term influencer relationships represent a win-win for both the brand and the influencers. For brands, it means that the influencer is more invested in you and your product. Aligning your brand with the right influencers for the long-term allows you to tap into their influencing power. For influencers, it shows that the brand trusts them and opens up new collaboration opportunities. You can send them your products for personal use and develop casual communication channels.
Lately in the fashion industry, for example, brands create PR lists with trusted influencers. They send the influencer newly launched products and ask them to promote those products, invite them to events, or take them on trips. In the example below, a YouTube influencer, TheLineUp, has partnered with Zara, creating awareness about the new products through videos.
Influencers are using social video to their advantage in 2021, encouraging marketers to up their video creativity. Most likely, the video marketing industry will reach nearly $50 billion by 2022.
One of the most effective media formats is short-form video. Approximately 56% of videos created by brands and influencers are two minutes or less.
Influencers use social video to great effects. Examples include hashtag challenges on TikTok or makeup tutorials on IGTV. The short video formats give creators a more dynamic and personalized way to engage with followers. A few other creative video formats apart from hashtag challenges and IGTV are:
These five influencer marketing tips can help brands leverage the power of influencers and successfully combine advertising into any social media marketing strategy. Choosing the right platform and influencers is the key to reach the target audience. This helps your brand gain loyalty and win the trust of your target customers.
Applying these tactics helps improve engagement and conversions. For maximum impact, make sure your content is valuable and your brand message is clearly communicated by influencers.
