What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is an activity that involves promoting your products or services through influencers. These could be: social media personalities, bloggers or industry experts who build a community of followers and inspire them. It can be a paid or unpaid promotion in a one-off format or an ongoing relationship (those people frequently become brand ambassadors). Its goal is to help increase your brand awareness among the target audience and drive brand’s message.

Who is influencer marketing good for?

The answer is: probably everyone. 

Influencer marketing is constantly on a raise and recent statistics confirm it’s by far the most successful marketing channel. Therefore, marketing budgets dedicated to influencer marketing increase too. You can be sure your competition has either implemented influencer marketing programmes, or is working on them as you read this.

Why should you be doing influencer marketing?

Social media presence

Social media and visual content are becoming the strongest driver in purchasing decision among millennials, who by now, have a stronger buying power than baby boomers. According to statistics, 70% of people rely on social media when making their purchasing decisions (HubSpot).

It’s the most effective way of reaching out and engaging with the right audience. If you are targeting the 16-45 audience that is. According to various researchers, on average 75% of Millennials and Gen Z use social media daily.

ROI

Simply put – this is the best marketing channel when it comes to return on investment. According to recent survey carried out by Tap Influence influencer marketing results in 11x better ROI than display advertising and generates twice as many sales. Recommendations are more likely to trigger a purchase.

Fresh & evergreen content

Majority of influencer marketing campaigns live long and way beyond the actual campaign time frame. It’s a bit of a win-win relationship (that’s what every brand should be striving for, at least).  If an influencer finds your product/service/venue ‘instagrammable’, they are very likely to post photos from there in the future to fill in their Insta profile. Influencers with blogs oftentimes write a piece on your offering too that can be accessed at any given time by anyone. Moreover, you as a brand can make an incredible saving on photo shoots and written content by having your influencers create the content for you.

Get around ad blockers

With the increasing use of ad blockers on desktop, markers have to get creative in getting around them. Influencer marketing is a great way to do so as content is incorporated in blogs and posted on social media channels.

Other benefits of influencer marketing:

Brand awareness

Increase your brand awareness by reaching to your influencers’ followers. It’s the easiest and best way to reach out to the right audience if done properly.

Reach new audiences

It’s much easier to have your brand featured when it is promoted via an established influencer than it is trying to reach them via your owned channels. Influencers have the target audience you are after at hand so all they need to do is to put your product in front of them. This means, your brand can reach even further.

Testimonials

Having a testimonial from an established influencer not only helps you boost your social media presence, but it also gives you the opportunity to reuse the testimonial on other channels.

How much does it cost?

As per any other channel, it all depends. It depends on the scale of reach, size of an influencer, campaign type, content type and even competition in the field.

You can pay as little as £0 (plus daily allowance/operations/product costs) for a great influencer campaign. It could even be promoted across major social media channels plus additional content if you’ve done a thorough research. You could also pay as much as £1000 for a single Instagram post. It’s primarily the budget and objective that drives the cost and reach of your influencer campaign.

Bloglovin’ has recently published their survey results and a third of respondents stated they spend less than $5000/influencer campaign with majority of brands allocating up to 5% of their budget to influencer marketing and looking to increase it by a quarter in the upcoming budget planning.

Instagram

According to an influencer platform Tribe Influence, which primarily works with micro influencers on Instagram, cost per post depends on the number of followers. You can expect to pay:

3-10K — £50-£100
10-25K — £100-£180
25K-50K — £180-£250
50K-100K — £250-£350
100K+ — £350+Blog

Snapchat

Digiday has carried out its own research and according to their sources a Snapchat fees start at $500 USD per 1.000-5.000 views in a 24-hour campaign. The price is usually negotiated based on active views, since audience size isn’t available. You can expect to pay around $10,000-$30,000 for 50,000-100,000 views.

YouTube

A post created by a YouTuber with more than 50,000 subscribers can cost roughly $2,000 per 100,000 views per video,  according to Digiday’s sources. For a video created by an account with 1 million subscribers, the costs could go up to $25,000-$50,000.

Blogs

Blogs are considered to be the most effective influencer marketing channel and a brand can expect to pay around $175 to $5,000+ per post. According to DigitalMarketing.org costs based on impressions can vary between $175 to $250 per post from a blogger that has 10,000 to 50,000 monthly blog impressions to $1,000 to $5,000+ per post from a blogger with 500,000+ monthly blog impressions.

However, as mentioned before, a lot depends on:

• Type of product you are promoting
• Size, reach & engagement of the influencer’s online presence
• Campaign type and length and content needs
• Type of partnership
• Mutual benefits

How do you divide influencers?

You can group influencers in a number of ways, depending on what it is that you are after. If you want to understand the size of reach, here’s some perspective:

Celebrities – These usually include the likes of Kardashians, entertainment industry personalities, politicians, public speakers etc.

Influencers (or macro influencers) – These are self-made (usually) social media celebrities who make most of their profit via their YouTube channels, Instagram posts or blogs.

Micro influencers – These are considered by experts to be the most successful group. They usually specialise in a small niche — such as an art or luxury holidays.

Brand ambassadors – A group majority of brands tend to forget about. It’s the general public and customers that strongly believe in your brand, spread the word in their communities and are keen to speak about it online.

Now that you’re equipped in the knowledge about basics of influencer marketing, check out our other posts from this series.