Influencer marketing leverages the trust and authenticity of content creators to build brand awareness, credibility, and sales. Success depends on choosing influencers whose audience aligns with your brand, using clear tracking methods like affiliate links, coupon codes, and branded hashtags, and measuring engagement and brand lift. When done strategically, across general, niche, and super-niche markets; it outperforms traditional advertising by delivering genuine, relatable communication that drives measurable impact.
Table of Contents
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing where opinion leaders are paid to promote, use, and review products and services to their audience in exchange for payment or compensation. Price and compensation are usually determined by the follower count and brand power.
Advertisement is often presented in the form of a detailed description of usage review and experience with the product or service. It is usually done through channels like:
- Blogs
- YouTube channels
- Instagram/Facebook
- TikTok
- Snapchat
Most influencers choose to specialize in one type of industry and try to develop a certain type of authenticity and uniqueness, which is necessary to establish needed expertise. We can divide influencers into 3 main categories of specialization:
1. General industry
In the general industry, influencers can be categorized in their respective broader expertise categories, such as:
- Fashion,
- Cosmetics
- Travel
- Food,
- Automotive industry
- Electronics,
- Gaming
- Sport & Fitness
2. Niche
In the niche industry, influencers are mainly occupied by creating content inside general industry categories such as:
- Shoes or dresses in fashion
- Makeup art in cosmetics
- Certain destinations in travel
- Specific game genre
- Simple home cooking in the food industry
- Premium cars in the automotive industry
- Specific sports
3. Super-niche
In the super-niche industry influencers are mainly occupied by creating content regarding certain niche products & services or their functionality:
- Eco-friendly skincare,
- Walking tours in certain travel destinations
- Homemade pastry in the food industry
- Race track driving in the automotive industry
- History of physics and mathematics
- Specific video games
4. Influencer audience
A sheer number of followers does not guarantee that campaign with that influencer is going to be successful. As the name suggests, nano and micro-influencer have a smaller, audience, but they usually have a stronger relationship with their audience, a higher percentage of reach, and an engagement rate. Niche and micro-influencer offer opportunities to work with a segmented audience with well-defined interests.
Influencer audience can be categorized into 5 segments
- Nano 1k-10k
- Micro 10k-100k
- Mid 100k-500k
- Macro 500k-1M
- Mega 1M +
Demand and pricing are increasing because each influencer has prior collaborations with strong brands, their brand power, your company’s brand power, and mutual interest.
2. Why should you use influencer marketing for your business
There are a number of reasons why you should consider using influencer marketing for your business. First, it’s a great way to reach a new audience. Influencers have built trust with their followers, so by working with them, you can tap into their audience and reach people who may not have heard of your brand before.
Second, influencer marketing is an effective way to build credibility for your brand. When people see that an influencer is promoting your product or service, they’ll be more likely to trust you and consider giving you a try.
“Most Gen Z and Millennials follow influencers, and teenagers are more likely to follow many: 72% say they follow at least some influencers.”
“influencers are more trusted as spokespeople than celebrities: 50 percent of Millennials trust influencers they follow on product recommendations, compared to 38 percent for their favorite celebrities.”
Source(Morning Consult)
3. Choosing the right influencers
When it comes to choosing the right influencers to work with, businesses need to consider a few different factors:
- Understand who their customer is
- Understand influencer audience
- Understand influencer expertise on the subject
- Understand influencer general trustworthiness
Then, they need to find influencers who are aligned with their brand values and have a similar target audience. When looking for an influencer to partner with, it’s important to make sure that they have a good reputation and are seen as trustworthy by their followers. Additionally, the influencer should be knowledgeable about the product or service that they’re promoting so that they can create authentic content that will help convince potential customers to buy. If you’re unsure about who to target as an influencer or how to find a good one for your brand, reach out to us and we’d be happy to help!
Check the chart for more information
Chart created by: Centella Media, Data Source: Morning Consult
4. Tracking Influencer campaign success
Affiliate Link
Links can be incorporated in the post, description, or CTA(call to action), allowing users that are exposed to the campaign to click and check the product/service/offer. The link should be decorated with UTM tracking parameters, so you can track, analyze and properly assign conversions to your campaign in analytical systems.
TIP: You can use tools such as campaign URL builder to easily decorate your links.
Coupon code
A coupon code should be a simple word, phrase, or numeric code that customers may use during checkout or payment. It is usually done by naming influencers and adding percentages of discounts.
TIP: do not use complex words that are hard to remember, it will lower the conversion rate of the campaign.
Brand term
The brand search term is a metric that can be measured within an analytics system and it indicates how many searches were performed regarding your brand name.
An increase in search volume indicates that the Influencer campaign increased brand awareness for the duration of the campaign.
Social media engagement metrics
Create branded hashtags for campaigns to increase the tracking capability of social monitoring. Each increase or ‘spike’ indicates the campaign is working.
5. Influencer effects on brand advertising
Influencers or opinion leaders are content producers on topics of their choice in which they consider themself an expert
We can divide and distinguish three different influencing levels
-compliance
-identification
-Internalization
The strongest influential effect occurs in the case of Internalization when a person adopts the opinion or behavior of the communicator, opinion leader, or when they are perceived as a credible source.
That is why source credibility is the most important determinant in marketing and advertising research
Source(Crane 1972).
It is subdivided into two characteristics, namely expertness (the extent to which the communicator is perceived to be able to know the truth) and trustworthiness (the degree of confidence to which the communicator is perceived to tell the truth), both being critical in the overall perception of a communicator’s credibility
Source(Hovland, Janis and Kelley 1953)
Influencers have been found to increase brand awareness and sales significantly more than traditional forms of advertising, such as TV commercials or radio ads. Content created by an influencer will typically be more authentic, their message comes from a genuine place in their life experience with the product, which helps create trust for potential customers who may then purchase the said product based on what they read or see from the influencer’s content.
Content produced by the influencers is structured and produced in a way that is familiar and expected to their audience. Each post, video, guide, or review communicated with a similar tone of voice, format, length, and quality. Each step is carefully managed to get the best results.
6. Common mistakes and how to avoid them
Companies often try to incorporate influencer marketing strategies into their marketing actions without enough research on the topic and it leads to wasted money. One of the key mistakes that were also mentioned above is to know who is your audience is and who the audience you want to talk with through an influencer. If your audiences are people of the same characteristics as influencers, then that marketing operation has a ground to be built upon and to be successful.
It often isn’t about the number of followers but about general engagement and trust that an influencer’s audience has to the words he says.
We will list the common mistakes in influencer marketing and what to do to prevent them
- Selecting an influencer whose audience is not interested in your product – to avoid this, do research about the influencer, go through their posts, and see what kind of audience is responding to them, what language they use, what their demographics are, etc. Learn as much as you can about their audience and ask yourself, Is this audience that will consume my product or service?
- Making a number of followers is a primary decision factor – making this mistake can cost you a lot, and you should do everything to avoid it. The number of followers can be an honest and good metric to estimate the possible reach, but in today’s world, where that number can be easily manipulated, it is extra important to take into consideration other factors too. The first step to avoid this is to check out the number of likes and comments on influencers’ posts to see the engagement level. The second step would be to rate the quality of that engagement and to see if it’s a real engagement or is filled with bots and spam. If influencers passed on that test and you want to collaborate, it’s good to ask to see metrics on some of their posts to see the reach and engagement rate, along with other metrics. You can also ask for metrics about the audience to see if that’s what you’re looking for.
- Not making it clear what you want from them – make sure they know what the goal of your campaign is, so their content aligns with your goals
- Not following the platform terms and conditions – it often happens that during the promotional events or collaborations, one or both parties don’t follow the platform guideline,s which can lead to fines. One common mistake is creating conditions for people to participate in giveaways on Facebook or Instagram. It is against the guidelines to tell people to share and tag friends in order to enter the competition. Make sure you always read the platform guidelines before you start your campaigns.
