In times where traditional advertising has received limited attention from consumers, influencer marketing has emerged as a proven strategy among marketers to drive performance.
Understanding Influencer Marketing:
Influencer marketing is a marketing tactic that focuses on utilizing key leaders or trendsetters to drive your brand’s message to a larger group of people or target audience. If planned and executed well, it works better than other forms of marketing.
The best part of it is that brands can market directly to a large group of consumers.
Wondering how? — It involves a brand engaging a famous face or individual with a sizable audience to positively reinforce a brand or purchase decision.
Influencer marketing is extensively popular on social platforms such as Instagram or Facebook because these platforms have lowered the barriers of acquiring large audiences. Celebrities, tastemakers, trendsetters, social media superstars, knowledge leaders, and other famous personalities have accumulated sizable networks of followers on these platforms. This has empowered marketers to leverage social media influencer marketing strategies to reach their target audiences with powerful messages.
Here are some popular and effective ways how Influencer Marketing can drive performance:
- Discount Codes and Affiliate Marketing: These collaborations are the easiest to track and evaluate. The results are relatively uncomplicated, genuine as web traffic or redemption rates from a particular campaign will be followed, monitored, and evaluated. If the campaign’s end goal is to drive leads into paying customers, the movement needs a solid and robust incentive for customers to convert and break brand loyalty. A great way to create a uniquely exclusive discount to encourage impulse buying. A unique discount code that ties to every collaborating influencer will help identify which influencer has the highest redemption rate.
- Competitions and Giveaways: These collaborations are great for brand awareness as competitions and giveaways usually generate more reach and social conversations. This influencer collaboration often requires the audience to tag their friends and follow the collaborating influencer or the brand sponsoring the campaign. This kind of marketing is ideal for increasing the social following of both parties organically.
- Social Media Mentions: While it is true that social media mentions or posts do not have the shelf life like that of sponsored blog posts, they have potential if executed correctly. This approach is typically suitable for product launches. For instance, they were collaborating Instagram influencers to get the first look at the new product and create hype before the official launch, making social noise and conversations around the development, just like Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Lip Kit or Rihanna’s beauty brand Fenty.
- Influencer takeover:Instead of featuring collaborating influencers on the brand’s social platforms, having them take over the media and post about the brand on your behalf is a great way to engage the audience. This way, a brand could engage with an influencer who speaks on their behalf and create fresh new content for their audiences.
- Share User-generated content: One of the most significant benefits of influencer marketing is having user-generated content shared in several ways. This creates an impression of regular people talking about the brand, and people trust other people more than they trust brands. Although it can be challenging to find content and images from people outside the brand, it can be a great success if done strategically.
- Amplify Testimonials from Influencers:Testimonials speak highly of brands, and every brand needs more testimonials on their website. It is difficult for brands to collect testimonials from customers or make them share their experiences. Using testimonials from celebrities can capture the whole story of them being associated with the brand and their views about it. Specifically, you can impart more social proof to your potential customers so they feel confident while purchasing or using the product.
Metrics to evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns:
– Click: CPC is a measurement of the exact amount paid by an advertiser. A business can measure cost Per Click by splitting a campaign’s overall cost by the overall count of the clicks on the ad for that particular campaign.
– Conversions or sales: A conversion happens when the activity is completed. It can be either a macro or a micro-conversion. A micro-conversion is any completed activity like email signup, while a macro conversion refers to a purchase transaction, which has been completed.
– Total site traffic: The metric performance measures the number of unique visitors that visit your website.
- Earned actions: An earned action refers to a user’s movement following the brand/campaign
advertisement. The actions can be likes, additional video views, and subscriptions. If you receive more activities, the users had developed a greater level of engagement.
Influencer marketing is snowballing and is absolutely here to stay. To utilize this powerful strategy for your brand, it is imperative that you plan properly to ensure that you have an effective influencer marketing campaign. Furthermore, it is important that you use the right tools and platforms for your campaigns to boost results and get better ROI on your campaigns.
Author Bio: Rachel Smith is a communication executive who works with the content marketing team at Affable, an influencer marketing company that provides AI-driven solutions that allows you to plan and execute your influencer campaigns strategically. She develops content around social media and marketing topics that can help her readers understand how to pick the right influencers, measure their impact, and run effective influencer campaigns. In her free time, she loves meeting new people and attending workshops on communication and psychology.
