Over the past few years, we have seen a real rise in Influencer Marketing. And, like any trend, there are those who are buying into it and those who think it is ineffective and a waste of money. So, the question is: is it worth it to invest in influencer marketing?
What is Influencer Marketing?
First of all, for those who don’t know, influencer marketing is when we hire someone that is considered a “person of influence” to advertise your products or services on social media and incentivize their audience to buy them.
Is it worth it to invest in influencer marketing?
The answer is it depends.
First of all, it depends on your business goals.
For example, if your goal is to increase sales, this can be a little hard to measure, unless you provide a promo code or an affiliate link to track purchases that come from the influencer advertisement. However, even this way is hard to track results because the influencer may not generate sales immediately, but can increase, for example, brand recognition.
So, creating an influencer marketing strategy to increase sales can be a little bittersweet because it’s hard to measure the results.
However, if your objective is to increase brand awareness and recognition then influencer marketing can be a good strategy.
A successful influencer marketing strategy also depends on the influencers you chose!
Firstly, you should understand that if you choose an influencer with thousands of followers, only a percentage of those followers will see the influencer’s posts about your product, an even smaller percentage will be interested in the product and, finally, just some of them will actually buy your product.
To optimize the results, you should carefully choose the influencers. The influencers should match your brand and values. More tips on this topic are below!
If you choose the right influencers, they will know how to best showcase your product, because they know their audience. So, remember: when you work with influencers, you should explain your goals and ideas, but also listen to their suggestions.
You should also ask yourself: is influencer marketing right for my brand?
Take into account the platforms used by influencers and the audience of those platforms. It is also important to consider if your business sector suits influencer marketing.
Finally, as with any other marketing strategy, influencer marketing will only be successful if you create a strategy aligned to your goals, have clear KPIs, and know your target audience. So, make sure you don’t forget these basic steps.
How to choose the right influencers?
Choosing the right influencers is key to a successful influencer marketing strategy!
Some important steps to choosing the right influencers:
- Analyze the influencer engagement rate! The number of engaged followers is more important than the total number of followers.
- Choose influencers that use their social media to talk about topics related to your products/services. This way, you assure that they are advertising a product to an audience that is interested in it.
- Choose influencers that post creative, relevant, and catchy content to assure that your product will be advertised in an appealing way.
- Monitor the influencers’ social media for some time before hiring them in order to better analyze their content and their audience behavior.
- If possible, privilege influencers that interact with or follow your business on social media.
BONUS: Tools to find influencers!
Need extra help finding influencers that match your brand? There are some tools that can help you with that:
> UpFluence: helps you recruit influencers, build and manage campaigns, and measure results in one place.
> Infludata: saves your time on influencer research and finds influencers that truly reach your target audience.
> SocialTalk: helps you find new Influencers to work with. It also has the option of managing your influencer database.
To sum up…
Influencer marketing can be a successful marketing strategy if you understand how influencer marketing can help your business and if you choose the right influencers according to your business.