The importance of social media has increased over the past decade. The number of people actively using social media exceeds 4.59 million. Influencers in social media are often looked up to by these people to guide their decisions. Working with the right influencer will result in sales for your business. In addition to fashion and gaming, influencer marketing is used in many other fields as well. Choosing the right influencer for your niche and demographic may require extensive research.
Who would you call a social media influencer?
As an influencer on social media, you have to be familiar with the fact that you have built an outstanding reputation for your knowledge and expertise on a particular subject matter. In addition to posting regularly about that topic on their preferred social media platforms, they generate a large following of passionate, engaged people who keep an eye out for their opinions. As a result of social media influencers, brands are able to create trends as well as encourage their followers to buy the products they are promoting.
Importance of a social media influencer
Make your brand more visible
For a target audience, which is often bombarded by tons of commercial advertisements every day, influencer marketing makes advertising activities more engaging and genuine. When such people recommend your products or services or mention your brands, influencer marketing helps you gain more visibility, which not only increases your brand awareness but also expands your scope.
Establish credibility and trust
As experts in their fields, influencers have considerable influence on their followers, which is why they trust them. Their fans are inspired and respected by their relationship. In this way, people believe what they say and what they recommend. People will be more open to your brand if you follow these recommendations, meaning that your influencer marketing campaign won’t feel like advertising anymore.
Enhance your content strategy
Before working with influencers, the content distribution must be thoroughly understood and carefully considered. The content distribution strategy should include details that let your company and influencers know what your brand is trying to accomplish, even if you don’t have any new ideas.
Partners for long-term success
In addition to saving time, resources, and money, a lasting influencer partnership establishes credibility and has a bigger impact on the company’s audience. The collaboration is a win-win situation since both sides are invested in the outcome. Influencer marketing can be profitable immediately as long as you partner with an influencer who appeals to the same market as yours. Your campaigns benefit from long-lasting brand awareness, which re-explores your content over and over again as a result of shares, reposts, and retweets.
Boost SEO, ROI, and bottom line
Your search engine optimization benefits from influencer marketing, both directly and indirectly. Your brand will rank higher in Google search results if you create more and more content through influencer marketing. Getting more visibility through influencer marketing enables small businesses to scale up by attracting more customers, providing a higher ROI than other marketing channels. Influencer marketing campaigns that focus on branding or engagements produce eight times more ROI. Influencer marketing delivers a very high ROI and bottom line based on actual business results, as its profit exceeds its costs.
Drive purchase decisions
Consumers make purchase decisions based on the influence of influencers. Brands receive a more positive reception when people respect and trust their favorite influencers. The influencer effect can affect a customer’s purchase decision at every level, according to numerous studies. 49% of respondents reported making purchases based on influencer referrals, according to DMI Blog statistics.
Increase sales
Consumers’ purchase decisions are significantly influenced by influencers, as discussed above. A whopping 40% of survey respondents said they bought something after seeing their favorite influencer use it. It is exceptionally feasible for businesses to create, manage, and deliver messages to the audience via influencers in order to generate a massive increase in sales due to the impact of influencers.
Cost-effective & Saves Time
Advertising through influencers is relatively inexpensive compared to other kinds of advertising. Influencers are generally more expensive based on their audience size and niche. With influencer marketing, brands can compete on social media sites such as YouTube and Instagram with a more efficient and optimized strategy. In addition to earning huge ROIs, influencer marketing boosts sales and saves you money, as mentioned earlier. By reposting or repurposing influencer-generated content for marketing campaigns, companies can also increase their brand awareness. It may be possible to save money and time by using this capability. Using creators as part of the content production process has saved 41% of advertisers’ money.
Unlimited Sharing Potential On Social Platforms
The fact that influencers interact with their fans almost every day makes them proficient at engaging with your brand and products or services, as well as your target audience. Almost all social channels are used by influencers, and most of their audience is loyal and trusts them. With multi-channel audiences, influencers’ content spreads rapidly, allowing brands to communicate their stories and messages to a wide range of audiences. The brand’s message will reach a wider audience thanks to the viral potential of collaborating with well-known celebrities on popular sites. Brand recognition, ROI, and continuous attention can all be achieved through shareable content.
Suitable for any Business
A typical influencer specializes in a particular field, such as health, fitness, traveling, cuisine, beauty, business, technology, science, etc. It doesn’t matter how big your company is or what industry you’re in, there’s always room for everyone if you find the influencers who are right for your business. Various influencer marketing strategies can be used to communicate and collaborate with influencers efficiently.
Types of social media influencers
Nano influencers (1K – 10K followers)
The nano influencer typically has between 1k and 10k followers on social media platforms. In order to determine the influencer’s relationship with their followers, look at the likes and comments section.
Micro-influencers (10K-100K followers)
At this level, influencers are still considered relatable and genuine even though they have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. Generally, they have a reasonable engagement rate and a more targeted audience since they have moved into a niche.
Macro influencers (100K – 1M followers):
It is common for social media celebrities to be macro-influencers with 100k to 1 million followers. It’s important to note, however, that their engagement rates may be lower than micro and nano influencers since they appeal to a broader audience.
Mega influencer (1M+ followers)
Elite influencers and creators provide influencer marketing on a higher level. Depending on the celebrity, engagement rates are usually reasonable for the number of followers. These individuals have over a million followers, but they target a broader audience.
Selecting your social media influencer
It is important that the types of influencers you choose reflect your brand values. Finding the right influencer, however, requires an analysis of your brand campaign.
When you run a campaign, you may have several objectives. The goals may include the creation of content, the downloading of apps, the registration of users, the promotion of brand awareness, the increase in followers or engagement, or the subscription to a newsletter. The influencer-hunting process begins with these goals in mind. In order to increase awareness of your beauty brand, for instance, you will look for someone who is vocal about make-up products rather than someone who lip-syncs.
Getting your brand in front of a new audience is easy when you work with social media influencers. With the right influencer marketing campaign, you can increase your social media following, increase awareness, and increase conversions, such as sign-ups or sales. Instead of waiting for organic growth to occur, it speeds up the process. That is why it is crucial to choose the right influencers for your campaign. Choosing someone based on their follower count won’t guarantee success. The following seven factors will help you choose the right influencer.
- Audience: When you search for influencers, you may come across some who have fake followers or engagement. To determine whether they do, it’s important to keep your eyes peeled for abnormalities.
- Despite the influencers’ low content quality, their following is large.
- Influencers publish very little content, but they get a lot of engagement.
- In relation to their number of followers, they have a very high or low engagement rate.
- Follower to following ratio may be caused by ‘follow-for-follow’ or ‘follow-unfollow’ tactics, where influencers follow more people than they follow.
- A large sample of influencers’ followers have traits like little to no content, no profile photos, strange usernames, anonymous profiles, suspicious follower-to-following ratios, copied bios, and stock photos for their profile photos.
- New Instagram profiles have large followings, but influencers haven’t posted yet.
- A sudden and irregular pattern of follower growth can be seen on influencers’ Instagram profiles. They may suddenly display large growth bursts and then experience large fall-offs in the number of followers.
- They receive a large number of spammy, generic, and repetitive comments on their posts.
- Immediately following their publication of content, influencers’ posts quickly get a huge amount of likes.
- As a percentage of their followers, influencers’ videos get few views. Although influencers’ Instagram profiles may appear abnormal, this doesn’t necessarily mean the creator is fake. It is important to examine their Instagram profiles in their entirety and in the correct context. For example, profiles that show follower bursts over a short period of time may be due to them being featured on the Instagram Discover Page, rather than them buying fake followers.
- Reach: Choosing an influencer shouldn’t be based on follower count alone. You should consider average post reach and impressions together with brand awareness and sales to determine how many people will be exposed to your brand. People with smaller followings shouldn’t be written off. You may be able to reach an engaged audience with the help of up-and-coming influencers.
- Values: It’s important to be careful who aligns with your brand. Influencers represent your brand in marketing campaigns. Therefore, you may want to avoid influencers who openly express controversial opinions or don’t share your brand values. Before contacting an influencer with a campaign opportunity, we recommend familiarising yourself with their past content and public reputation.
- Engagement Rate: Having thousands of followers doesn’t mean much if that audience isn’t engaging with the influencer’s posts.If you see a social influencer that you’d potentially like to work with, scroll through their posts and check out their comments section. How many genuine comments do they receive on each post? Are the comments section pretty barren or spammy? Also, consider whether the influencer is taking time to respond to comments. That’s a good sign that the influencer prioritizes community engagement, which will bode well for a potential marketing campaign.
- Frequency: Influencers who post frequently and advertise sponsored content are also something to watch out for. Your campaign might get lost in the shuffle or be seen as just another quick paycheck by the influencer’s audience if you scroll through the feed and see the majority of posts are sponsored. Instead, you should hire someone who specializes in creating organic content and is selective about which brands he or she promotes. A campaign’s success depends on the influencer’s audience taking you seriously. The best influencers utilize sponsored posts in conjunction with their regular content. Influencers with a full account of sponsored posts may have their credibility questioned.
- Relevance: In order to promote your product or service, your social media influencer’s posts should be related to your product or service. For example, if you’re promoting a fashion accessory, the influencer you choose should have fashion elements in his or her social media feed. When you’re checking out influencer profiles on Instagram, your products or services should be able to be advertised on their Instagram profiles. Collaborating with influencers who are a good fit for your brand is important. An Instagram account of a food & drink influencer would not look appropriate for ads for a real estate company. When you collaborate with influencers with profiles that are a good fit for your brand, your sponsored posts will resonate with their audience. They will have an audience that is interested in your products or services.
- Content Quality: Due to the fact that influencer content is usually created by industry experts, including subject matter experts and influencers, you clicked on the influencer’s content first. A lot of people look forward to the opinions of influencers because they share their expertise so transparently. In order to reach a broader audience with credibility and social followings, marketers hire influencers. It doesn’t matter how small your following is, if you know how to engage people through your craft, you can still make an impact. In order to create an impactful marketing campaign, you need to work with an influencer you know will create high quality content. The quality of their images, videos, copywriting, metadata, and overall enthusiasm for working with you is awesome..
- Hashtags: In no uncertain terms, hashtags will assist you in finding influencers. You can make a better influencer marketing plan if you keep track of what hashtags influencers use. By tracking hashtags, you can get a sense of what influencers want to talk about. When you contact your chosen influencers, you’ll know exactly what to offer them in order to get them to work with you. Additionally, you can get insight into what hashtags are popular in your sector by looking at the influencer’s tactics. Hashtags can also provide competitive data. Simply looking at the hashtags they use in their posts can reveal whether influencers are working with your competition. Using hashtags to locate influencers to work with requires some forethought and planning. There are some hashtags you might be able to use.
- Online Databases: In addition to the influencer marketing databases, there are also influencer marketing platforms available that can simplify the process of researching influencers. Examples of these platforms are Qoruz, Upfluence, HypeAuditor, Storyclash, and others. Influencer marketing platforms, like 6th Street, connect brands with influencers and provide end-to-end services for content generation.
- From script writing to post-production, 6th Street Artist can take care of your brand’s needs. With over 100 influencers, the platform serves a wide range of categories.