In early 2024, statistics showed that over 5.07 billion people use social media. That’s around 62.6% of the total global population.
If you are a marketer, you know what this means. Social media is a massive hub for potential customers. That’s where influencer marketing comes in.
Influencers are famous figures who command a huge following and influence their followers’ direction on specific issues – including purchases.
Since social media is the source of such individuals, using them to promote or endorse your products or services can increase your sales.
However, only some influencer marketing campaigns work. You must crack the best way to do things here.
That’s why we’ve compiled this comprehensive guide just for you. It explores, in detail, how to do influencer marketing and get the best ROI.
But before diving into how best to use it, let’s understand influencer marketing.
Table of Contents
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Just as the name suggests, influencer marketing is a type of marketing that leverages the popularity of specific individuals online to market products and services.
Since influencers have huge, social media followings, brands, and companies use them to push their offerings into the eyes of their target audience, starting with the influencer’s followers.
Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that involves businesses collaborating with people who have large and engaged online followings to promote their products or services.
The world is changing fast, and even traditional marketing tactics may need to be more effective. And with everyone going online, leveraging the power of the online audience has become the next big thing for brands and companies.
Consumer behavior is prone to being influenced by how others make their purchases. For instance, you might buy a product just because your friend or loved one bought it. That’s no different from influencer marketing; the latter works on a grander scale.
When an influencer uses or endorses a particular product, their followers trust and have confidence.
Also, if the product is unknown, its visibility grows as more people see it.
Typically, marketers use influencer marketing to create brand awareness, reach new audiences, drive more traffic, and, in the best scenario, increase sales.
Important Influencer Marketing Statistics
To understand how extensive and effective influencer marketing can be, here are some facts and statistics to digest:
- The global influencer marketing market size stood at $24 billion in 2024.
- According to MediaKix, around 80% of marketers deem influencer marketing effective.
- For each dollar that goes into influencer marketing, the business makes $5.20.
- According to 49.6% of influencers, followers focus more on authentic content.
- Around 70% of teens have more faith in social media influencers than other celebrities.
- According to the Morning Consult Influencer report, 56% of young Americans have bought a product because someone they follow recommended it.
These statistics show that, if used well, influencer marketing can be a great source of traffic for your brand and products.
Types of Influencers
Not all influencers are equal. Each has a different number of followers and influence. Also, their influence is in various niches, and they have diverse audience types.
Understanding the different types of influencers is paramount for achieving the best results when using influencer marketing. Here are the different types of influencers to consider for your marketing campaigns.
Nano Influencers
This breed of influencers is popular in a specific locality or community and has attained 1000 to 10,000 followers. If you want to promote your products or services to a particular neighborhood or community, these might be the best influencers to approach.
They usually comprise figures like government and community leaders, pastors, and local musicians. They might not be known beyond a particular locality, but they influence within it.
Nano influencers have a high level of engagement with their audience or followers, which makes them quite effective in convincing followers.
Micro-Influencers
Micro-influencers are relatively larger than nano-influencers in terms of followers. A micro-influencer is an individual boasting from 10,000 to 100,000 followers.
Generally, micro-influencers have yet to hit celebrity status. However, they greatly influence their following as they are mostly opinion leaders in specific subject matters.
They have carved their followings by creating content in a specific niche or topic. Most of them are industry experts on such issues.
While they may have a small number behind them, their followers engage extensively with the content. This means that their level of influence in marketing is relatively high.
Also, they are relatively cheaper to collaborate with than having a celebrity promote your brand.
Macro-Influencers
Any influencer with a following between 100,000 and 1000,000 is a macro influencer. These are usually social media-made celebrities and may include bloggers, social media stars, vloggers, and podcasters.
While they have massive followers, their relationship with the audience is also quite strong. This is because they mostly build their followers’ base over time, engaging them in content they like or find useful. That way, the ROI in using a macro influencer is still good.
However, as followers grow, engagement levels reduce. So, if you want more engagement, micro-influencers may be better than macro ones.
Mega-Influencers
Now comes the epitome of influencers – the celebrities or mega-influencers. These boast massive followers, surpassing 1 million.
Considering the vast audience they offer, using these kinds of influencers for your brand can have a significant effect.
However, as they are already rich and famous, your marketing budget should also be high.
The only disadvantage of using mega influencers is their broad and diverse audience. Therefore, they might not be the best option in promoting a niche-based product or brand.
But their influence comes in handy if your brand cuts across multiple or all segments. It would be worth giving them a try.
How to Do Influencer Marketing
After understanding influencer marketing and the various types of influencers, it is now an excellent time to learn how to do it effectively.
Check out these practical steps on how to optimize your influencer marketing campaigns.
Set Solid Campaign Goals
Setting solid campaign goals is the first step in getting the most out of your influencer marketing strategy. You must first know what you want to achieve, and then you can find ways to achieve those goals.
The truth is that different people and brands define success in various ways. What might seem like a failure to one person might look like success to another.
Nevertheless, there is a way to approach this for everyone—using the SMART goals approach. Your goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Working without goals is a remedy for failure. On the other hand, working with unrealistic goals that have no timeline can be more frustrating. Therefore, evaluate your brand, decide where you want to be, and see how influencer marketing can assist you.
Examples of goal parameters you can consider include:
- Increasing Brand Awareness: Brand awareness is crucial, as people must know about your brand before they can use your products or services. In other words, this is the initial step when introducing a product to the target audience.
- Traffic: Increased web traffic is an excellent measure of your content marketing effectiveness. The more traffic your website attracts, the higher the possibility of converting visitors to buying customers.
- Conversions: Sales is the ultimate goal for any business. So, if your target is direct sales, include coupons or discount codes during the campaigns.
- Attract New Customers: You might also set your goals to acquire a certain number of new customers or users through your campaign. This helps increase your brand’s reach and grow your business.
- Generate High-Quality Leads: The business needs new high-quality leads that can turn into actual sales. Therefore, your influencer marketing goal could also focus on leads.
- Establishing Industry Authority: Influencer marketing can also help you establish authority in your industry. When more people trust what you offer, your brand will have more authority in that industry. People will see you as the market leader in your specific niche.
But in all these goals, ensure that you include measurable parameters. Be specific with your goals.
Have a Target Audience
You must know whom to target with your influencer marketing campaigns. This will save you resources that yield minimal or no results.
Influencer marketing, like any other type of marketing, will only be effective if directed to the right audience. It’s crucial to first define your target audience before going any further.
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If you go in unthinkingly, you might reach a vast audience, but one that doesn’t need or relate to your brand. This means that your marketing campaign will have a minimal effect. It’s like using many resources to market a product to people who don’t or rarely use it.
So, how do you define your target market?
A target audience is a group of people or consumers with similar behavioral or demographic patterns. For instance, a target audience can be defined in terms of:
- Demographics: Age, education, gender, income, employment, and marital status
- Habits and Behaviors: Living habits, purchase intentions, interactions and engagement
- Geographics: Country, state, local business, international targeting
- Psychographics: Personality types, hobbies, core values, lifestyle choices, professional interests, etc.
- Niche Audience: A smaller audience of individuals with specific needs and interests.
Such information helps you better understand customers’ behavior and what influences their purchase decisions.
Defining your target audience based on these parameters enables you to reach the right people with your marketing efforts.
Some examples of defining a target audience include:
- Gender: Female audience for gym shoes
- Age: 25-35 years
- Education level: Graduates only
- Income levels: Earning more than $50,000 yearly
- Location: Texas residents
You can narrow down and be as specific as possible with a target audience. The smaller the niche, the more effective your targeted messages will be.
Define your Message or Campaign Content
After defining your goals and target audience, you must also decide the type of message to deliver. This comes even before determining the type of influencers to collaborate with.
Your goals and the target audience will highly influence your message. For example, you could tailor your campaign message based on the following factors:
- Is it a new product you wish to launch?
- Do you want to create more brand awareness?
- Are you highlighting new features on a product?
- Are you looking to increase sales of a particular product or service?
It shows that the purpose of the influencer marketing campaign determines the kind of message to create. In other words, the message should align with your goals.
Create a campaign brief outlining your goals and what the influencer should help you achieve.
Come Up with a Budget
Any marketing plan should have a budget. And in influencer marketing, this should be the same.
A marketing campaign budget helps you determine what kind of influencer you can afford and what activities to undertake.
For instance, besides paying the influencer, you might need more goodies to entice the audience throughout the campaign. All that will cost you money.
Only start looking for influencers with a budget first. It guides you on the way forward.
Some key questions to ask yourself when setting a budget include:
- What is the goal?
- What type of influencer do you need?
- How many influencers do you want to collaborate with?
- Where do you find your target audience?
- Do you want to reach or engage with the target audience?
- How do influencers charge?
It would help if you also remember that influencers on different platforms charge differently.
For example, influencers on Facebook usually charge $25 for 1,000 followers. In contrast, YouTube charges $20 for every 1000 followers.
Having these figures helps you decide which platform works best for your brand based on the budget and your audience.
Typically, prices charged by different influencers depend on factors like:
- Platform used
- Number of followers (influencer type)
- Content type
- Type of product or service
- Duration of the campaign
- Point-of-contact (influencer or agent)
- Exclusivity
Based on all these factors, the price may range from $100 to around $1 million a post. Therefore, take your time to consider all these factors in the budget.
Understand the Rules of Collaboration
First, you must understand the guiding rules of influencer marketing. These should help you avoid legal repercussions.
In the US, the rules are set by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). This body takes disclosures in such collaborations quite seriously.
Therefore, it’s prudent that you set some disclosure guidelines in your influencer agreements.
For example, the FTC requires the influencers to identify sponsored posts. And while these influencers might not do so, or they do it subtly, the law requires them to.
The CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) investigates such scenarios in a country like the UK.
In one instance, it investigated hidden or concealed advertising on Instagram and compelled Facebook (the parent company) to make changes that simplified and clarified disclosures.
Different countries or regions have varying rules for disclosures. Therefore, before signing the influencer agreement, ensure you’ve researched and understood your area’s laws.
Identify and Reach out to the Ideal Influencer for your Brand
You are now ready to look for and contact the ideal influencer for your campaign. This is another hurdle you must cross before the campaign can kick off.
You can work with macro, micro, nano, or even mega influencers.
Each option has benefits and drawbacks and will be ideal in certain situations. You will decide which one works best for your brand or products.
The choice of an influencer for your marketing campaign will depend on several factors, such as:
- Budget
- Purpose of the influencer marketing campaign
- Type of target audience
- Platform used
- Influencer followers’ demographics
- Engagement rates
- Content quality
Having considered all that, where now do you find these influencers? Identifying the right influencer for your marketing campaign can be challenging if you need help knowing where to look. If you do, the process can be pretty straightforward.
You can start by analyzing your competitors. Which influencers are they using? This can help narrow your search.
Better still, you can use influencer research tools. That’s right. These tools help you analyze and identify the right influencer for your brand’s marketing campaigns. Some of the most effective tools here include:
- Influencer Analytics
- BuzzSumo
- Upfluence
These tools allow you to evaluate influencers based on the channels they are most active in. You’ll also be able to see data on various influencer’s metrics. This way, you always make a well-informed choice.
Pick several influencers based on your needs or marketing goals, then compare them against each other. From here, you can pick the best fit for your brand. The Social Media Tool Kit will be a great place to conduct your comparison.
Monitor the Performance of your Campaign
Remember to track performance. Monitor the campaign’s progress once everything is in order and your influencer marketing has started. This is the first step in identifying whether the campaign achieves its target goals.
Tracking the influencer’s effectiveness will depend on your set goals. For instance, if your goal is to drive more traffic to your website, you should be able to measure or see how much traffic the influencer drives to your site.
If it’s sales, you should also be able to substantiate the number of sales resulting from the campaign. Otherwise, the sheer number of followers liking or commenting on the influencer’s posts might give you false signs of success. You can use Google Analytics to measure the traffic driven to your site by the influencers’ activities.
Should You Invest in Influencer Marketing?
Considering that influencer marketing is costly and straightforward, is it worth it? Should you consider it for your marketing campaign?
Well, the simple answer is that influencer marketing is more than worth it, especially when done right! The main reasons you should consider influencer marketing include:
- Reduced effectiveness of traditional marketing: The increased number of consumers using social media has seen a surge in influencer marketing. People are quick to trust influencers over conventional advertising. Consumers can easily engage with influencers’ posts, giving advertising an entirely new feeling. This causes a shift from traditional marketing to new trends like influencer marketing.
- A new breed of consumers that trust influencers more: The younger generation, mainly in social media, trusts influencers more than traditional celebrities or others trying to endorse products. And since marketers look at conversions, influencer marketing has become the go-to option.
- Targeted campaigns: Influencers make targeted marketing easier. There are influencers in every niche, meaning you can leverage their following to reach your specific niche.
- Great way to reach a new audience: With their huge followings, influencers give your brand an excellent chance of reaching a new audience, which can lead to new sales opportunities.
- Dedication: The influencers want repeat business and good reviews, so they will work hard to ensure the campaign’s success. This is an advantage, as you don’t need to monitor their activities.
- It’s possible to measure ROI: While it might not seem like it, the return on investment in influencer marketing campaigns can be measured. This lets you know if your efforts are paying off or consuming company resources.
Top Influencer Marketing Tools
These tools help you identify the best influencers, contact them, and enter into deals with them. They help automate marketing tasks and streamline processes to ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign.
Having the right influencer marketing tools enables you to:
- Identify and link with the right influencers.
- Easily analyze competition
- Identify top trends
- Make data-based decisions
Some of the top influencer marketing tools include:
Influence by Brandwatch
This influencer marketing tool allows you to manage all your influencer marketing activities under a single platform. You can discover, manage, and maintain your influencer relationships seamlessly here.
With a capacity to track over 30 million creators, Brandwatch ensures you have the most prominent hub to source the best talent. It allows you to filter the best creators from the 30 million based on niche, interests, credibility, brand affinities, and more.
This way, you’re exposed to one of the largest collections of influencers and can pick the one that best suits your marketing needs.
Its robust marketing management and reporting features help offer real-time reports while tracking deliverables to ensure that influencers meet the set goals. It works best with multiple channels, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, and Shopify.
Upfluence
Another great tool to consider for your influencer marketing campaigns is Upfluence. This tool allows marketers to search and discover influencers and manage marketing campaigns on the top social media platforms.
Upfluence boasts an influencer database of over 2.7 million creators in over 250 niches and industries.
The tool uses over 20 qualitative and quantitative filters to help you quickly identify the best influencer for your business.
The main features of the Upfluence tool include:
- Influencer search and discovery
- Campaign management
- Team collaboration tools
- Relationship management
- Third-party analytics
- Campaign reporting
- Automated recruiting
- E-commerce tools
- Audience analysis
- Social listening
It works best in channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok, as well as Blogs and Pinterest.
Impact.com
If you’re looking for a tool trusted by some of the industry’s big names, Impact.com is an excellent choice. Brands like Walmart, Lenovo, and Uber know how effective this tool is in influencer marketing.
Impact.com comes packed with valuable features for your influencer marketing campaigns, such as:
- Search and Discovery
- Relationship Management
- Automated Recruiting
- Content Amplification
- Team Collaboration Tools
- Campaign Management
- E-commerce Tools
- Influencer Analysis
- Content Library
- Campaign Reporting, etc.
The platform is ideal for brands of all sizes and agencies.
Traackr
With Traackr, you can get the most detailed insights into influencers’ followers’ demographics, behavior, and interests. It lets you promptly gauge which influencers best fit your brand’s marketing goals.
The platform’s discovery tool also allows you to identify influencers who actively engage in relevant social media trends, topics, and conversations. Thus, you can easily pick an influencer already active in or engaging with your desired niche.
The top features on Traackr include:
- Search and Discovery
- Relationship Management
- Audience Insights
- Campaign Management
Influence
Influencity is different from your everyday influencer marketing tool. It is a comprehensive hub that enables you to seamlessly discover, analyze, and organize creators for your influencer marketing campaigns. With it, managing campaigns, setting up workflows and forecasts, and measuring campaign results become easy tasks.
This platform boasts of having big names like Samsung, IPG, Airfrance, and OMG use their influencer marketing tools. And if you are wondering what kind of features it offers, here is a peek at the list:
- Influencer discovery
- Influencer relationship management.
- Campaign manager
- Campaign reports
With Influencity, discovering ideal influencers, optimizing campaigns, and monitoring performance is as easy as tapping your fingers. This helps to increase your brand’s impact and grow sales.
Benefits of Using Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing can benefit your brand or company in several ways. Here are the main ones:
High ROI
Return on investment is the best measure of a marketing campaign’s effectiveness. Influencer marketing offers just that.
A study conducted on over 1,400 marketers revealed that one in four marketers picked influencer marketing as the marketing trend with the second highest ROI.
A high ROI is a clear indicator that your investment is well-spent. So, if this has been on your list of potential marketing strategies, you don’t need to fear wasting resources.
All you need to do is follow the above steps for the most successful campaign.
The Gen Z Population Trust Influencers More
If your target audience comprises people born between 1997 and 2012, you should use influencer marketing.
As this age group is popularly called, Gen Z trusts social media influencers more.
As such, reaching and influencing them through influencer marketing will be easier than traditional advertising channels.
This type of audience is influenced even more by influencers than by family or friends.
They Offer Social Proof for your Brand
Influencer marketing is among the most popular trends. It offers quality and authentic content that gives your product or brand much-needed social proof.
Social proof increases brand awareness and helps build trust among your target audience.
With increased brand awareness and trust comes more sales and revenue for the company, which is what most businesses want.
It Inspires Purchases
Studies show that around 33% of Gen Zs have once bought a product recommended by an influencer in the past three months. That shows influencer marketing can quickly drive sales into your business if done right.
However, you must define your target audience’s parameters well to achieve the best results. As mentioned earlier, influencer marketing is quite effective when dealing with niche markets.
Helps to Crack New Markets
Influencers have massive followings. As such, this might be the way to go if you want to launch a product or help a brand reach a new audience.
If your offering overlaps with your influencers’ niche, it will be easy to get their followers to like or start using your product or service.
All that’s needed is the right content, and voila, your offering will start getting impressions from new customers and markets.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is an effective campaign option that can benefit you in many ways. Whether you want to increase your brand awareness, drive more traffic to your website, or grow your sales volume, it is a great option.
However, you must pick the right influencer, define realistic goals, use the best influencer tools, create the right content, and monitor your campaigns. Only through this can you enjoy the full benefits of an influencer marketing campaign.
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