Raji RidwanWith the rise of platforms like TikTok, influencer marketing is no doubt the next big thing. Everyone wants to become an influencer these days, and your brand can take advantage of these influencers to get your business out to the wider world.
But in an age of declining attention spans, how do you get influencer marketing to work for you. Granted, influencer marketing isn’t for everyone, but if you’re reading this article, the chances are high that it’s exactly for you.
In this article, I’ll take you through a deep dive into what influencer marketing means and how it can benefit your business. Then, you’ll learn how you can take advantage of a good influencer marketing strategy to ensure that your brand gets as much exposure as it deserves.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a process in which an influencer gets compensated to promote or endorse the products of a specific brand. The compensation usually comes in cash packages, free supplies of the product, and/or discounts off some or all of the brand’s products.
Influencer marketing happens almost exclusively on social media since that’s the only place where all influencers gather. At the moment, Instagram is the most popular channel for influencer marketing, with a reported 67% of surveyed brands claiming to have used it.
In addition to Instagram, there are many other social media platforms where you can find influencers to promote your brand. Some popular and growing platforms include YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, and blogs.
In the appropriate influencer marketing strategy, a brand partner with an influencer that focuses on a particular niche. The niche of the influencer usually matches the product category of the brand trying to use influencers as part of their marketing strategy.
The whole point of influencer marketing is to get someone closer to the potential customers to recommend your products to them. Since they watch their favorite creators every day, they have a personal bond with the creators, which is what a brand takes advantage of to make its products or services more appealing to the fans of the influencer.
Types of Influencer Marketing
There are several types of influencers, depending on the standard you’re using to analyze them. The most common identifier for influencers in the marketing world is the size of their audience, creating four common types of influencers.
- 1. Nano
Nano influencers aren’t influencers in the general sense; they’re everyday people with a few thousand followers on Instagram or TikTok. If there’s anyone who appears to be interested in your product, with anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, they qualify as a nano influencer.
One reason why you may want to use nano influencers is the level of trust they’ve built with their audience. Nano influencers build relationships on a personal level, making it easier for them to influence someone to patronize your brand. - 2. Micro
Micro-influencers are a bit more popular than nano influencers, but not quite in the celebrity zone yet. They usually have around 10,000 and 100,000 followers and they have a lot in common with nano influencers. Every serious influencer marketing strategy should have a place for this category of influencers. - 3. Macro
Macro influencers are those popular content creators that are a step away from being full-blown celebs. They have more than 100,000 followers, with most having up to 500,000 followers or even more. When you interface with macro-influencers, you’ll notice they already have a streamlined system for working with brands, making the process easier. - 4. Mega
Mega influencers are your typical Instagram and TikTok celebrities with millions of followers. You should qualify as a mega-influencer as soon as you have over a million followers with a focus on a particular niche.
Mega-influencers get you the most reach, but engagement rates are typically low because they don’t keep a personal relationship with their audience; how do you even keep a personal relationship with 6 million people?
Advantages of Influencer Marketing
There are many reasons you want to include influencer marketing as a dedicated part of your marketing budget. Unlike what most marketers think, influencer marketing isn’t the same as affiliate marketing or social media marketing, although, there might be overlaps.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why your brand needs a dedicated influencer marketing budget for more reach.
1. Builds authority and trust
When an influencer recommends a product to their audience, it instantly creates an idea of authority for the product. Influencers are known for using some of the best products on the market, and if they can recommend yours, it means you meet a specific performance threshold.
Of course, this benefit only applies when you use influencers that set a standard for the brands they promote. If an influencer has a history of promoting subpar products for the monetary benefits or hosting fake giveaways, their recommendations will do more hurt than help your business.
2. Increases reach
The most evident advantage of influencer marketing is the instant increase in the reach of your product. Since they typically have hundreds of thousands of views on their content, promoting your product will get them to thousands of people when you use the right influencer marketing strategy.
With the increase in the use of adblockers, it’s slowly becoming more beneficial to promote your products directly with influencers rather than use an advertising network like Google Ads. You should also note that the reach automatically trusts your product since they’re hearing about it from a source they trust.
3. Generates leads
When your product reaches more people, they’ll always keep your brand in mind whenever they need your product or service. That makes it easier for them to simply reach out to you when they need any of your offerings, generating leads that may become a customer in the long run.
4. Creates useful partnerships
Having an influencer endorse your product is a great way to start creating crucial partnerships in your industry. Outside of the business sphere, your brand can work together with your network of influencers to create impactful messages that will cater to your potential audience, making it a win-win situation for everyone involved.
How to Become a Pro TikTok Influencer
When it comes to becoming an influencer, TikTok is probably the best platform for video creators in 2022. With how it’s designed, you don’t need a sophisticated camera to make videos; your smartphone alone is sufficient.
However, becoming a TikTok influencer isn’t as easy as getting a mobile phone and downloading TikTok. You must also be willing to put in the effort that’s required to attract the huge audience required for TikTok success. Consistency is also required to retain your followers and attract huge brands.
If you’re looking to become an influencer on TikTok, the first step is choosing a niche. Your niche is your category of interest, and every video you make should revolve around that specific niche. Doing this makes it easier for related brands to identify you with the niche, offering you endorsement offers.
Then, you’ll have to populate your account with videos that will attract people interested in your desired niche. Posting football highlights on a fashion TikTok will undoubtedly attract football fans, most of which aren’t interested in fashion, and that’s a turn-off for brands.
When you start creating useful content for TikTok consistently, you’ll start reaching even more people, gaining more followers in the process. With the increase in your follower counts, you should fall into one of the types of influencers, which will encourage brands to reach out to you.
Influencer Marketing Tips for Brands
While a lot of brands are jumping on the influencer marketing bandwagon, it’s pretty evident that they’re not doing it the wrong way. Some brands simply get the most popular influencers to promote their products, regardless of their niche or area of interest, which is a very smart way to lose money.
If you’re not interested in losing money smartly, you may want to implement some of the most effective influencer marketing strategy tips and tricks for businesses. Here you go.
1. Finding Influencers
When diving into the murky oceans of influencer marketing, the first thing you want to learn is how to find the best influencers for your niche. It’s clear at this point that not all influencers will work for you since you need someone that caters to your niche.
That’s about half the story. The other half is that you should try focusing on micro-influencers for influencer marketing unless you have a humongous budget to spend on influencers. Even with a huge budget, you’ll still need to create a balance between micro-influencers and mega-influencers.
The reason why micro-influencers are so important to the average influencer marketing strategy is how well they can influence their followers. They usually build relationships on a personal level, leading to a higher engagement rate than you’ll ever hope to get with celebs.
When trying to find influencers for your brand’s marketing, it’s recommended to go with people in the nano-influencer or micro-influencer category. Not only will you have to pay less, but you get a higher engagement rate per capita, compared to what you get with a mega-influencer for example.
2. Set Clear Goals
Before paying influencers to voice messages about your brand, it’s crucial to sit down and have a deep think about what you want from it. While the ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to get more sales, that’s too vague for influencer marketing specifically.
For the vast majority, the primary goal of using influencers is getting more people to know about the brand. If they know about it, it becomes an option when they need to buy the product you sell or use the service you offer. That sounds like an interesting goal, at least for a start.
Setting goals makes it easier for you to evaluate your progress and determine if your influencer marketing strategy is working for you.
3. Get Your Potential Customers Involved
A big mistake many brands make when it comes to influencer marketing is thinking it’s only a partnership between them and the influencer in question. To be clear, the ultimate goal is to be more accessible to your potential customers, who in this case, are the influencer’s audience.
Instead of spending your entire budget on reaching out to new influencers and giving them free samples of your product, why not involve the potential customers too? Staging a giveaway in partnership with an influencer is a common way brands get the audience involved, and it doesn’t sound like a terrible idea.
4. Offer Value
How many times have you watched promotional content only to say to yourself: “this sucks!” I mean, there’s a reason why so many people install Adblockers in their browsers to get away from brands trying to market to them.
If you want your influencer marketing strategy to be of any value, do not be that boring brand. Instead of having the influencer read out a boring script about how amazing your product or service is, why not make the content a bit fun and engaging, like hosting a giveaway?
The goal is for the audience to find your promotions fun and engaging. With a little help from the influencer themselves, you should be able to do this, creating a positive image before those that matter.
FAQs
- What type of marketing strategy is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is closely related to social media marketing, making it primarily a social media marketing strategy. However, it’s more complicated than regular SMM, since influencers can also appear on TV and in print to promote your product. - How do you develop an influencer marketing strategy?
Influencer marketing is a bit less complicated than other forms of marketing. Your influencer marketing strategy should focus on the kind of content you want the influencer to use in promoting your product. Reaching out to influencers and negotiating terms are also important aspects of influencer marketing.
Conclusion
If you’re running a business in 2022, not having an influencer marketing strategy would be unforgivable. But even if you do, there are certain tips and tricks to help ensure you’re making the most out of your marketing budget.
This article lists some tips and tricks for an effective influencer marketing strategy. In addition to that, you also learn the benefits of this marketing technique, the types, and how to become an influencer on TikTok yourself.
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Erica Ofure
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Raji Ridwan
Techibytes Editor
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