Influencer Marketing is a marketing tactic that allows brands use celebrities and social media influencers to promote the organization’s products and services. Famous personalities such as Kylie Jenner, Selena Gomez, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Kim Kardashian West charge between $750,000 to $1.5 million to post a single update on behalf of the brands they promote. Organizations such as Pepsi, Microsoft, Marriott, British Airways, and others use influencer marketing extensively to create demand for their products and services.
If you’re interested in learning how to use Influencer Marketing for your brand, watch the video below which includes tips that you can put to use right away. (Or, if you’re in a hurry, you can read the transcript below the video.)
Transcript: My name is Jamie Turner and in this episode of IN:60, I’m going to talk to you about a new tool you can use to grow your sales and revenue.
So let’s get started with Influencer Marketing.
Today, I’m gonna talk about the number one mistake people make with Influencer Marketing, but let’s start off with some statistics that might be of interest to you.
A research study by Vamp found that 61% of those surveyed engage with an influencer on any given day. They also found that up at 87% of those surveyed bought a product or service based on influencer input.
The Vamp study is a strong indicator that Influencer Marketing works. The problem is if you’re trying to figure out how to get into Influencer Marketing you might be focusing on the wrong thing.
Here is what I mean –– a lot of marketers focus on the breath rather than the depth of an influencer’s engagement.
Breath is how many followers that influencer has. But that’s not what you should be focusing on –– what you should be focusing on is the depth of engagement that that influencer has with their audience.
The deeper the engagement goes, the more bang for the buck you’re going to get from the engagement.
So when choosing an influencer for your brand, focus on depth of engagement rather than breath.
Okay, if you like what you’ve heard so far I got more tips for you, so stick around and we’ll talk about the other Influencer Marketing tips you can use to grow your sales and revenues.
I’ve already given you tip number one, which was to focus on depth that rather than breath.
In order to understand if an influencer is engaged with their followers, you’ll have to use some of the online tools that are available to you.
A great tool you can use is called Social Blade. They help you track influencer engagement and also help you figure out how many followers that influencer has.
There are a lot of different analytics with Social Blade and they give you a neat little dashboard helps you understand whether or not that influencer would be a good fit for your brand.
Here’s an example of the dashboard for Kim Kardashian West below.
Other Influencer Marketing tools
You know I’m a big fan of Agorapulse. Not only do they sponsor IN:60 but I also use them on a daily basis in order to deployed my social media campaigns.
If you’re thinking about getting into the influencer marketing game, Agorapulse is a listening tool you can use to start following influencers and see if they’re a fit for your brand.
Just open up the Agorapulse dashboard and click the “listening” icon. Then, you can select the influencers you want to target and track to see if what they talk about on social media is a match for your brand.
Did you know that micro influencers achieve an average of seven times more engagement than influencers with large followings? That means that, on average, if your micro influencer is somebody with 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 followers they’ll be engage with your prospective customers seven times more frequently than the big influencers.
That can have a major impact on your business because if you engage with the micro influencers instead of spending a ton of money to engage with one of the big influencers, you’re going to get more bang for your buck.
Here’s another tip — If you have zero budget for an influencer marketing campaign, consider establishing an affiliate marketing relationship with them instead. That means that instead of paying them with money you’re paying them a slice of the action for every product that they help you sell.
Here’s why it might work out for you — first of all you don’t have to have a big budget in order to establish an affiliate relationship. Secondly, in an affiliate relationship that influencer then realizes that the more they promote your product or service the more money they get paid.
One more tip — instead of hiring an influencer with a lot of followers, hire an influencer with expertise in your industry.
Let’s say that you make tennis rackets. You have two choices. One is to hire an influencer with 1 million followers the other is to hire an influencer with 100,000 followers.
But the second influencer happens to be a tennis pro who’s going to be at Wimbledon next year. That gives them credibility with their followers.
On the other hand, the big million person influencer doesn’t even play tennis.
If you’re looking for a way to engage with your prospects and your customers in an authentic way, use the influencer who has expertise in your field since they can talk about things with a lot more credibility.
Include an offer in your influencer marketing campaigns so you can track the results
Influencer marketing campaigns usually are one of two kinds — the branding kind or the direct response kind.
Both are important. A branding campaign should be, say, 50% of what you do. The direct response-oriented campaign should be the other 50% and it should drive people through to your website so they can buy your product or service.
Both kinds of campaigns are important, but when you’re running the direct response-oriented campaign, be sure that you have an offer in it.
An offer should be to be something like “Get 10% off by clicking this link now” or “Free trial for 14 days.” The offer is what drives people to click the link, which is a tracking mechanism you can use to see if the campaign actually worked.
Influencer Marketing will peak, then drop, then plateau over the next few years
Influencer Marketing will continue to be used by marketers around the globe to grow their sales and revenue. You can expect a short-term dip in the use of Influencer Marketing by about 2022 or 2023. That’s what Gartner calls the Trough of Disillusionment and it’s a normal process in the cycle of new technologies.
But overall, Influencer Marketing is an effective way to generate buzz, increase brand awareness, and drive new prospects to your products or services.
What are your thoughts? How are you using Influencer Marketing? Feel free to share your insights below.
About the Author: Jamie Turner is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and CEO who has helped Coca-Cola, Verizon, Holiday Inn, AT&T and others grow their sales and revenues with innovative marketing and growth hacking techniques. He has been profiled in the world’s best-selling marketing textbook and has been written about in the Wall Street Journal, Inc., Forbes, Entrepreneur and Business Insider. Jamie can also be seen regularly on CNN and HLN where he contributes segments on business, leadership, and marketing. Jamie has recently launched a new YouTube series called IN:60 with Jamie Turner. You can find out more about having him speak at your next event by visiting JamieTurner.Live.
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