The Basics of Influencer Marketing
MYN Group is a worldwide digital innovative agency that works closely with a brand to evaluate where we want to place influencers in the customer journey. Part of this work involves influencer marketing, which is considered one of most lucrative methods of marketing, especially as social media becomes more widespread. If you want to learn about creating a successful influencer marketing campaign, please click here.
What is an influencer? An influencer is an online content creator who posts on a social platform (like Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, TikTok, or others) and has a substantial following. Influencer marketing is when a brand collaborates with a creator to market a product or service. It usually involves a positive review and images or videos of the product. Creators will also link the brand’s website, typically including an affiliate link where the brand keeps track of how many followers were channeled through the influencer. Affiliate links sometimes contain discount codes (though not always).
Influencer media is a new method of buying independent media because of social media’s youth relative to other media. It is yet to be refined in the advertising world, which means it has numerous challenges.
The Challenges of Influencer Marketing
Though worthwhile, marketing in the influencer industry can be difficult. Seeking out influencers for collaborations is hard. You have to identify creators whose profiles are centered around what you are looking for (for example, if your company wants a fashion-based campaign, you would search for influencers who post about fashion). These creators are important to identify because their following is interested in, and thus more likely to buy products from that industry. Choosing an influencer whose niche is dissimilar to your product will be detrimental to your campaign’s success.
Gauging an influencer’s real audience with KPIs (key performance indicators) can also be difficult. One KPI is Reach, or the total number of people who have seen an influencer’s content, either as follows or as people who have been recommended content through the platform’s algorithm. The number of times the content was on a screen, or Impressions, is another base audience metric. If a unique user sees a post four times, that would count as four impressions. Engagement (how much people like, comment, etc on a post) is another KPI. ER Rate (Engagement rate by Impressions) is often used to measure an audience.
Why You Should Use Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is successful because it combines the old idea of a “celebrity” endorsement with the new medium of a digital landscape. People look at influencers as their friends and trust them. 63% of consumers say they trust what influencers say about a brand more than the brand’s advertisements. What’s more, influencers can introduce people to new products. 65% of people say they discover a new brand or product through an influencer at least once a week (and 24% say they find one daily). This means that influencers have the potential to skyrocket brand awareness if their campaigns are managed correctly. In fact, 86% of marketers say raising brand awareness is one of their top three objectives in influencer marketing campaigns.
Influencer marketing is a lucrative way to garner revenue. People purchase products influencers use and promote, even if they know the influencer is sponsored or working with a brand. This makes influencer marketing incredibly profitable: businesses that use it for publicity earn $18 for every $1 invested.
Still in its adolescent phase, influencer marketing will grow in the coming years. The influencer marketing industry is expected to hit $15 billion by 2022. This number is even more astonishing when you consider that the industry was $8 billion in 2019, which means the market will increase by 88% in a short three years.
What will it look like in the future? We expect influencer marketing to be more refined, with companies using better media measurables. 80% of marketers measure engagement, 61% measure audience, and 56% measure traffic. But only 32% of marketers measure leads and only 24% measure revenue. We predict this gap will begin to close as marketers hone in on the most accurate media measurables they can use. Brands will also need to be conscious of fake influencer numbers and bots (robots) that follow influencers to inflate their numbers.
Because of creator marketing’s huge potential, companies are increasingly investing in influencer content. 57% of marketers say they will be increasing their influencer marketing budgets in 2020. The medium is also growing in popularity. Only 28% of marketers have been using it for three years, and 21% have been using it for less than a year.
In short, influencer marketing is gearing to be a huge opportunity for companies to raise brand awareness and garner revenue. Influencer marketing is the future, though it can be daunting and time-consuming if it’s not something you have experience in. As one of our specialties, MYN Group works with client brands to reach out to influencers and plan campaigns (we also focus on CRM; click here to read more about it). Please contact us at MYN.Group@MYNGroup.com if you want to discuss creating an influencer marketing campaign.
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