The digital revolution has been a game changer in many areas of life and business – including the way people connect, and companies build relationships with their customers. With the rise of social media, a new type of ‘celebrities’ appeared on the marketing horizon.
These celebrities, called influencers, are normal people, just like me and you, who share their lives online, and are followed by tens of thousands, or even millions of social media users. No one really knows how one can become an influencer. But, having an exciting lifestyle and good photography skills surely helps. Although it’s not all there is to it.
Many argue that influencers have nothing to offer: they show no special talents that other people couldn’t do, so there is no reason that they should be celebrated as they are.
However, it is a fact that these people inspire, motivate, and influence others to live life a certain way (thus the name ‘influencers’), and no matter what some might say, this fact will not change.
Lately, a lot of companies started noticing the power that influencers hold, and started using it to their advantage.
And that’s how influencer marketing was born.
Actually, ‘born’ is not the right verb to describe it, as the practice existed even before social media platforms gained so much importance. The only difference was that in the past influencer marketing was done through celebrity (and by ‘celebrity’ we mean actors and singers) endorsements, as opposed to right now when the word ‘celebrity’ is understood in a broader sense, and includes online celebrities as well, otherwise known as influencers.
With the rising importance of influencer marketing, a need for a thorough explanation of why and how it is done arises. This is exactly what we will do in our definitive guide: we will guide you through the reasons you need influencers as a part of your marketing strategy, the types of influencers you will encounter online, and the ways you can make sure that you invest your money for the maximum ROI.
So, let’s begin.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that consumers trust other consumers’ words more than they trust your company’s.
Influencers are the bridge that connects your company to your target audience. Reports show that in the modern business environment, influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate leads and boost sales.
… Spread the Word About Your Brand
With wide and strong networks of followers who trust them on various topics, opinions and lifestyle choices, influencers are able to successfully promote your brand to their networks of followers, thus providing you with exposure, increased traffic, and improved conversion rates.
… Quickly Gain Credibility, Trust and Authority
As we have stated so many times before, people trust other people, and doubt companies.
Influencers are the ultimate social proof your company can get to gain the trust of its customers.
Moreover, they will help you build a relationship with a broader audience, so even if people do not need your products at the moment and do not buy from you immediately, they will likely remember your name and make a purchase once the need arises.
… Improve Your SEO
Although not every mention will be indexed, having influencers on your side, along with their strong audiences will likely help you climb the SERP ladder by getting visible mentions and quality backlinks.
And, if all of the above reasons were not enough for you to accept influencer marketing as the new standard, just note that most of the contemporary brands have started to practice it regularly. So, not adapting to this trend, will not help you in any way – it will only cause you to lose your competitiveness in the modern marketplace.
Before revealing how you can find influencers and choose the ones that are the best fit for your brand, we need to define the types of influencers that you can stumble upon online.
Celebrities and Social Media Stars
50% of global marketers claim that celebrity influencers boost exposure and sales, while a whopping 70% of Asian marketers regularly use celebrities and Instagram stars to reach their customers.
Journalists and Reviewers
Although they do not have as much exposure as celebrities have, reviewers are followed by people who are genuinely interested in the topic. For example, a restaurant reviewer has a loyal following of food lovers, so getting a journalist related to your industry on your side will open you the door towards passionate users of products similar to yours.
Bloggers
Bloggers are also very powerful as they not only write a review of products they have used, but they also host giveaways, which always result in high engagement rates. Bloggers are also the ones that will provide you with high-quality backlinks and help you improve your SEO.
And last, but not the least:
Everyday Consumers
Although everyday consumers are not influencers per say, they have a huge impact on those that surround them. The fact that everyday consumers have not been compensated in any way to leave a review, makes them the most credible influence-source from the list. Urge your customers to leave reviews by sending them a survey through email, or making it easy for them to rate your company or products.
As far as the number of followers goes, influencers can be grouped into three main categories:
Note that all of these influencers have a different impact on their audiences, so creating a strategy in which you will involve each one of the influencer types we mentioned will yield you the best results as it will provide you with a lot more variety.
With so many influencers crowding the world wide web, it might be hard to spot and choose the right ones for your business. The number of followers is not always a representation of reality. Also, although reach and engagement are important, they are not all you need to think about.
First, you need to make sure that the influencer you contact is a…
Before you set out to find an influencer that fits your brand’s image, you need to define your target audience. To find someone who matches your needs, means finding someone who has established an audience similar to the one you would want to reach.
A food company and a clothing vendor cannot use the same kind of influencers to promote their products. So, before caring about the numbers of followers, you first need to know what these followers are interested in. An audience made out of hundreds of thousands of fashionistas will not improve the rating of your sports-related site. Sure, you might get some likes if the influencer is truly powerful, but you will not get any action.
In the end, the action is the only thing that will lead to measurable results. Likes and comments mean nothing if they are not followed by conversion. And, the only way an influencer’s follower would convert is if that influencer offers something that rings true to his or her style.
The best way to state your brand’s needs is if you create an influencer persona.
Just like you create a customer persona, you should create one for your wanted influencer as well.
The process goes through a couple of stages.
First, define the influencer’s image, personality and type – whether he or she needs to be an informer or an authority of some kind.
Next, pick their niche and the kind of topics you would want them to post. Do you need a fashion or a travel blogger that posts image-oriented content, or a marketing expert that sticks to how-to guides?
Finally, define the type of reach that you are targeting. Would a visually compelling Instagram influencer bring in more results, or a blogger would? Or maybe, a tweet campaign is what you need? You need to define this part since those who have gathered a following on Instagram, are not that powerful on Twitter and vice versa. Stick to the channel of choice until the end of the search.
After you have decided that someone is the right fit based on their audience, you need to monitor and evaluate their reach and engagement. Note that we are not talking about the number of followers. Reach and engagement are so much more important, as they point to the part of users who are actively exposed to the influencers’ stories.
We cannot stress this enough, especially in times when a lot of people are buying followers and social media bots are on the rise. Of course, there are a couple of things you could do to evaluate if the influencer’s following is real or made mostly out of bought followers or users spending time on social media exchange websites.
There are two ways you can go about this.
The first one is manually checking the person’s activity online. To find if there are some red flags you should:
The other way to assess the following is much easier, as it is automated by tools that have been created just for this purpose.
IG Audit
IG Audit is a free tool that allows you to quickly check whether a person’s following is genuine by comparing the expected and real number of likes and comments. The only problem with the tool is that it works for public accounts only, but having in mind that most influencers have a public account already, it should do the trick.
FollowerCheck
FollowerCheck is yet another tool that compares the number of real with the number of fake followers. It also shows some of the most suspicious users.
Note that the free tools that are mentioned above work the best when used to assess accounts with a lot of followers, and the results they yield are close to the reality, but not 100% accurate.
For complete accuracy, there are some paid audit tools like
Social Audit Pro
This tool offers a couple of payment plans to do a complete audit on the influencer’s profile. The price depends on the number of followers it needs to analyze, but in the end, the tool does not only show accurate data but it also provides useful analytics.
Okay, now that you know what defines your ideal influencer, it’s time to talk about how you could actually find the best spokespeople for your brand.
Do not worry, as we go further; the whole thing gets easier and easier. Defining what you need is the hardest part of the process. Afterward it all comes down to applying the filters you have already chosen to make sure that the person that ends up being your brand’s face is the absolute best choice.
Generally speaking, there are two ways to find influencers. The first one is using some of your social media analytics tools to involve yourself into social media listening, while the second one is signing up for one of the specialized influencer platforms and searching their databases directly.
The best approach to finding influencers for your brand is first looking at the pool of current users that are already vouching for your brand. Your brand’s raving fans are already influencing their network of connections, without you asking them to do it.
So, finding someone with a good following, reach and engagement rate out of these satisfied customers is the easiest possible starting point in your influencer marketing journey.
There are a couple of great tools that can help you out on your quest to follow your brand’s mentions and dedicated hashtags.
Hootsuite allows you to gain insight and manage all mentions of your brand, trends and influencers on different channels from one place.
One of the leading keyword monitoring tools, Keyhole, allows you to track what’s being said related to your keywords on Instagram and Twitter. Apart from real-time data, it also allows you to tap into the potential of historical data. An interesting feature is the heat map representation that Keyhole uses to visually organize the data collected from around the world.
BuzzSumo allows its users to find popular topics and influencers based around a specific keyword. The best thing about this tool is that it allows you to can find influencers of different types (journalists, bloggers and so on).
This is an Instagram based app, that helps you find trending topics and photos on Instagram, as well as the influencers that share them. Using the app, you can find the top content creators, who may be suitable for your brand.
TweetReach shows you the most influential Twitter users that are contributing to a particular topic.
A great idea would be to set alerts for every future mention of your brand via Google Alerts. That way you will be able to find people that mention your brand, and fans that are already there. It will be much easier communicating with these people, as opposed to users who have never been introduced to your brand before.
When companies work on multiple campaigns, looking for influencers by using keyword research tools might not be the most time-efficient way. Thankfully, there are specialized influencer platforms that help companies and individuals in the lookout for influencers find, reach and organize the individuals that are the best fit for their campaign’s needs.
Upfluence is a talent discovery platform that is most widely known for its search engine that allows companies to vet the best influencers across various networks. With a huge database, it offers detailed searches, shows contact information, and enables users to organize the preferred influencers into lists and event export their info in bulk.
The tool, previously known as Revfluence, provides features that can help out users in each stage of an influencer marketing campaign from content creation to campaign analytics and payment. The tool also provides an influencer discovery search engine, which allows users to search for influencers based on various criteria. An interesting feature is the Quickmatch option, which is a faster way to match companies and influencers. Performing just like Tinder, the Quickmatch feature shows the influencers to the company based on the listed preferences. Once shown, the company can either ‘like’ the influencer or skip him or her, after which another influencer is shown and so on.
Takumi is a great platform that ensures that good companies are matched with influencers that provide high-quality content. When working with Takumi, brands are asked to define the budget, timeline and objective of their campaigns and then they are matched with individuals who can satisfy their campaign needs. The best thing of all is that companies are completely protected – the influencers are paid only if their content meets the guidelines.
Okay, let’s say you have found an influencer you would like to work with. What would be the next step?
Well, you would have to do a couple of things: decide what kind of campaign you need, reach out to the influencer, and agree on the type of collaboration and compensation they will get for promoting you.
Let’s go through all of these stages one by one.
When you decide to work with an influencer, you can ask for various kinds of campaigns. Below we will list the most frequent and effective types of collaboration.
A paid partnership is a relationship in which the influencer creates and shares sponsored content in exchange for a flat fee paid by the company. The company provides the content guidelines as well as the end goals they have in mind, and they agree with the influencer on a certain number of posts and their frequency which are included in the fee. Usually, these types of collaborations are marked as being a paid partnership deals, so everything is transparent for the public and the influencer’s audience.
Another way to collaborate with influencers is to pay them to mention your brand or your product in their blog posts. You can either ask for a dedicated blog post, or a couple of mentions with affiliate links in some of their non-related blog posts. The type of sponsored content you ask for will result in a different kind of compensation.
There is nothing that people love more than free goods! Knowing this, a lot of companies are partnering with influencers to host social media contests o giveaways. To enter a giveaway, users usually have to follow the brand, the influencer, or both, and like, comment or share the photo that has been published. Other are more competitive, and ask of the participants to be more creative and take a photo or show their skill at something.
A great idea for brands that are willing to go the extra mile, is to collaborate with influencers to create limited edition products together. This is a great idea if the brand is collaborating to either a Middle power or Macro influencer, as they would have a much bigger fan base to promote the products to.
Okay, maybe you are not that big of a company to be able to collaborate with a social media celebrity and create a personalized product, but that does not mean that you cannot find a way to create something together.
Like for example – an event. The last event we encountered and that has popped in mind was a styling event organized by a clothing vendor in collaboration to a fashion blogger, where people could come, hang out, take some photos, and get some styling tips.
Finally, you can collaborate with influencers by allowing them to offer discounts to their followers, if they use their personal code. Usually these kinds of collaborations offer a discount to the customers, and commission to the influencer whose code has been used.
Influencer marketing has become a way that many people earn for leaving or at least earn an extra income. Obviously, influencers are paid, one way or the other, which is why they are so dedicated to promoting companies. The compensations influencers get can be different and vary from product gifts, to discounts, or flat fees per post.
Let’s take a look at each one of the possible options.
As influencer marketing is leveraging social proof to shape opinions and drive sales, some consider that paying for a review, a testimonial or a blog post is lying to the public. However, paid collaborations are more than frequent, especially on Instagram. The platform has made it possible for influencers to mark when they are posting because of a paid collaboration – so that way they can stay completely honest with their audience.
Moreover, many influencers, and especially the ones with a wide network of followers, only accept to work for brands and products they believe in, so there is actually nothing wrong with being paid for their hard work.
Managing a strong social presence takes a lot of time and energy, and usually influencers that are paid for their posts hire a whole team that helps them to create and manage high-quality campaigns that yield a high ROI.
The burning question of every company that decides to work with influencers: “if I decide on paying, how much should I expect to pay”?
Influencer marketing is similar to ad placement. And just like with ads, the payment depends on factors like:
That is, the payment depends on the influencer’s power to connect with his or her audience and the time he or she will need to create and share your posts.
Having said that, although it is a bit hard to talk about numbers, since there are many different types of influencers, we can mention some averages that have shown up in some of the most recent earnings reports.
However, as we already noted, these numbers are just a rough estimate, while the final rate will also depend on the engagement as well. Moreover, some influencers offer monthly or quarterly packages which include more posts for a discounted price.
In the end, the payment varies from case to case, so you would have to contact a particular influencer and inquire about a price in order to know for sure.
Many influencers will mention a brand if the brand gives them a free product or at least some discount. However, note that when deciding to compensate an influencer this way, it is not right of you to ask them to mention your brand in their posts – with a product giveaway you will depend solely on the influencer’s good will. On the bright side, most of the social media users offer thanks when a company has gifted some kind of product to them.
As we already mentioned in the section above, you can collaborate with an influencer by allowing them to offer your products at a discounted price to their following. This is the most common situation when an influencer is gaining commission by the sales made, since the activity is easily measurable by simply counting the number of times the influencer’s code has been used when making a purchase.
A shout out is simply mentioning an influencer that has shared your product. This only works when the company is a more powerful name than the influencer, since macro influencers will not care about being mentioned, as they already have a loyal following.
Influencers are contacted by a lot of companies offering them collaboration. So, with so much noise between you and the influencer you would want to work with, how can you get them interested in what you have to offer?
The line between being flattering and creepy is thin, remember that. So, do not stalk the influencer liking and commenting on all of his or her photos all the way back to 2015, even if you really, really, really like their work.
The very first impression you want to leave on your influencer of choice is that you know who they are, what their online presence is all about, and what their audience wants. Think of contacting the influencer as going for a job interview. You need to be as prepared as you can and show that you have put some thought into the possibilities that your partnership would offer.
The greater the influencer’s network, the more offers he or she gets. So, chances are, they do not even respond to requests that are generic and too vague. Personalizing your message will take up longer than crafting a single email which you will send out to every influencer you are interested in, but it will show that you are serious about the potential relationship and will increase the chances of your message ending up in a fruitful collaboration.
Go through the payment plans we mentioned before, and decide what kind of payments would be the best for your company’s goals. Of course, be flexible, as it is possible that what you offer will have to change, as the influencer states his or her needs as well. Micro influencers are the best to work with, as they have the most flexible payment requirements out of the three categories.
Congratulations, you managed to get to the last section of our definitive guide on influencer marketing. Here are a couple of final tips to have in mind when you embark on your influencer hunt.
It is imperative for a company to know what it needs, but you have to be willing to give up some creative control. Each influencer you collaborate with will have his or her own unique way with words and photos, and although they might follow some general guidelines, it is their personal touch that the audience is following and raving about. That is why it is absolutely essential for you to put enough effort into researching and finding someone whose posts fit your style.
So far, we told you all about how careful you should be when you approach influencers, but that does not mean that you should agree to everything they say. Feel free to ask them to give you detailed reports on the views, likes, comments, reach, engagement, the demographics that follow them, etc.
Finally, progress comes with measurement. So, after you launch a campaign, measure the results that campaign yields. Do not focus on numbers – they will surely be high since the influencer will promote your product to a broad network of followers who were not exposed to it before. So, instead of measuring ‘empty’ metrics like likes and comments, focus on actual ROI.
And, that’s it!
Now you know everything there is to know about influencer marketing – at least until you start practicing it.
That is to say; when you include it as a part of your marketing strategy, there will be many more details that will reveal themselves to you. But we couldn’t include those details in this guide even if we wanted to, as they are entirely individual, and can be learned only by practice.
So, wait no longer, and try yourself out. Taking action is the only way that you can learn what works for you and what doesn’t.
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