The proliferation of social media platforms and their fascination among people of all ages have made it necessary for brands to understand the best ways to use social media marketing effectively in addition to whatever they were already doing.
Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing, where instead of driving content and engagement through the brands or individuals page, the brands engage with individual creators also called influencers who have a large number of followers on social media platforms.
Having said that, Influencer marketing combines the nuances of B2B expert roundups with the B2C social media strategy to drive engagement and sales via the trust that influencers command.
Many things need to be considered for an effective influencer marketing strategy, following are some points that can be considered essential to plan a good social media influencing marketing strategy.
First, you need to decide which social media platform you want to be on. That choice depends on your brand or industry type. For instance, if your industry is beauty, cosmetics, or merchandise, Instagram and YouTube are the best social media platforms for you.
Once you decide the ideal social media channel(s) for your brand, determine which influencer group you want to work with based on your target audience, location, and budget—be it models for product promotions or micro-influencers with followers ranging from 2-10k.
Celebrities are easy to find on all media platforms, but you might need help finding the best micro-influencers for your brand. For this, check out various influencers who post on the products or services that you deal in. For example, if you are a makeup brand, look for influencers who post reviews of makeup products. One way is to follow hashtags specific to your product or industry.
Then, check out the content of their posts to understand if they fit the bill. Also, check their following, consistency of posts, creativity skills among other things. Choose the best suitable influencer for your brand, and then approach them with a proposal via email or any other way suggested in their social media account biography.
You could also use influencer marketing places like Plaza that offer a list of influencers sorted by their expertise and followers.
Your selection of the kind of social media influencer will determine the pay. If you opt for a celebrity or model, you have to make a proposal to their respective agencies handling the PR. In that case, the charge can be steep, usually based on the posts' number, type, and duration, much like an ad.
Micro-influencers either work in a team or individually. Both ways, their ask might not be as high as a celebrity or model. In fact, sometimes they even deliver excellent quality reviews for your products if you just ask them to do so, provided they like your product. This is because they aim to provide great content and value to their followers instead of just earning sponsorship money.
Social media platforms also play a major role as they offer different prices to the influencers. For instance, on Instagram, about 80% of people charge an average price of $10 for every post that reaches 1000 followers. Influencers with more than 10,000 followers charge $100 per post, influencers with 100,000 followers charge $1000 per post, and influencers with 1,000,000 followers charge $10,000 per post.
Other ways of deciding the pay include the pricing model. This can be pay-per-post, pay-per-click, pay-per-subscribers, pay-per-view, or pay-per-acquisition. The price and target audience of your product or service can also impact your marketing prices. Companies with high-value products or services tend to pay more for strong marketing.
Influencer marketplaces also tend to advertise the asking price for most influencers on their listing, which can be a useful way to gauge the cost associated with the influencers. To better judge the pay, you can send a proposal to many influencers and then hire the one who bids the closest to your proposal.
Now that you have an idea of the pay, set a budget for the brand promotional activities. Consider the other aspects involved in marketing that require your funds, like planning, endorsements, ads, giveaways, gifts, discounts, vouchers, and other promotional tricks.
If you are a small brand or just a startup, you can use the DIY method for in-house budgeting as you would not likely spend another stack of money getting the task done. This method is flexible and has no commitments to fulfil. However, the DIY method adds to the number of man-hours for the team members and does not guarantee influencers to be prominent.
If the brand cannot handle the stress of this time-taking influencer hunt, it can sign up for Influencer Database Services, which helps to provide relatable influencers for the brand. Although this method may save time in the process of getting and managing the influencers on its own, it requires a dedicated team member to manage it further as it works on long-term contracts.
Brands that desire short-term contracts may opt for the Managed Influencer Services method, wherein the contracts are short-term and do not require a team member to manage them.
It is crucial to strategize a good marketing campaign with the influencer as it will affect the products’ or services’ reputation among the customer base. Decide first on the approach you want to have based on the aim you have in mind for the product. If it is for an increase in sales, ask the influencer to add discount coupons or provide cashback on recommendations.
However, if the aim is brand awareness or a new product launch, ask the influencer to talk about the uniqueness of your brand and its products and values.
Also, you would not want the influencer to upload anything that you don’t claim or is unrelated to your product. The conversational-type-videos and content directly affect the customers’ minds rather than your sales-driven cliché articles on the products.
The other important thing to decide on is the type of content that you would want your influencer to produce. Videos are undoubtedly the most engaging form of content. From a 1-minute TikTok video or a short Instagram reel to a long full-fledged product review video over YouTube, choose the one that caters to your product or service for promotion.
The second-best tool for garnering views is images. You can go for blog posts with your products images, image advertisements, poster influencing campaigns over Instagram, Pinterest, Shutterstock, etc.
If your product or service is not compatible with a video format, or you want it to be super quick to garner instant attention from the audience, you can choose audio advertisements, podcasts, etc.
Influencer marketing can be a game-changer for you. As influencers already have your target audience , promoting a product or creating brand awareness becomes easy wit much better long term ROIs than any traditional social media marketing strategies.