Influencer Marketing: Reaching New Audiences and Generating Leads for Your Business

by Hit Your Mark | May 18, 2023 | Digital Marketing Articles

In a world that’s so digitized, marketing has quickly moved beyond billboards and newspaper ads. Paid online ads are commonplace today, and TV ads act like the virtual billboards of today. But the marketing world is in for another shift from paid digital ads to a world of marketing that appeals to the humanity of its buyers. This is influencer marketing.

Over the past few years, influencer marketing has grown in popularity and effectiveness. Now that social media platforms are so widely used, it’s not just celebrity influencers who impact the marketing world, it’s also micro-influencers and nano-influencers. With so many people willing to partner with brands and launch an influencer campaign, influencers are becoming an essential part of today’s business world. So let’s dive in and understand this growing world of social media and its marketing capabilities.

Understanding Influencer Marketing

With trust running in short supply these days, businesses need to garner it wherever they can. And one of the new places companies can build trust is on social media. In fact, in a recent survey, 80% of customers made purchases responding to influencer campaigns, and 37% more said that they trust influencers and their opinions more than brands. People tend to trust influencers who they’re already familiar with, so influencers can fill the gap between impersonal companies and customers. So what is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a strategy by which companies build brand partnerships with influencers to get more leads and brand exposure. Influencers themselves are social media users who, through a large follower count, encourage people’s buying choices or opinions. These people can help companies boost sales by giving their product or service the spotlight.

There are also multiple kinds of influencers. Some, like those with celebrity status, have massive followings of over 1M people. Others, like macro-influencers, still have large audiences of 100K to 1M. The influencers getting the spotlight today, micro-influencers, usually have 10K-1ooK followers, and nano-influencers have under 10K. Either way, one of these influencer types can be a good fit for your business and its growth. Your target audience will likely be the determining factor in which kind of influencer you select. Still, the world of influencer marketing can see convoluted, so let’s expand the story with a little history.

What is the History of Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing history began only one decade ago. At this point, celebrities and well-known bloggers were the only influencers out there. Then, as time went on and social media blossomed, other influencers began to appear. Social influencers with smaller reaches but more targeted audiences began to appear on the scene and slowly populate worlds like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Now, influencer marketing has grown into one of the biggest stories in business innovation.

What is Influencing 101: Basic Principles?

Leveraging influencers in your marketing strategy allows you to get product endorsements and mentions to increase sales. People place a lot of trust in popular celebrities or even in the micro-influencers they follow on social media. This means that if these people endorse your products, they will view it as social proof that what you offer is legitimate and reliable. So what are the basic principles of crafting a successful influencer marketing strategy?

• Have clearly defined goals. Fostering a good relationship with your influencers will go much smoother if you help them understand your brand and its goals.
• Find the right influencer. You’ll want to make sure that your company goals align with them.
• Set a standard of clear communication. You’ll probably have instructions for your influencer that you’ll want them to know, and they will probably have questions for you. So making sure that it’s straightforward for either member of the contract to get in contact with the other is essential.
• Offer incentives. Depending on what kind of influencer you work with, this could simply be including free products as a perk or giving them some sort of pay rate.

Setting these kinds of expectations in your relationships with influencers will go a long way to building a strong community of loyal customers. An influencer who is impressed by your brand and how you treat them will generate more sales. Fostering this kind of relationship with them is the best way to leverage influencers for success.

What are the Benefits of Influencer Marketing?

Having influencers work with you to produce high-quality content and reach your target audience might seem daunting at first, but with so many benefits, it’s worth the time and effort. Partnering with social media influencers can help you

• Have a bigger reach. If you’re looking to grow your business, influencers are a great way to get the word out about your product. Influencers who work with your target audiences can spread sponsored content even about small businesses. This makes new people aware of what you have to offer and increases your brand exposure.
• Increase your credibility. People trust familiar faces with similar interests. For many, that’s who their favorite influencer is. So, when they endorse a brand, customers are more likely to trust it.
• Advertise at a lower cost. Paid search ads can get expensive. Influencers let you skip the search and jump straight to your target audience, helping you save money.
• Reach your target audiences. If you pick the right influencers, you’ll find that their customers will quickly engage with your brand. The right influencer can offer a way to reach people who have an interest in your products.

Given this, it’s not surprising that 56% of young Americans make purchasing decisions based on what their favorite influencers endorse or do not endorse. Even better, 83% of people believe that influencer marketing is the next big strategy on the marketing scene. So let’s explore how to help you effectively hit your influencer marketing goals.

How to Craft a Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign?

The big picture for launching your marketing strategy is creating a campaign with a roadmap. Of course, there are some specific steps to creating your influencer program, so let’s talk through those.

What are the Steps to Build an Influencer Marketing Campaign?

If you’re looking to get begin influencer marketing, you’ll need to find the right influencer. So how do you do this?

• The right influencer will have a target audience that matches yours. For example, if you’re looking to target middle-aged moms, you should look for influencers that commonly target these kinds of individuals and have follower growth in this area.
• You can find these kinds of influencers by researching ones in your target area. This will involve social listening, a strategy that finds where your type of business is discussed. Then you can select an influencer who publishes a significant amount of their content on that platform.
• Pay attention to each influencer’s engagement rate. This means figuring out how many of their followers are engaging with their content. These are followers who actively like, comment, or share influencer-generated content.
• The right influencer should have authenticity and a genuine personality. This will help people trust them more, but it will also help your brand’s values seem more authentic as well.
• Look into any previous campaigns they’ve done. Ideally, they’ll have worked with brands before to meet the right audience and have been successful, especially if it’s a product that’s similar to yours.

With these simple steps, you can find an influencer and begin your campaign. Of course, once you’ve begun, it’s time to implement your marketing strategy. Let’s look at a few examples of successful campaigns to get some ideas for a good marketing strategy.

Examples of Successful Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Sometimes other brands’ stories can give us ideas for our own. We’ll spend a little time understanding how others have harnessed influencer marketing to further their brand awareness.

• The Got Milk? the campaign is a familiar face from the early 200os, but it made a return recently. In this new campaign, Got Milk? partnered with Derrick Henry, the NFL star, and other online creators to build a successful marketing strategy.
• Dunkin’ Donuts saw an opportunity with the rise of TikTok to build engaging content through influencer posts. They partnered with Charli D’Amelio, a popular TikTok dancer, to raise their app downloads by 57%.
• Absolut Vodka created a digital marketing scheme by partnering with earth-conscious companies, thus creating branded content that sent a message: Absolut Vodka is economically efficient and responsible. 95 different influencers shared 612 posts, resulting in 8.6 million engagements across social media.

These stories illustrate the power of social media marketing and partnering with celebrities or other influencers to spread the word about your brand. Influencer content can majorly impact your conversions, customers, and even move toward boosting sales.

How Can Businesses Leverage Influencer Marketing for Success?

Still, influencer marketing strategies need to be tuned for success. Each social media influencer will need guidelines from the marketers they partner with to succeed. These guidelines should include things like

• Encouraging them to post their content on multiple social media channels, not just one. Using both Instagram and Facebook is great, but what if you also added Snapchat? Suddenly your influencer’s followers everywhere will get exposed to your brand.
• Tracking their success so you can help them adjust their strategies to meet yours. Using analytics is a great way to learn more about how well your brand partners are performing. Then, you can gently correct your partners to reach the specific audiences you want.

With these tips, you can build a strong relationship with the influencer. Marketers need not fear complications between themselves and their partners when they communicate clearly and have similar missions. It’s time to conquer social media, and to do this you’ll need to maximize each tool at your disposal. We’ll talk through how to achieve that.

Maximizing Your Brand’s Potential with Influencer Marketing

The potential of social media is growing every day. This social media takeover uses the new creator economy to expand its reach. This creator economy is constructed of businesses and their reach into the online world. Specifically, the creator economy is composed of over 50 million independent content users, and these include influencers and bloggers.

With so much access to the online world through the creator economy, it’s no wonder that marketers are increasing their spending on it and pushing toward overall success. In 2020, nearly 66% of marketers explained that they planned to put more money toward the creator economy. So let’s dive into how you can harness this economy to increase brand awareness.

How can Influencer Marketing Increase Brand Awareness?

Of course, the goal in business is lead generation. Influencer marketing has proven itself effective in this. The engagement rate from influencing is so high that, in one survey, 74% of customers spent as much as $629 0n one purchasing decision that was impacted by brand partners.

So how can you make something miraculous like this happen in your business? We’ll guide you through a few simple strategies to maximize your influencer marketing strategy.

• Podcasts. These are great places to find an influencer to create fresh and engaging content for your company. Listeners have been flocking to podcasts in the past years. Now you can use them to appeal to customers who may not be visually motivated.
• Social listening tools. These allow you to see where your brand is being mentioned so that you can know where to find influencers.
• Video shorts. This includes platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where short videos are taking the world by storm. Here, marketers have the opportunity to showcase their products and reach their targeted audience.
• Brand advocacy programs. These allow even one positive post to become a marketing scheme. Customers have the opportunity to post about their positive experiences and in return, the company rewards them with free stuff.

These are some of the best ways to launch your marketing campaign. These platforms give you quick access to influencers of all sorts, be they macro-influencers or nano-influencers.

Measuring Success in Influencer Marketing: A Deeper Look into KPIs

Once you have your campaign rolling, you’ll probably want to know how successful it is. For this, it’s important to understand your KPIs, or your key performance indicators, and your ROIs, or returns on investment. There are a few ways you can measure these things in influencer marketing.

How to Define KPIs for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign?

These ways of measuring your campaign success come down to four essential markers.

• Reach. This measures how many people are exposed to your brand content through your influencer. You can track it by looking at the number of likes, comments, shares, or clicks directly from posted content.
• Engagement rate. This tallies how many people not only see the content but also engage with it. You can find this rate by dividing the number of likes, comments, and shares by the influencer’s followers.
• Conversion rate. This is the number of people who have taken a desired action after seeing posts. To find this, you should count the clicks from content to your website and what happens after those initial clicks.
• ROI. This is your return on investment, and it can be found by dividing your profits by your campaign cost.

These four markers will indicate the success of your campaign. And, fortunately, they’re easy to find. Through the creative freedom of influencers, your brand assets and acquisitions can grow overnight. The evidence for this will be found in your KPIs. If you’re ready to become a marketer who knows social media inside and out, you’ve found the right place to begin!

Transform Your Business Through Influencer Marketing!

As you embark on your influencer marketing odyssey, remember that every post, like, share, and comment is a testament to the authenticity and power of your brand. In the world of influencer marketing, genuine connections fuel success, and your brand has the potential to shine brightly amidst the digital noise.

At Hit Your Mark, we don’t just juggle keywords and play around with demographic sliders; we dive headfirst into the nitty-gritty of Influencer Marketing. So, are you ready to redefine your brand’s story? Start your influencer marketing journey today and witness the transformative power of genuine connections in the digital age! Schedule a free discovery call, and let’s make a successful influencer marketing.

References:

1. https://www.markettailor.io/blog/lead-generation-through-influencer-marketing
2. https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/influencer-marketing-for-lead-generation/
3. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rise-influencer-marketing-strategies-best-practices-errajraji-%E5%B0%94%E5%BF%97%E8%BF%9C/
4. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/influencer-marketing/
5. https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/examples-of-influencer-marketing-campaigns/