Part 2 of 4: In part 1 we explained why marketers turned to influencer marketing.
When marketers are faced with a challenge, it’s in their DNA to find smart solutions. As the option to reach their audience organically became difficult, marketers turned to social media influencers to drive awareness and traffic.
Social media influencers like bloggers, Instagramers or YouTubers amassed followers by constantly generating great and engaging content. Their biggest asset is their community engagement. Followers are not paid to follow an influencer. They do it voluntarily, as they are looking for inspiration, ideas or just want to be entertained.
Influencers know that and finetune their content on an ongoing basis. Likes, comments, dislikes, increased or decreased number of followers—those are the metrics influencers use to adapt on a daily or even hourly basis the type and quality of the content. Over time, influencers know exactly what their audience is interested in, how to maximize engagement, and how to start conversations within the community.
And that’s why marketers turned to influencers to help them to overcome the visibility issue. Smart marketers realized that it was far more efficient to leverage existing communities and influencers’ knowledge of how to reach and engage these communities to benefit their brands.
What are the advantages of influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is word-of-mouth marketing at scale. Nielsen Catalina identified that 92% of people trust recommendations of people over branded content.
If a brand convinces an influencer to talk about its product or service, it can reach thousands or even millions of engaged users. Influencer marketing provides businesses with a way around the roadblocks posed by changing algorithms. It gives businesses a chance to substantially boost visibility.
Here’s the good news: influencers aren’t just expensive superstars. Micro influencers can be extremely impactful. In addition, we’ve seen great engagement and reach by combining dozens of smaller influencers.
It’s no surprise that influencer marketing is growing fast. It has been the fastest growing tactic in the digital advertising world over the last few years. Google Trends shows, that over the last five years, search volume for the term "influencer marketing" quadrupled in the US.
Source: Google Trends
According to Smart Insights, 85 percent of marketers use influencer marketing, and an astounding 90 percent of them say it’s one of the more effective forms of marketing. A.T Kearney estimates influencer marketing spending to surpass $10 billion in 2020.
But if it’s so effective, why aren’t companies spending more on influencer marketing?
After talking with hundreds of marketers, I believe that some of them see their choices as either/or, meaning that they believe that they can either do PPC or influencer marketing, but not both.
Smart marketers add influencer marketing to their current toolbox. They leverage the strengths of the other tools to amplify influencer-generated content with PPC.
Some of our clients are big marketing spenders like Hunkemöller, BMW, Expedia or Philips. They see influencer marketing as part of their 360 degree marketing campaign. This approach works for them because they acknowledge that influencer marketing’s strength is creating highly engaging content. They leverage having people talking to people about their products because they know that people trust recommendations of others more than branded content and therefore collaborate with influencers.
During the campaigns, influencers receive the products or services and test them. Then they create blogs, videos or pictures and share them on their social channels. In the content, they showcase the products in action, provide feedback on the features and explain why they find the products useful.
Brands can re-use this content on their social channels, if they agreed with the influencers on that.
As a result, these companies get authentic reviews and influencer-generated content at scale.
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