Marketing is about being able to influence people to patronize a particular product. A lot of companies and products have hit the top of the roof sales just by being endorsed by a top celebrity.
However, influencer marketing does not involve celebrity only; rather, it also cuts across people who ordinarily are not even famous offline.
Who is an Influencer?
So, an influencer in this context is someone who has followership based on his niche and can impact their purchasing decision because of his knowledge or authority in that niche.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing, therefore, involves a form of collaboration between a brand and an online influencer to promote a product or service. The company leverages on the influencer's effect to improve recognition of the brand in question.
Importance of Influencer Campaign
Over time, an audience becomes very loyal to an influencer, and when the influencer recommends a product, the audience perceives it from the perception of believability and authenticity.
As a result of his strong influence on the audience they, in turn, become an influencer by making referrals through word of mouth, sharing of marketing content communications as well as patronizing the same product themselves.
Influencers help expand the horizon of brand influence and reach
The social media has become a more powerful tool to reach the target audience more so because of its ability to foster relationships. Influencers are not just people with lots of followers whose marketing niches are not known.
They are deliberate and mostly authorities in their fields which makes them command the respect of their followers. Therefore, being content developers themselves, they can create powerful communication materials which help to create awareness about the brand further
Effectively Reaches Your Target Audience
Influencer campaign is an effective niche marketing; it is not just reaching out to anyone at random. Brands deliberately reach out to influencers, who have already fostered their audiences on the social platform. This also saves you the time, resources and energy to find your audience.
Identifying Your right Influencers
The whole idea of using influencers to promote products to specific audience sounds very seamless and interesting. However, getting the right fit for the job on social media is a daunting task.
The challenge is associated with the fact that the social media has lately become bedeviled by the menace of fakery, manipulation of the system by desperate influencers, the use of paid reach instead of organically building following amongst others.
Its enormous benefits notwithstanding, once you sign up the wrong person, that money spent becomes a wasted investment. Sometimes you need to go beyond using followers as the only metric for measuring influence.
Relevance
Look at how compatible an influencer's content is with your communication. Research through his previous posts and archives to get insight into the kind of audience he has.
An influencer who is in the similar niche as what you are looking to promote by all means is a greater advantage to you than one who has a much larger followers base but whose niche is unrelated.
Authenticity
Influencers who share compelling messages tend to get more engagement than those who share just product reviews. Audiences will find posts that create quality and authentic content more motivating than that which attempt to review products.
Personal experiences that centre on the use of a particular product, service or brand is also more trusted.
How to Measure Impact of Influencers
It is estimated that a whopping $8 billion will be spent on Instagram influencer marketing alone in 2020. Yet most platforms are silent on the impact of these influencers on companies return on investment.
With so much money spent, it is crucial to measure the impact of influencers. Here is what to do if you intend to get value for your every dollar.
Use Isolated Marketing
Isolated marketing is an amazing means of measuring the impact of influencer on sales or campaigns. With this method, you select a special trial product that will only promote at that particular period through influencer marketing.
When you isolate your marketing efforts, you can track sales throughout the entire funnel, including in-store purchases. The test gives you an overview of your consumers' buying behaviour, from which you can more accurately measure the aggregate sales possible to generate from influencer marketing in subsequent engagements.
Choose an Influencer Tracking Platform
Instead of attempting to track the impact of influencer on your campaign manually, engage an influencer marketing platform to help. With that, you will be able to precisely measure the impact of the influencers on your campaign effortlessly.
An influencer marketing platform that you can adopt to track the impact of the influencer include effortlessly:
Clarobi: has a tracking-and-reporting component that allows you to measure performance in real-time. You can measure the performance of your overall campaign here