Accessing the Benefits of Influencer Marketing
Influencers are everywhere. The digital landscape is chock-full of people with a following promoting products, services, and philosophies. How does a brand cut through the noise and utilize the benefits of influencer marketing?
As usual, the answer is in the data. 90% of brands are currently using influencers to promote their products or services. With a keen eye on numbers, you can take a promotion and turn it into conversion. In this article, we’ll analyze the benefits of influencer marketing – and how to multiply these for proven results.
What Is the Benefit of Influencer Marketing?
While the initial reason for partnering with an influencer is in the name (influence), not all content creators are created equal. Identifying the right influencer for your brand can have a major impact on your audience, but results only come to those who know what to look for. Here are a few of the key benefits of influencer marketing.
Authentic Voices Drive a Competitive Advantage
Social Media influencers inspire trust in their audiences. Compared to traditional ads, audiences appreciate the authenticity of a ‘regular person’ sharing recommendations. Customers don’t want to feel like they’re watching an advertisement. They want to feel like they’re receiving a recommendation from their friend – which they’re far more likely to heed. In fact, Gen Z reports that they value the opinions of influencers above family or friends.
As you establish connections with a network of influencers, your audience will start recognizing you as a well-known figure. By saturating their online community with your message, competitors will struggle to make a dent in your market share.
Cost-Effective Conversions
One of the major benefits of influencer marketing is its cost-effective results. Because low-production content is currently trending, creators don’t need a design squad behind them. Simple videos can serve as a relatively inexpensive ticket into a market that would otherwise be difficult to touch.
Recently, a shopping rewards app decided to launch a major TikTok campaign. With the majority of their budget dedicated to influencers, they were able to achieve more cost-effective results by partnering with micro-influencers.
Targeting older Gen Y and younger Millennials, this content spurred a massive spike in organic activations. By strategically selecting social media influencers with high engagement but lower follower count, the brand saw conversion rates on par with a significantly higher spend. A standard user-acquisition (UA) campaign has a cost-per-activation (CPA) of $25. Meanwhile, influencer posts saw <$10 CPA.
How Do You Know Which Influencers to Work With?
Content creators are a dime a dozen. Some have large followings; some have higher-quality content. Some have excessively loyal comment sections or a specific societal niche. With hundreds of different traits to consider, how can you select an influencer that will drive results?
Define
The first step to finding anything is to know what you’re looking for. Every brand’s needs are different, so it’s vital to set out comprehensive goals and KPIs for an influencer campaign. Whether you’re looking to generate leads, push app installs, or simply skyrocket brand awareness, your end goal will affect what kind of content is required to achieve it.
Who is your influencer supposed to be influencing? Create a buyer persona to identify your target customer. It will help you learn who impacts their purchase behaviors. More likely than not, there’s already a creator out there making the type of content you need. The influencer for your brand’s campaign will have to spend time creating where your audience consumes.
Research
When searching for the right influencer, follower count is not the all-important ingredient for success. It may be tempting to select the closest influencer with a verification tick, but content creators must be vetted on parameters like the following:
1. Resonance
Every influencer has a niche. Their message is based on their interests and activities, so driving measurable engagement will rely on those passions lining up with your target audience.
- For example, a fitness app launched an influencer marketing campaign featuring a well-known former professional athlete and other popular creators in the health and fitness space. Approaching fitness lovers in the 24-54-year-old demographic, content spread on Facebook and Instagram.
- Because these influencers resonated with the right audience, the campaign outperformed other UA campaigns by over 10% across downloads, registrations, and subscriptions. Additionally, the fitness app saw a 13% boost in organic activations and 6% better retention.
2. Relevance
A fashion blogger from New York City may not be the best choice to advertise software protection for crypto investors in the UK. Every connection may not be obvious, but there must be a clear alignment between your creator’s content and the consumption of your audience.
To ensure success, we measure these data points.
- Geotargeting. Where are their truly engaged followers located? Are they in the region of your target audience?
- Gender breakdown. Does the influencer’s audience skew toward men or women specifically? How would those interactions impact your brand?
- Age breakdown. Are your influencer’s connections rooted in the age group your brand needs to access?
3. Reach
How many people will be exposed to this influencer’s message? This is not simply a question of follower count. Reach does not equal the amount of people who have scrolled past. It’s a factor that is more accurately reflected in the strength of a community.
There are four types of influencers:
- Nano Influencers – 1-10k followers
- Micro Influencers – 10-100k followers
- Macro Influencers – 100k-1 Million followers
- Mega Influencers – 1 Million+ followers
It’s natural to assume that large influencers will have the greatest reach, but smaller influencers can forge strong connections with their audiences that spur higher engagement. Content likes, shares, and comments are a far greater indicator of the distance messages can travel. These factors are called true reach. By measuring real engagement, you can ensure that followers aren’t purchased or inactive.
Now you know what to look for. But how do you ensure the information you’re finding is accurate and real? Key metrics like engagement rate, follower ratios, and geolocation help marketers identify irregularities in the data – protecting your brand from ineffective partnerships.
Our data indicates that influencers are often most effective on TikTok and Instagram. But the numbers don’t stop there. A truly strategic viewpoint on the benefits of influencers dives into posting times, comparative post-performance, location insights, and so much more.
Looking to take the headache out of finding the best influencer for your brand?
Our influencer marketing specialists are here help!
How do I Amplify My Brand’s Influencer Content?
After discovering the ideal influencers, it’s time to amplify their impact! Given the prevalence of influencer culture on TikTok, we recommend enhancing creators’ posts through Spark Ads. This can allow you to maximize exposure and reach a wider audience.
These ads distinguish themselves from the familiar pop-ups that appear while scrolling through content. They retain the authenticity of organic posts originating from real TikTok users with genuine accounts. This distinction implies that all the advantages of views, comments, shares, and other forms of engagement can be specifically attributed to the quality of your organic content.
- On average, we’ve seen a whopping 43% increase in conversion after boosting content on Spark Ads. Retaining the authentic experience of an influencer’s content while increasing ad performance is truly the best of both worlds.
As an added benefit, Spark Ads support the Duet, Stitch, and Sticker features on TikTok, unlike traditional in-feed ads. The ability to piggyback on trending content ensures a long-lasting, memorable impact on audiences. Positive experiences with organically focused ads can improve customer retention and loyalty while driving re-purchases – all because customers are operating within their own communities.
iFit, a mobile fitness app, wanted to drive consumers toward trials on their mobile and web platforms. Launching a TikTok influencer campaign, we saw a significant uplift in key performance metrics and CPA. Noticing the success of influencer content, we repurposed the best-performing videos as UA ads, driving the lowest cost-per-install to date.
iFit’s trials and installs grew four times over while costs remained low. And iFit’s ranking soared to the top 25 health and fitness apps in the US App Store and the Google Play Store.
To conclude, a data-driven approach is vital to transform the success of your influencer marketing campaign. With a more holistic view of media and a variety of complementary digital marketing services, an expert influencer marketing agency can help you harness the benefits of social media influencers.
Interested in replicating these results for your brand?
Our Influencer Marketing specialists are here to help you succeed.
FAQ’s
An influencer network is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a collection of content creators curated by marketing professionals who know what data to look out for.
Purchase behavior has always relied on recommendations. Whether it’s a celebrity endorsement or a casual suggestion from a friend, humans want to be assured of their buying decisions. Influencers are the sweet spot for marketers because they already have a place in their audience’s communities – providing curated recommendations that lead to conversions.
From TikTok to LinkedIn, influencers can be found everywhere. However, platform purpose, ad integration, and more can affect the concentration of influencers on each platform. Based on our data, we see the highest engagement on TikTok, Instagram, and occasionally on YouTube shorts. It makes sense to target TikTok in this case, but it’s always worth digging deeper and monitoring your specific campaign.
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