Digital marketing these days has changed and so have the marketers. No one is thinking traditionally anymore. Breaking out of traditional marketing is the new ‘tool’ businesses use to build their brand image.
Talking about changing marketers we have a whole new category of ‘collaborators’ for businesses and promotions. It’s the generation of ‘Influencers’ in digital marketing.
In theory, only print media or celebrities were considered for collaborations, but now is the time of influencers and ‘micro-influencers’.
The Wit Agency, the best social media agency in baner, is here to break down the concept of influencers and collaborators and how they can help boost your business!
Firstly, what are collaborators?
Collaborators are entities that work with the company to create value for target customers. Collaborations involve entering into a relationship with an external entity and delegating it to a subset of the company’s activities. Value creation through collaborations reflects a fundamental shift in the traditional business paradigm in which a company alone creates value.
-Strategic Marketing Management by Alexander Chernev.
Influencer digital marketing is one such tangent of collaboration. In lay-mans terms, it is the process to connect with an influential person to publicize and promote something. It could be a product, service, or campaign through a blog, video, vlog, article, or photographs.
Celebrity endorsements were the original form of influencer marketing.
With the growth of digitization and diminishing, geographical borders influencers with niche audiences create a lot of value for brands. These influencers have engaged and active audiences that follow their stories and trust their experiences. They are known simply as “social media influencers.”
Instagram is the leading platform for social media influencers to spread their stories. 89% of marketers consider it the most important channel for influencer marketing.
What is a social media influencer?
Quite simply, an influencer is someone who can influence others.
A person who can convince and inspire others through their stories and experiences. Every influencer is unique hence is the audience which gives companies to reach parts of the audiences with varied channels.
The right choice of an influencer can have a lot of impact on the brand image of the company. With an audience that trusts them, they create original and unique engaging content. Most of them have their styles and hence no two influencers will ever create the same content.
So, it’s critical to work only with social media influencers whose vision aligns with your own.
Influencers are the drivers for digital marketing and you need to be on the front seat. They can have followers ranging in millions. The most famous influencer is Kendal Jenner.
She has 108 million followers and can reach a wide audience with just one branded post about a brand.
It’s the beauty of influencers and digital marketing in the world together that help you take your brand to places.
How to choose an influencer?
The first step to influencer marketing has nothing to do with the influencer.
Confused?
It’s true. You need first find out and finalize who your audience is. Once we have established our audience, we further to see who are they following, who do they trust, and why.
We need to look at this as a traditional marketing plan.
With social media, we have seen the rise of what has come to be known as the “citizen influencer.” These are people who have not necessarily ever been on television or seen the inside of an NFL arena. They are passionate individuals who develop and share their experiences and opinions on the social web for all to see. In their categories of influence, they hold considerably more sway than traditional celebrities.
Predicting and Maintaining a Successful Social Media Influencer Campaign.
Once you have selected your influencer, you need to look into their style and the impact of their influence.
Unlike a more automated ad strategy, influencers are frequently balancing multiple partnerships. Hence, might fall behind on commitments to post on time or make errors in your requested tags or calls to action. You’ll need to be more hands-on with these relationships to cultivate them. You might have to refine your approach through experience about what works and what doesn’t in your niche.
While influencer marketing works differently, it’s not too far from our traditional marketing ways. It follows similar processes of setting up a digital marketing campaign in which you research, design, budget, execute, and review goals.
So, What Exactly is a Micro-influencer?
Micro-influencers are individuals that have between 10,000 to 1,000,000 followers/audience members and are considered experts in their respective fields and area of influence.
They could be talking about food, travel, fashion or fitness, communities, environment, etc. There is no limit to how many smaller categories and groups of audiences are out there.
The smaller the groups, deeper are the relations and connect with their audiences and engagement.
Influencers with 10,000 followers generated 85% higher engagement than those having 100,000 followers. As the number of followers increases the engagement tends to decrease.
Staying within that 10,000 to 100,000 followers proves to be the sweet spot.
Micro-influencers tend to see themselves as peers of the influencer rather than fans. 84% of consumers say they trust recommendations from peers over advertising.
Businesses may wonder: If I’m a brand, why are micro-influencers more powerful than say, getting a Ryan Reynolds to do something for me?
IMPACT’s Facebook Advertising expert, Ali Parmelee, puts it like this, “They’re more accessible”. “Because people love to see themselves in these aspirational ads, and that more niche, every day-person influencer makes that much easier.”
Leveraging micro-influencers puts your product in front of the right people with a glossy coating of social proof.
Micro and nano influencers have seemed to established deeper trustworthy relationships which their clients. It could be due to their exclusivity to their audiences and choice of projects.
Tips for finding (and working with) micro-influencers:
- Research, research, research! Knowing your industry inside and out is the key to pitching the right people. Make sure you’re pitching users whose brands feel like a natural fit with yours. Their followers will notice, and they have more to lose by “selling out.”
- Cast a wide net. A good advantage of working with micro-influencers is that instead of paying for one you can pay for 2/3 at the same cost.
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Maintain a relationship with your micro-influencers even after the partnership has ended. You’ll see many happy returns from some surprise-and-delight gifting or content shout-outs.
Social media influencers tap into core human interactive needs, which spur response, often in the form of purchase action. As such, influencers can be a powerful way to communicate with your potential customers and increase your customer acquisition rate.
With psychological principals, and understanding how influencers fit within that scope, you can establish how to target the right influencer for your digital outreach.
We at The Wit Agency, the best social media agency in baner, work hand in hand with influencers and nano influencers and aim to get maximum benefits for the brand and the collaborators both. A design studio in Pune that will surpass all your expectations, we are eagerly waiting for your requirements for digital marketing.
