Understanding Influencer Marketing: Benefits, Tips, and Examples. Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that leverages social media platforms. Influencer marketing is also suitable for effectively enhancing brand image and increasing consumer brand awareness of a brand or product (Hariyanti & Wirapraja, 2018).
Influencer marketing is a powerful form of social media marketing that utilises the credibility and reach of individuals (influencers) who have built trust and influence within their specific communities. Rather than traditional advertising, brands collaborate with these influencers to endorse or integrate their products and services into the influencers’ content, making promotions feel more authentic and acceptable to their audience.
According to a Statista survey, the influencer marketing market on Instagram has reached over two billion dollars. Additionally, video-based platforms such as TikTok are also becoming increasingly popular among marketers. The number of TikTok influencers has significantly increased from around 35.5 thousand in the year.
Understanding Influencer Marketing: Benefits, Tips, and Examples
Influencer marketing is generally utilised by businesses to enhance their marketing in the current digital era. This is largely due to the influencers’ ability to attract a significant target audience to follow them on social media. Thus, businesses can reach their followers.
The high level of engagement can be leveraged by businesses to enhance credibility and foster interest among followers in the products being advertised. This is certainly advantageous for businesses, especially as influencer marketing currently yields relatively more effective results.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a service offered by online influencers to promote a business’s products or services. An influencer has the ability to sway potential buyers of products or services by promoting or recommending them on social media.
The aim of influencer marketing is to enhance brand recognition and awareness. This is because influencers have a strong emotional bond with their audience. Therefore, they can influence their audience’s preferences and behaviour.
The trend of e-commerce in Indonesia heavily utilises promotional advertising on social media and influencer reviews. This marketing strategy has become a significant factor in influencing a consumer’s online purchasing decisions.
Why Do Businesses Need to Use Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing helps businesses succeed in digital marketing. This marketing method facilitates the establishment of brand awareness and customer trust. Moreover, there are additional reasons why businesses should collaborate with influencers based on the statistics from the influencer marketing hub:
- Influencer marketing has grown to $13.8 billion in 2021.
- Businesses generate $5.78 ROI for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.
- There has been a 465% increase in searches for the keyword “influencer marketing” on Google since 2016.
- 90% of survey respondents believe that influencer marketing has become an effective form of marketing.
- Nearly 49% of consumers rely on influencer recommendations for their purchasing needs.
What are the Types of Influencer Marketing?
The significant influence of influencers on digital marketing has made many businesses eager to utilise their services. However, before delving deeper, there are several types of influencer marketing based on the number of followers that you need to be aware of.
Here are the types of influencer marketing based on the number of followers:
1. Mega influencer
When viewed from the number of followers, a mega influencer has a significantly large following on social media. This type of influencer typically has more than 1 million followers.
Most influencers of this type are professionals in the public eye, such as celebrities, artists, and many more. Therefore, the fees for collaboration are relatively high, reaching up to £16,000 for a single post.
2. Macro influencer
Beneath mega influencers, there are macro influencers with follower counts ranging from 40,000 to 1 million. This type of influencer is often dominated by celebrities who are not yet widely known.
Additionally, there are online experts who have successfully built a significant following. They are usually more open to collaboration. However, before proceeding, you need to ensure that their followers are genuine and not fake accounts.
3. Micro influencer
At the lower end, there are micro-influencers who have a specific niche market. This type of influencer has followers ranging from 1,000 to 40,000.
With that number of followers, some micro-influencers do not feel they can influence others. Therefore, micro-influencers sometimes promote products for free.
4. Nano influencer
Lastly, nano influencers have a relatively small number of followers, but they are experts in a particular field. The number of their followers is usually less than 1000.
Nonetheless, their followers are generally more interested in listening to or watching the content they create.
What are the Benefits of Influencer Marketing for Businesses?
Here are the benefits of influencer marketing for businesses:
1. Increasing Brand Awareness
Influencer marketing is beneficial for expanding your reach and positioning in the market. Social media users can learn more about your brand, your story, and the products or services you offer.
The contribution made by influencers in growing your brand awareness is one of the most prominent benefits of social media marketing.
It is important to partner with influencers who can evoke emotions and are close to their loyal audience, so they can be influenced to see your brand as a leader in your industry.
2. Helping You Easily Reach Your Target Audience
Before you decide to collaborate with an influencer, you would have certainly studied the characteristics of that influencer’s content. Next, you would understand whether the products or services you are selling are relevant to them.
Essentially, an influencer mentioning your brand on social media is certainly aimed at driving sales. As time goes on, consumers are also turning to influencers for advice on which products or services they should purchase.
As social media has become a “second home”, there is a great opportunity for you to reach your target audience. If your brand wants to increase sales, influencer marketing can help you substantially boost your sales figures.
3. Influencer Connecting You with Millennials and Gen Z
Millennials are increasingly fond of and contributing to the popularity of digital media. Therefore, if you want to attract the millennial or Gen Z market, influencer marketing is essential in today’s digital-first world.
Engaging consumers from this audience segment brings exceptional value to your brand and invaluable access to one of the most lucrative demographics.
The millennial generation views social media as a source of information for shopping. A study by Animoto states that 75% of purchasing decisions among millennials are influenced by a brand’s social media.
Moreover, Generation Z is also becoming increasingly important as it has surpassed Millennials as the largest living generation, representing 40% of global consumers.
The growth of the Generation Z population and their purchasing power of $143 billion makes them one of the most influential consumer forces in today’s market.
4. Providing Long-Term Benefits
Similar to SEO, influencer marketing is long-term in nature. Do not expect to see instant effects on your sales figures from a single influencer post.
Brands should view influencer marketing investment as a long-term strategy because it is an essential part of building a relationship, not just promotion (hard selling).
Building trust between your brand and consumers takes time, and this also applies to influencers in influencer marketing.
5. Building Credibility and Trust
Influencers have built relationships, trust, and credibility with their followers. People respect the content and recommendations from influencers.
Research has shown that the number of teenage users connecting with influencers, rather than traditional celebrities, is 70%. And 60% of users confirm that they prefer reviews from their favourite YouTubers over mainstream TV and film stars.
By sharing influencer content, you will quickly gain the attention of their audience. With their audience’s attention, they can then share your content, leading to engagement and fostering a sense of trust in your brand.
6. Budgeting for Influencers
Currently, businesses find it increasingly difficult to promote products or services due to the rising costs of paid advertising. However, this is where influencer marketing can help reduce expenses.
The costs associated with influencers largely depend on the size of their audience. Furthermore, influencer marketing opens up new opportunities for brands to compete with more efficient and optimal strategies on social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram.
Influencer marketing can help you achieve a significant ROI, boost sales, and save more money. A common way to reduce costs with influencer marketing is by negotiating partnership agreements where influencers receive performance-based commissions.
7. Assisting Content Marketing Strategy
Producing new and engaging content is not always easy. If you run out of ideas, influencers can assist in your content development process.
You can collaborate with influencers to create high-quality content that is aesthetically pleasing to your audience.
8. Time Savings
To create an advertising campaign, you need a considerable amount of time to produce images, duplicate them, and schedule ads across various platforms. Collaborating with influencers will help you offload the above tasks and save a significant amount of time.
Influencer marketing will ensure your brand is promoted daily across different channels by popular individuals. Especially during market stagnation, content created by influencers is becoming increasingly popular.
Many influencers generate content from their homes or studios, which, in turn, means that influencer marketing collaborations will assist brands in continuously creating new content remotely at any time.
Furthermore, branded content created by influencers can also be reposted or reused by companies for their marketing campaigns.
This can also save a great deal of time and money. According to Engaiodigital, by involving content creators, 41% of advertisers have saved their budgets for content production.
9. Providing Value
Influencer marketing aims to deliver content that offers solutions to a problem, thereby stimulating the emotions of your audience. Influencers are attuned to the needs of their followers and fans, enabling them to easily create content that will also provide value for your target consumers.
10. Suitable for All Businesses
Influencers usually have expertise in their respective fields. For example, in health, fitness, travel, cuisine, beauty, business, and so on.
No matter how large you are or what industry you are in, there is always room for everyone, as long as you identify the influencers that best match your needs.
How to Choose the Right Influencer for Your Business?
After delving deeper into influencer marketing, you may be interested in utilising their services. However, most marketers agree that finding the best influencer can be relatively difficult. Therefore, you need to follow a few tips below:
– Choose the product value to be highlighted
The main benefit of influencer marketing is building brand awareness. Therefore, you must understand the value of your product or brand compared to competitors.
This value will serve as a reference for future marketing strategies, such as the content to be created, determining the target market, and more.
– Determine the targets you wish to achieve
After understanding the value of the product, you can decide on the targets or objectives you want to achieve with this marketing method. You should also identify which market segment you wish to reach. This will make it easier for you to progress to the next stage.
– Create a list of influencers
Influencer marketing consists of various types based on the number of followers. From there, you can learn approximately who you will collaborate with.
To simplify this, you can create a list of influencers. Next, you can research who could reflect and represent your brand and bring a positive impact.
– Create quality content
Some influencers will ask what type of content they will be promoting. You need to ensure that the content is of substantial quality, so it can attract their followers and have a positive impact on your brand.
Examples of Influencer Marketing Trends
It is important to note that influencer marketing trends continue to evolve alongside changes in consumer behaviour and technological advancements. Therefore, it is crucial for brands to stay updated with the latest trends and adjust their influencer marketing strategies in response to the changes occurring in the market.
Here are some examples of current trends in influencer marketing:
1. Video Content
Video has become a highly popular format in influencer marketing. Platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels have become the primary venues for influencers to share engaging and entertaining video content.
Collaborating with influencer marketing in the creation of video content can help brands reach a wider audience and interact in a more visual manner.
2. Live Streaming
Live streaming has become a significant trend in influencer marketing. Influencers can conduct live broadcasts on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube to interact in real-time with their followers.
These efforts provide opportunities for brands to collaborate with influencers in live streaming events and directly introduce products or convey brand messages to the audience.
3. Platform Diversification
In addition to focusing on Instagram, many brands are also beginning to engage influencers on other platforms such as TikTok, Clubhouse, podcasts, and other social media channels. Diversifying platforms helps brands to reach different audiences and optimise their presence across various popular communication channels.
4. UGC (User-Generated Content)
Brands are also leveraging user-generated content in their influencer marketing strategies. They can encourage followers and customers to share their experiences using the products or brands, and then share that content through their influencer channels.
Understanding Influencer Marketing: Benefits, Tips, and Examples
By understanding the nuances of influencer marketing, brands can harness its power to build trust, expand reach, and drive meaningful results in today’s dynamic digital landscape.