Why does influencer marketing need the support of paid advertising?

In recent years, influencer marketing has grown from a supporting marketing strategy to a multi-billion dollar industry. Nowadays, deciding whether to buy a product by watching product trial reviews and unboxing videos by influencers has become a daily "homework" for many online shopping enthusiasts. China’s “Lipstick King” Li Jiaqi and “Taobao Queen” Viya are good examples.

According to a survey by market research firm eMarketer, as many as 48% of marketers use influencer marketing, and on the corporate side, an average of 10% of media budgets are spent on influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is expected to swell to $5 billion to $7 billion by 2020, according to marketing firm MediaKix.

What exactly is “influencer marketing”?

Influencer marketing refers to working with people who have influence on your potential or target customers (such as influencers), and then promoting their content and reaping the business growth brought by the "influencer effect" by investing advertising spend on the content produced by the influencers.

These influencers have cultivated a large number of loyal fans on social media by creating online content. Therefore, marketers can cooperate with influencers and use their "hands" to post information on social media to increase brand awareness and drive product sales.

According to the current industry situation, influencers are usually active on the following platforms:

blog

Twitch (live streaming video platform for video games)

Snap

Facebook

Youtube

Instagram

Big and small influencers are divided into the following levels according to the number of fans:

Nano influencers (1k-10k followers)

Micro-influencers (10k-30k followers)

Mid-level influencer (30k-300k followers)

Big influencers (300k-1 million followers)

Celebrity influencers (with more than 1 million followers)

It is understood that by cooperating with micro-influencers with niche audiences, many brands have achieved relatively ideal marketing results. The cost of hiring micro-influencers is lower than that of big influencers, but the engagement rate of micro-influencers is higher than that of big influencers.

(Image source: tinuiti.com)

The above chart shows the main advantages of influencers at different levels:

•Celebrity and big influencers: Their popularity can help you reach a wider audience;

• Intermediate influencers: have a relatively stable and large fan base and have certain marketing and promotion experience;

• Micro-influencers: highly motivated to work with brands and have high fan engagement;

•Nano influencers: They have a deep understanding of niche audiences and can even communicate with fans one-on-one.

The limitations of influencer marketing

The typical influencer marketing process can be limiting and hurdles for brands.

The process typically includes:

• Track, contact, and vet influencers

• Negotiate compensation

• Pay influencers and send them products

•Coordinate the content and form of cooperation

• Follow up the market response and effect of the post

• Evaluate post engagement to determine return on investment (ROI), but it is difficult to truly fully evaluate ROI and actual impact

The entire process of influencer marketing screening and follow-up can be time-consuming, and it can be difficult to find the right influencer for your brand and niche. You also need to ensure that every post it produces and publishes is on-brand and effectively communicates your value proposition.

It has to be said that it can be difficult to visually see the results of influencer marketing to judge its success, other than higher exposure and engagement, so you need to be able to quantify your goals and results.

You might hope that influencer marketing can help you drive growth in your business metrics at every stage of the customer journey. For example, impressions that increase awareness, post likes, comments, and reposts, sales that contribute to ROI, as well as where you want to drive traffic (Amazon or your website) and what audience you want to reach are all metrics you can use to measure the success of influencer marketing.

Promotion of influencer content

Promoting influencer content can greatly increase engagement and convert engagement into revenue.

Specific steps:

1. Find out the posts and influencers that perform well in organic traffic;

2. Approach the influencer and ask him/her to agree to promote his/her posts;

3. Use influencers’ help to promote your best performing posts. You need to connect the influencer’s posts to the highest-paying, highest-engagement segments of your brand’s advertising account. Then, find similar audiences among the influencer’s loyal followers as your target audience. Finally, add a CTA (call to action) button to the post and update the copy on the post as needed.

4. You can use Facebook Ads Manager and advertising analytics platforms to test, iterate, and properly quantify the impact of each influence on your profits.

Why Promote Influencer Content?

Typically, influencer posts lose their impact in organic traffic within less than 24 hours of being published. Therefore, by promoting content published by influencers, you can integrate the influencer’s account with your advertising account so that you can invest your advertising dollars in the content that performs better.

On Instagram, it’s currently difficult to directly link engagement on influencer posts to conversion rates. By overlaying your CTA on an influencer’s account, you’ll be able to reach the influencer’s followers and other audiences. Therefore, adding CTA buttons to your Facebook and Instagram posts can effectively drive traffic to your Amazon listing or website.

If you want to more accurately measure the performance of influencer posts, you can track the traffic source and performance of your CTA links by adding UTM link tags to your URLs and using Facebook Pixels so that you can directly see how much each post contributes to your sales.

summary

If you also want to do influencer marketing, you have many ways to find influencers, but you must carefully select the influencers that are suitable for you. Because influencer posts can easily be lost in organic traffic, you need to use paid advertising to promote your content in a timely manner to maximize the value of each post. In addition, you need to strictly review the influencers who are interested in cooperating with you to prevent the occurrence of "buying fans" and falsifying the number of followers.

Author: Xie Xinxin from Hugo.com

Source: Hugo.com Xie Xinxin