How can brands leverage internet celebrities and big Vs to do "influencer marketing"?

Alibaba released the first " Internet Celebrity Internet Consumption Influence List" this year. Among 10 Internet celebrities, the secondary consumption of fans of 7 celebrities accounted for more than 50%. We found that today, the active search popularity of first-tier Internet celebrities, the transaction popularity of related stores, and even the stickiness and purchase loyalty of fans are not inferior to those of popular stars.

Internet celebrities and influencers are popular. How can brands leverage them for marketing ? This article will introduce you to "influence marketing" in a systematic way in 10 minutes.

What is Influencer Marketing?

In today's social networks , the right to speak is becoming increasingly decentralized. People are increasingly willing to actively follow and trust some people, especially experts in vertical fields. This gave rise to a new marketing method:

Influencer Marketing: Different from direct advertising to consumers, brands use specific influencers to deliver personalized information for the brand.

The influencers here not only refer to people with large traffic , but also celebrities who can truly influence others to take action, such as big Vs, Internet celebrities, stars, grassroots big accounts, vertical small accounts, industry experts, and even your loyal users and your employees.

What are some common influencer marketing campaigns ?

There are four main categories:

Category 1: Ask influencers to share product experience, reviews, etc.

For example, new product trial activities in the beauty industry.

△Fashionable large gogoboi shows Tom Ford's new lipstick△

△Blogger Emma reviews MAC liquid foundation△

Category 2: Invite influencers to endorse

For example, New Balance and Jaeger-LeCoultre invited Papi Jiang to be their spokesperson.

Category 3: Invite influencers to important events

For example, Apple invited big WeChat accounts to participate in its 10th anniversary press conference; Zhihu Yan Club invited big Vs to participate and presented awards.

Category 4: Invite influencers to jointly launch welfare activities to motivate users

For example, DW Watches gives away new products to a large number of internet celebrities and provides personal discount codes ranging from 5% to 20% off, inspiring them to create high-quality recommendation content. For a time, bloggers both aware and uninformed were recommending DW watches, sparking a DW trend, with sales increasing from $1 million to $220 million within five years.

△ A blogger with millions of Instagram followers showed his personal discount code and received tens of thousands of likes△

No matter how things change, the essence remains the same, which is to allow the influencer's fans to pay attention to the brand while actively following the influencer; and to like the influencer while liking the brand recommended by the influencer.

Influencer marketing is a very popular topic abroad. The number of people using Google influencer marketing is growing exponentially, and a report by Mediakix shows that advertisers are spending more than $10 billion on influencer marketing on Instagram each year.

△ Since 2015, the popularity of influencer marketing in Google searches has increased dramatically△

Why is influencer marketing popular?

In fact, more than 70 years ago, people in the industry predicted that influencer marketing would one day become popular.

In the book "The People's Choice", the author first proposed the concept of "influencer marketing", and there is a universal principle behind it:

"Consumers actually trust the opinions of their friends and family more than the ideas of brands and political tycoons."

They even proposed a communication path that can effectively persuade the public - Two-step Flow of Communication, that is: first market to influencers, and then motivate influencers to market to the public. ( The Two-Step Flow entailed first marketing to influencers, and then incentivizing influencers to market to the wider public.)

However, today, as social media has given people a freer environment for speech and dissemination, as well as more vertically segmented coverage, the potential of influencer marketing has been gradually tapped.

Because the factors that influence people's purchasing decisions have not changed.

Behind popular fashions, there are always key figures who can efficiently spread information within a certain range.

——The Key Person Rule in "The Tipping Point"

When people make decisions, consciously or unconsciously, they are always influenced by others:

When it comes to deciding what is right, we act on the opinions of others (the social proof principle).

Most of us are more likely to say yes to a request from someone we know and like. (Preference principle)

——Influence

In the past, this key person was a door-to-door salesman, a TV shopping "expert", an authority in the field, or an entertainment star.

Today, on social networks, everyone is a communication node and the right to speak is becoming increasingly dispersed. People are willing to actively follow and trust influencers, especially those in vertical fields.

Twitter's official report also revealed this fact - nearly half of people will look at influencers' recommendations on social platforms before shopping, 1 out of every 5 people who have seen influencers' posts will be motivated to share their own experience, and nearly 40% of people reported that they had placed orders directly through influencers' tweets.

How to take the first step in influencer marketing?

You might ask,

• If I were to do influencer marketing, which type of influencer marketing campaign would be right for my brand?
• How do I find the right influencers and make deals with them?
• How can I measure whether influencer marketing is working for me?
• …

The following four steps can help you solve the mystery and create an influencer marketing campaign that fully utilizes your advantages:

Step 1: Set activity goals and strategies

Influencer marketing is inseparable from content marketing and social marketing. Your influencer marketing campaign should be aligned with your brand’s higher-level brand strategy and content marketing strategy. Before you begin, let’s clarify:

(1) Target audience: The popular columns and audiences of each platform are different. In which columns is your friend active on each platform? What hashtags to follow?

(2) Activity objectives and KPIs: Is it brand communication or motivating users to take action? Is it to promote new products or to establish industry authority? Is it to increase downloads/registrations, or to stimulate purchases? Is it about attracting new customers or retaining existing customers ? Having a clear direction will greatly facilitate subsequent channel selection.

(3) Evaluate social media/channels: Each platform and each major account has its own advantages and disadvantages in achieving different market goals. For example, on Zhihu, conversion is relatively difficult to achieve, but it is more suitable for establishing industry authority and enhancing brand reputation than Weibo and WeChat. For example, vertical social platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Haohaozhu are more suitable for promoting sales conversions.

(4) Allocate budget: How much can you invest based on your customer lifetime value and the influencer’s audience reach?

Step 2: Select influencers

As mentioned before, the influencers we are looking for are celebrities who can truly influence others to take action, such as big Vs, internet celebrities, stars, grassroots big accounts, vertical small accounts, industry experts, and even your loyal users and your employees.

Who are the celebrities on social platforms suitable for your brand activities ?

The 3R rule proposed by Hootsuite, a foreign social media management platform, can help you judge that an influencer suitable for a brand usually meets three dimensions: Relavance, Reach, and Resonance.

Relavance: The influencer’s field should be consistent with the interests of the brand’s audience. A leader in the circle of food lovers, although he has far fewer fans than Kris Wu, when he recommends kitchenware brands, the conversion rate he brings may be higher than that of Kris Wu.

Reach: The more fans a celebrity has, the more audience a brand can reach through this influencer.

Resonance: The extent to which an influencer can resonate with the audience. It can be considered through the popularity of daily interactions, the popularity of secondary content dissemination, and even the performance of past cooperation with brands.

How to find them? There are two ways to collect candidates:

(1) Start with search popularity. Learn about the search popularity of major accounts from third-party platforms such as Xinbang , or search for topics directly on the platform and observe the situation of major accounts.

(2) Start with conversion capability. If you can consult relevant agents (such as MCN service agencies) or e-commerce platforms, you can often get a list containing the conversion rates of Internet celebrities.

Then you can contact the influencer to clarify the specific cooperation matters.

Step 3: Collaboration

Some foreign brand owners call influencer marketing (Influencer Marketing) influencer marketing investment (Influencer Marketing Sponsersh ip ). They believe that activities that bring high value will create a win-win marketing situation for influencers and brands.

Influencers know their fans better than anyone else and understand what kind of benefits, content, and styles are more popular with fans. Instead of providing content for influencers to publish, brands should provide themes and let influencers plan activities and create content with you.

Or you can be more lightweight and provide exclusive benefits to influencers, such as customized products, invitations to behind-the-scenes experiences, exclusive events, etc., so that they have more topics to share.

Pay attention to the three misunderstandings and try to avoid the following taboos:

(1) Ask influencers to write a “PR draft”. Be careful about the awkward brand placement. On Bilibili , many bloggers’ video comments tell us that sudden-turn advertisements at the end of the film often cause negative emotions among consumers, and even turn them from fans into passers-by. So, what kind of content is more sincere?

(2) Not paying attention to issues such as content copyright and portrait rights, which can lead to regrets when problems arise.

(3) Good content should only be published once. It is a good idea to make full use of influential and good content, such as citing the recommendations of Internet celebrities in other publicity, so that good content can continue to play its value.

Step 4: Track the effectiveness of your campaign

There are many indicator models, data points and monitoring tools that can help brands track data and clarify the effectiveness of activities. Let’s take a look at how the user’s purchasing decision stage is reflected in the data.

Table source: Tapinfluence

There is a voice abroad that interaction indicators are more critical than reading volume in measuring the success of influencer marketing.

Reading volume can reflect the audience coverage, but it cannot tell you the real reaction of consumers to the content. This is also the reason why Zhihu platform has become popular in recent years. The real and effective comments from fans can better illustrate the value of influencers to brands.

Of course, digging deeper into campaign data can yield even deeper insights, such as which influencer collaborations are driving better results? Which content tags are more popular? Which social platform is more conducive to similar activities? …

Understand the advantages of marketer marketing, clarify the four steps of conducting activities, and believe that the influencer marketing activities created by your brand will bring rich returns.

Think back to the most effective influencer marketing campaign you’ve ever tried.

The author of this article is @Amy, and the vortex is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games