The 4-1-1 on Influencer Marketing: Leveraging Dedicated Audiences

As with all emerging marketing tactics, there is conflicting information about what influencers do, how much businesses should pay them, and how to find meaningful, sustainable results when relying on someone outside of your company to produce results. With so many influencers now participating in social media, we’ll attempt to sort out all of the assertions and data, to help you plot a course to using influencers in a way that generates revenue for your business.

Social media influencers are content creators who leverage social platforms to distribute their talent and grow a dedicated audience of followers that share a common interest. Brands seeking to reach this dedicated and enthusiastic audience contact the influencer to ask how much it would cost for features in their content, such as Stories, Reels, Shorts, and News Feed posts. Emerging social platforms like TikTok and Snapchat, and the influencer juggernaut Instagram, are all places where brands can find content creators to reach the company’s target market. Short-form video is a major trend in 2023, that has sparked an arms race between content platforms attempting to engage younger demographics with attractive content that doesn’t require a significant attention-span commitment.

Many global businesses and companies prefer this type of marketing tactic because it gives them credibility with their audience, and doesn’t come across to the consumer as being overly sales-pitchy or heavy-handed. Additionally, consumers tend to trust individuals more than big brand names and companies, due to the candid nature of the influencer’s content. Sprout Social explains it this way: “Influencer marketing works because of the high amount of trust that social influencers have built up with their following, and recommendations from them serve as a form of social proof to your brand’s potential customers.”

Many new brands struggle to get their key value propositions across using traditional social media advertising methods and instead opt to bring in influencers. There are several social media influencer software options out there to reach content creators, which we will get into further down in this blog.

To answer this, we’ll cover the mechanics of the process when reaching out to an influencer, and how the influencer creates content for your brand. “Influencer Marketing” starts when a brand defines an ad spend budget, then chooses to allocate that budget to an influencer rather than spending it on channel ads like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more. 

The brand then reaches out to the influencer and asks them about collaborating with a product or service. Example: An outdoor company selling camping gear might reach out to a hiking influencer to have their products featured in the influencer’s content, and the influencer will have positive things to say about the product after using it on their next outing. That content is then broken up into pieces to maximize the functionality of the platform, such as News Feed posts, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc. The influencer provides customized links to the products’ landing pages through a series of posts, and the customized links assign sales and service conversions to the influencer because the URLs are unique to that influencer. The relationship and this process are repeatable if the influencer shows success in driving traffic and conversions to the brand’s website or e-commerce platform.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a straightforward answer to this question. There are several variables that must be addressed prior to understanding influencer-based business growth more clearly. Here are several factors to keep in mind when considering working with a social media influencer:

• What does a die-hard in my target market look like?
  • Find an influencer that is creating content that closely aligns with your brand’s mission statement
• Is the influencer’s audience in a region or location that my company services or ships products to?
• How much would I have to pay the platform for advertising to reach as many people as I would reach through the influencer and is the influencer’s rate more affordable?
• What type of understanding will I gain as the business owner via performance results metrics received from the influencer?

In a general sense, as mentioned above, influencers help businesses reach dedicated customers because they reach target market consumers in a way that feels more genuine to the consumer, and the trust the consumer has with the influencer will transfer to any products the influencer endorses in the content they create.

The prices social media influencers charge for their services can vary considerably. The best thing to do as a business looking to “stealth advertise” is to first establish what a comfortable ad spend looks like, and what your expectations are for sales and conversions. As a brand, you can absolutely ask the influencer what their typical results look like, and you definitely want to ask for metrics and case studies upfront when the influencer provides their rate sheet.

Influencers are scalable based on their audience size, content creation abilities, and anticipated results. Some brands that are just starting out in influencer marketing may want to leverage “micro-influencers” which are individual content creators with dedicated social audiences larger than normal personal users, but smaller than notable brands. This tactic can be effective for brands on a tight budget but still wishing to gain social media growth. Speaking of cutting costs in digital marketing, we recently covered the healthy ways to do this in our blog.

Most influencers having worked with several brands in the past and using sponsorships as their primary source of income will have “rate sheets” in the form of a pitch deck that can be sent to your business for review. Take in several of these rate sheets at once and gauge the pros and cons before committing to an influencer. 

As with any emerging industry, there are emerging software companies putting out products to assist brands with finding influencers. For example, Influencer Marketing Hub is one of the global leaders in connecting brands to influencers by helping them organize and sort influencers by audience size, industry, and how prolific they are in sharing branded partnership content. 

Additionally, searching by hashtag can produce influencer content, leading to connection, because influencers often include relative hashtags with their content posts in order to maximize the reach of their posts to their intended audience. Flowbox is another platform that can connect you to influencers, and they detailed how else to find them here.

If your company is in need of help building your influencer strategy, we can help with that!

No matter what your digital marketing goals are for 2023 and beyond, Fuze7 Marketing can create custom growth, sales, and leads plans for your business! If you need a comprehensive strategy for leveraging digital marketing trends in 2023 drop an email to info@fuze7.com or give us a call at (503) 830-0355. You can also connect with us on our website.