How Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your PR in 2024
Have you ever wondered why your influencer marketing isn’t working? The truth is, that influencer campaigns often fail because companies misinterpret how influencer marketing works, the goals of influencer marketing, and how to run an integrated campaign.
Without this type of integrated marketing, businesses lose a big opportunity to leverage the content generated in their other owned, earned and paid marketing channels and ultimately their customers will experience a disjointed campaign.
This approach leads to incohesive advertising campaigns. Instead, you want a campaign to hit viewers from all marketing channels with the same message in the most cost effective way. Use influencers as your main content creators.
Benefits of Using Social Media Influencers
Increase Brand Awareness
Today, billions of users check their smartphone apps daily for news, information, and to connect with their community. All these interactions open up opportunities for businesses to attract someone’s attention to themselves.
Companies hire influencers to promote awareness about their product or brand. They do this by presenting products and brands in a positive, and relatable manner. This aligns a business with the influencer’s image and relationship with their audience.
Compared to TV advertising, the relationship between businesses and influencers is far more genuine and far-reaching. This is because creators share a long-term relationship with their followers when most TV ads are basically one-off encounters.
Reach New Audiences
An essential part of growing a business is tapping into new audiences who might be unaware of your product, brand, or business. Achieving recognition in a new audience requires thoughtful marketing choices. Hiring an influencer within a specific niche community is a smart way to target people with values and interests related to your brand.
Marketing teams often create audience personas to establish their targeting goals. These personas correlate with the brand or company’s target audience. For example, a marketing campaign for electric cars might have an eco-conscious millennial as one persona and an older, high-end consumer as another.
Audience personas help businesses choose an appropriate influencer to represent their brand or product. Instead of spreading a message to the whole world, well-chosen influencers send a message to people with a high probability of interest. It’s like knocking on someone’s door and having a conversation compared to a branded blimp– some forms of advertising are simply more effective.
Create Authenticity
The problem with traditional advertising is predictability. Most people watching a TV ad will know the product before the brand even flashes on the screen. The experience leaves you disinterested and unengaged.
Social media influencers flip the script with imperfect and unpredictable content. People find their posts relatable and interesting because they show “real” people with thoughts, opinions, and personalities.
The best part is that influencers sustain authentic engagement with their followers. The relationship is formed when influencers share real-life experiences and opinions. Followers trust these individuals and look up to them for product recommendations and opinions. Companies get to piggyback on these relationships with sponsored advertisements.
Why pay an actor when you can leverage a vast audience with someone who loves your brand? Polished TV commercials might look nice, but people are also attracted to influencers who are relatable and candid.
Engage Your Audience
One of the more obvious ways that influencers engage with their audience is by talking to their followers. Using the chat and comment functions, you can personally reach out to individuals who are interested in your brand or product. This brings an advertisement one step closer to a real-life interaction between the brand and the user.
Engagement also comes from connecting people to multiple platforms, web pages, and profiles. Just like road-builders, influencers create internet interchanges using hyperlinks, hashtags, user tags, and comments with their posts.
When audience members click on a hyperlink or tag it drives up engagement for the influencer and your product. The pathway to other links and profiles establishes an experience between your brand and the potential consumer. This will lead to memorability and word-of-mouth marketing.
Quality Traffic & ROI
People rely on influencers to provide opinions and reviews about products and brands. This reliance translates into a return on investment (ROI) for brands reaching their audience through social media. The expanding social media marketing industry reflects the growing popularity of influencers.
The key to appreciating the ROI of social media is recognizing its non-monetary benefits. While most ROI calculations focus on costs spent and profits earned, influencers bring a priceless form of engagement. Not only do they present the business or product, but they form lasting connections with their followers. This promotes long-term engagement and conversations, helping to form a quality connection to the brand or business.
How to Create an Influencer Marketing Campaign
Determine Your Target Audience
A good start to finding the right influencer would be to research bloggers and content creators yourself. Become familiar with relevant niche audiences through hashtags, keywords, and posts. Look for big names within a niche and the type of followers they attract.
You can start to form an outline of your marketing campaign by observing these social media influencer examples. Creating audience personas from these examples is a great way to formulate a successful marketing campaign.
Find The Right Influencer
The goal of your influencer marketing campaign is to create excitement and engagement about your brand or product. To do this, you need to choose an appropriate individual who is fit to communicate your brand’s values.
This acquisition process shouldn’t be taken lightly because influencer campaigns are arduous and lengthy projects. Try to find experienced or at least dedicated influencers who will reliably speak true to your goals and beliefs.
Another way to assess an influencer is to check their engagement. You can measure their engagement by observing their likes, views, and retweets, or by asking them to share engagement metrics. Considered over the long term, the measurements will confirm that the influencer can deliver consistent messaging to their audiences with reliable engagement.
Identify Your Objectives
You might imagine that the main goal of advertising is to sell, but that’s simply not the case. The goals of advertising encompass a complex set of steps where consumers come to know about a product, learn more, and then choose to make a purchase. The role of advertisements may enter at any of these phases. The idea is to nudge, not force, consumers toward the purchasing part of the buyer journey.
Have you ever gotten frustrated with an advertisement that barely describes the product and simply presents a logo? This is a marketing tactic intended to spark interest in a product you may have never heard about. This is a non-aggressive approach to generating awareness about a brand or product. Still, in the early stages of the buyer’s journey, this type of ad simply gets your attention without waving a price tag in front of your face.
As written by the Forbes Agency Council, “Selling is Dead.” This means that advertisers need to find creative and non-direct means of attracting audiences to their brand.
Leverage All Possible Marketing Channels
Influencers, TV commercials, paid ads on Google, and press releases are all part of the marketing playbook. Just because influencers are new doesn’t mean businesses should ignore more traditional forms of marketing. In reality, most advertising campaigns use a combination of advertising channels.
For example, if your business provides podcast production and distribution services, there are several marketing channels that will optimize your advertising campaign. Of course, you will want to leverage advertising through the podcast community. Another good step would be creating Search Engine Optimized web pages. In combination with influencer marketing, these three channels would attract high-quality customers to the business.
On it’s own, influencing is not the perfect solution to improving generating profits. This is because influencing generally works on the “awareness” side of advertising, without overtly asking the audience to buy into a product. Webpages, emails, and paid internet ads, on the other hand, are more direct ways to link consumers with the “buy” stage.
Measure Your Results
The results of your influencer marketing need to be measured using channel-specific metrics and also on how the assets from the influencer marketing campaign fit into the overall marketing campaign. Ultimately the results of a marketing campaign should be both improved sales and increased customer engagement.
You can track engagement from likes, views, and reactions on most social media platforms. Many platforms like Facebook and Twitter have analytic tools that show your engagement over time, giving you a visual representation of your audience’s interactions.
People running a website will likely use tools to measure site traffic, engagement, and content effectiveness. These tools work by measuring clicks through a website and helping web writers optimize their content for search engine performance. Well-written online content will match with frequently searched phrases and keywords. This will increase the chances a user will arrive at the company’s website or profile.
How Can Influencers Promote Your Product or Service?
Influencers can play many roles in the advertising process. To start, they can introduce their audience to a product or brand through an advertisement segment in their content. It’s like a TV commercial, except most people consume it through their smartphones. In these ads, influencers usually give reviews and demonstrations.
Influencers sometimes incorporate the product or brand into their content. This helps demonstrate the brand or product naturally. Often referred to as product placement in movies, it’s a subtle way to help audiences imagine a brand or product in their life.
Recently, it’s common to see influencers in TV commercials. These ads are banking on an influencer’s mass appeal based on their online following. It’s a creative way to mix both new and traditional forms of marketing.
Social Media Influencer Examples:
Major companies are coming out with impressive influencer campaigns to reach their audiences. Dunkin’ Donuts caused a stir in 2021 when it employed an army of influencers to concoct new beverages to be sold at the popular coffee chain. This campaign harnessed the unique identities and creative abilities of influencers to connect with and generate interest from their audiences.
Another stellar example of influencer advertising comes from Subaru, a Japanese car manufacturing company. Subaru tasked its influencers to showcase its Impreza model in exciting and beautiful places. One of their biggest influencers was Devin Graham, who, with a following of nearly 5 million subscribers, had his Impreza on display before he parachuted off a 500-foot cliff.
The Bigger Picture
It’s more than a trend. As more people turn to their phones to access news, information, and entertainment, businesses are changing the way they advertise. With so many options available, marketing campaigns no longer stick to TV and print sources. Instead, they’re using social media platforms with niche audiences who are dedicated to unique content creators.
These influencers explore a new style of advertising that highlights engagement with authentic and genuine personalities. These connections result in long-lasting and memorable affiliations between audiences and a brand, business, or product.
FAQs about using Influencers In Marketing Campaigns:
What is an Influencer?
An influencer is someone with a social media platform who advertises products to a niche or sometimes generalized audience. The occupation started with blog writing but later expanded to audio and visual forms of content with the development of platforms like Instagram and TikTok. There are many celebrities who are influencers, but regular people can also be very successful with this kind of marketing.
The great thing about influencers is that many aren’t professionals, they’re ordinary people with strong interests and a knack for communicating through social media. Over time, influencers become savvier with advertising techniques, but they still retain their authenticity through real engagements with their followers. This is a powerful marketing strategy for businesses wanting to generate genuine relationships with consumers.
How much does it cost to hire an influencer?
Investment in influencer marketing is growing each year as more businesses realize the benefits. Most companies budget under $10K for their influencer marketing. The rate you pay an influencer depends on the size of their following. The larger the following, the more you will pay the influencer per post.
An Instagram influencer with 1 to 10K followers will likely charge a rate between 10 and 100 dollars per post. The rate goes to 100 to 500$ for those with 10 to 1000K followers. After around 1 million followers, the rate enters $10K per post.
Youtube influencers generally charge more for their services. It’s not unheard of for a company to pay a Youtuber up to $4K to mention their product. However, similar to Instagram, the cost of influencers are relative to their follower count.
Influencers may also package their services to include a variety of social media platforms. The packages are delivered over a monthly period where your business or product will appear in stories, photos, blog posts, and giveaways.
How do I find the right influencer for my brand?
Finding the right influencer takes careful consideration and research. First, you need to identify the audience you want to reach with your business or product. Once you decide on an audience, you can match that profile with influencers who are marketing to the same group of people.
Once you have a few candidates, you can check a few metrics to verify the reliability of an influencer. Do they post often? Are they consistent with their messaging to their followers? The answers to these questions determine if you’re looking at a reliable influencer or someone who isn’t committed to their brand.
How do I calculate the ROI of influencer marketing campaigns?
The Return On Investment, or ROI, is measured by impressions, email subscribers, or profits. If your goal is to improve brand awareness, you can track your returns through impressions on posts. If you’re trying to attract new leads to your business, you can measure returns through email subscribers.
Finally, if your hope is to generate revenue through influencers, your return is measured through quarterly profit reports contrasted to other business periods without any influencer campaigns.