Influencer marketing is a marketing technique based on identifying opinion leaders in our society so that they can collaborate with a brand.The help they can provide consists of spontaneously connecting with the target audience. This is achieved through their profiles on social networks. The appearance of influencers in the digital world has generated small communities of thousands or millions of users around their profiles. For this reason, they have become one of the focal points for marketing specialists as they seek to impact their target. They have a high communicative power and working with them means guaranteed recognition for the company.
In order to practice influencer marketing, it is necessary to create an influencer campaign. This serves to establish specific objectives and propose them to the previously chosen internet profile. This profile must adapt to the image of the brand and have a community with which we are interested in connecting by tastes or age. This new concept has turned traditional marketing on its head and has become one of the most widely used due to its high success rate.
what is influencer marketing for?
- Improve your SEO: The massive generation of content brings leads closer to your brand. The recognition of your brand will grow and its relevance in search engines will be greater in terms of your positioning.
- Power of impact: This marketing strategy is more effective than others because of the impact it achieves. Moreover, in influencer marketing this growth is measurable and serves to know the status of our marketing campaign.
- Brand image: By being recognised by a large number of users by our own brand, the brand image is strengthened.
- Independence from advertising: Influencer marketing generates new business opportunities. Through an influencer campaign, it is possible to connect with a new group of people, sometimes larger than those we manage to attract with traditional advertising.
- Greater credibility: Our brand, service or product will be tested by the influencer, who will offer a testimonial to their followers that will make our brand more reliable in terms of their purchase.
- Participation of third parties: By getting third parties to generate content related to our brand we are advancing the process of our marketing campaign exponentially.
Types of profiles in influencer marketing
The digital world, like our society, is heterogeneous and each profile is composed of different factors. Based on this, a financial or product compensation will be offered. From another perspective, influencers are classified into different levels according to the popularity they have in social networks:
- Celebrity: If a well-known public figure has a presence on social networks and takes care of their profile they will be a perfect candidate for our brand. Commonly, actors, footballers or singers group millions of followers and become collaborators of prestigious brands. It used to be typical to find these profiles starring in TV commercials. Now it is more effective to get them to advertise our brand in Instagram stories or record themselves consuming our product.
- Macroinfluencers: This group is made up of profiles with more than 100k followers on social networks. Some are more recognised in the digital world than celebrities because they remain more active. The main difference is that they make a living working with other brands so they have a higher cache. However, it is worth paying that price as they have a great power of influence.
- Microinfluencers: They accumulate less than 100k followers on their profiles. Their communities are small, but more interactive and loyal. The relationship between the influencer and their followers is closer and has a higher success rate due to the closeness they transmit to their community. This generates an interesting power of prescription in this character.
- Nanoinfluencers: This profile has less than 5k followers. They are growing influencers who share their day-to-day life with a very small community. As in the opposite case, they achieve a high power of impact on their followers because they have earned the trust of their audience.
5 steps to add influencer marketing to your growth strategy
- Define the target audience: To start an influencer marketing campaign, we need to define the target audience, as this will help us to select one type of influencer or another. In addition, based on what we want to achieve (increase sales, recognition, promote a new product...) we will send a specific brief to our collaborators.
- Choosing the influencer: This step will determine the destination of your campaign. The influencer you choose must match your brand image and the product you are going to promote. In other words, the reach of an advert for a new protein bar on the profile of a sports trainer will not be the same as that of a photographer.
- Define the brief: The brief or briefing will serve as a tool for these public figures to understand what they have to communicate, what we expect from the campaign or what values we want it to transmit. This document will explain the project in detail and it is vital that they correctly understand the work they are going to carry out.
- Homogeneity: The message that the influencers are going to communicate must coincide with the message that we are transmitting in our marketing channels. If this is not the case, users will distrust the brand and we will not be able to clearly transmit the campaign.
- Make the most of the collaboration: If the content created by the influencers has generated impact and is what was expected, it is advisable to reuse these ads. From the brand's profile, you can continue publishing content from these creators and collaborating on new projects. In this way, this influencer campaign will be prolonged over time and a long-term relationship with their community will be consolidated. By considering ourselves part of their group, we will have their trust and they will be able to become our consumers.
3 common mistakes when starting an influencer campaign
Influencer marketing, being relatively new, can make some mistakes that can lead to not getting the most out of a campaign:
- Not defining the KPIs: Measurement in the influencer strategy is essential to know the evolution of our campaign. Not defining the KPIs will cause us not to know how effective a marketing action should be.
- Unachievable objectives: When launching a campaign, it is common to try to achieve too many objectives at once, such as increasing sales, making a new product known, having more followers... However, by focusing on a specific objective and achieving what is necessary to achieve it, the result will be more beneficial for our company.
- Strengthen ties with the influencer: The key to influencer marketing lies in the content creators, which is why it is important to establish a good relationship with them to ensure that they perform their work better and future collaborations are possible.
Examples of successful influencer marketing
- Adidas: This sports brand was one of the first to incorporate influencer marketing in its strategies. It established millennials as its target audience and created a campaign on networks starring influencers who identified with the brand. They achieved a great impact on young people, as these profiles asked followers to upload photos to be the next models in the spring campaign. This generated a sense of community, identification with Adidas and thousands of interactions.
- H&M: This is one of the clothing brands with the largest presence on social networks. It has a large number of followers on Instagram thanks to an influencer campaign. They collaborated with Julie Sariñana, a fashion blogger with more than 5 million followers, and Ela Velden, a model with 1.5 million followers. The marketing strategy consisted of the creators showing their day-to-day lives wearing their brand. In this way, they connected with their target, which was the same as the two influencers. Since then, their campaigns have been common with similar profiles.
- Krash Kosmetics: This cosmetics brand is positioned as one of the most prestigious in Spain. Álvaro Kruse, beauty influencer and founder of the company, managed to get the most out of influencer campaigns. Its main recognition lies in collaborations with personalities from the world of make-up on social networks. They carefully choose who they want to collaborate with by selecting creators who identify with their values of creativity, gender diversity and love for animals. For example, among their latest collaborations are former contestants from Drag Race Spain and Nuria Adraos, a professional make-up artist who has 368k followers on Instagram and more than 4 million on TikTok.
