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influencer marketing 101 - guide and statistics

Influencer marketing is now considered a mainstream digital marketing strategy. It is more than a buzzword, though. So before moving forward, we need to understand what influencer marketing is and what value it brings to a business or, more specifically, a brand.

INFLUENCER MARKETING 101

what is influencer marketing?

At its most basic, influencer marketing is a strategy that uses influencers or individuals with a dedicated following on social media sites. These influencers are the experts in their field or niche. Brands working with influencers capitalize on the amount of trust these influencers have built up over the years. 

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Influencer marketing can be paid, although there are less tangible forms of influencer marketing. These brand collaborations work wherein the influencers are utilized to improve brand awareness in exchange for a product or service. Improving brand awareness, however, is just an application of influencer marketing.

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Influencer marketing is an offshoot of celebrity endorsements. Celebrities come with a hefty price tag that brands cannot afford their representational services. When Internet stars have more followers than celebrities, it only makes sense to tap into their services instead. So you can think of influencer marketing as a hybrid of traditional and digital marketing.

what are the types of influencers?

There are many ways to categorize influencers. It can be based on the number of their followers, the types of content they produce, and their level of influence.

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  1. Followers

    • Mega influencer

    • Macro influencer

    • Micro influencer

    • Nano influencer

  2. Content

    • Blogger

    • Vlogger (or YouTuber)

    • Podcaster

    • Social influencers

    • Photographers

  3. Influence

    • Celebrities

    • Industry leaders

    • Key opinion leaders

    • Professional advisors

what does an influencer do?

The critical term in influencer marketing is an influencer.

 

Now, you might be asking who an influencer is? An influencer can be anyone for as long as she has sizable followership. Influencers can have from 1,000 up to 1 million followers or more. In influencer marketing, more followers are always better. This is also the reason why influencers continuously build their community online. 

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An influencer does what she does best: influence her followers to do or perform the desired action. Fundamentally, that action is centered on a brand and its product or service. In addition, it means influencing others to make a purchase. As such, the influencers need to push their followers down the sales funnel.

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Influencers also:

  1. Create branded content

  2. Build personal brand

  3. Drive brand loyalty

  4. Become brand ambassadors

CREATING TOMORROW'S POSITIVE INFLUENCE

influencer marketing advantages and disadvantages

Digital marketing has an overall goal. Every strategy under this has its own purpose and intention. However, several things can go wrong.

INFLUENCER MARKETING ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

advantages of influencer marketing

  1. Trust and credibility building
    Developing both trust and credibility takes time. Influencers with a great following have already built that trust and credibility. Since influencers can talk positively about your brand and your products and services, this process helps build the followers' confidence in your brand.

    However, as a brand, you need to partner or collaborate with influencers who have authentic followers. Therefore, they are deemed as authorities in their chosen niche.
     

  2. Relevant audience targeting
    Working with relevant influencers is crucial. You may effectively attract potential customers if you work with relevant influencers. These are the influencers who have a parallel target audience as yours. 

    As a guide, look for influencers who have worked on your niche. Better yet, consult with an influencer marketing agency. It can help you find the right influencers for your thumb pain while also cutting down on your budget, time, and effort.
     

  3. Broadened reach
    Regardless of which platform you currently have a presence on, your brand may reach thousands to millions of new audiences. These are technically the followers of your chosen influencers. These are the audiences you could not have reached on your own.

    What's more, these followers value the opinion of the influencers they follow. They have trust in the influencers, so they allow them to have an influence on their buying decisions.
     

  4. Reduced sales cycle
    There is a reason our emphasis is building the target audience as genuinely as possible. Notably, only the legit influencers have highly engaged audiences. So when an influencer becomes one of your brand ambassadors, it's like cutting the sales cycle in half.

    An influencer's endorsement is a vouch for product or service value. As such, the followers end up buying the product that the influencer endorses. Skipping a process or two in the sales funnel also cuts down marketing spend.
     

  5. Minimal budget requirement
    Speaking of the marketing budget, influencer marketing is comparatively less costly than acquiring new customers through other channels. Your job is to find influencers that can help you reach your target audience.

    Steer clear from influencers who buy followers to boost their followership. If you must, enlist the help of an agency to find influencers who charge less but bring in the desired results.

disadvantages of influencer marketing

  1. Mismatched in influencers
    Finding the right influencers remains a challenge. This is extra challenging because you need to discover influencers that align with the values of your brand.
     

  2. Uncertainty of results
    Not because an influencer has contributed successfully to a particular campaign doesn't mean the same for your brand. Results are not guaranteed if the audience won't engage, then returns will not be realized.
     

  3. Measuring results difficulty 
    Even when you find the right influencers and the campaign is launched, you still need to analyze the campaign results. If you fail to set metrics and KPIs, you won't know what to monitor and track. Even where there are metrics, but you don't know how to measure them correctly, you won't be able to determine if it is successful or not.
     

  4. Highly risky
    Influencer marketing done wrong can damage your reputation. It may even cause the very brand that you have built so hard through the years. 

influencer marketing statistics

If you're not convinced enough, we will let these figures do the talking.

instagram influencer marketing statistics

  1. Instagram has 1.074 billion monthly active users

  2. Instagram is the most competitive social networking site with 4.2 billion posts daily; 95 million of these are photos and videos

  3. Instagram photo posts are the most popular at 64.4%; carousel posts at 18.8% and video posts at 16.8%

  4. The most popular niches in Instagram are fashion, beauty, lifestyle, and music

  5. Instagram influencers who have fewer followers have higher engagement rates than influencers with more followers

  6. About 22% of Instagram users buy products through the platform

youtube influencer marketing statistics

  1. YouTube is the second most popular influencer channel at 63%, following Instagram

  2. About 51% of YouTube creators’ #1 goal is to express creativity

  3. Approximately 23% of YouTubers consider inadequate time as their top challenge

  4. YouTube influencers are four times more effective than celebrities, especially when it comes to increasing brand awareness

  5. YouTube micro influencers have better engagement rates than mega influencers at 1.64%

  6. Teenagers consider YouTube influencers as more relatable than celebrities

facebook influencer marketing statistics

  1. Facebook has 2 billion monthly active users

  2. Facebook is the fifth most visited website

  3. About 9% of Facebook users buy through influencer posts

twitter influencer marketing statistics

  1. Twitter is the fourth most important influencer marketing channel, following Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube

  2. About 40% of Twitter users purchase a product or avail a service based on an influencer’s recommendation

  3. Twitter has the biggest impact on purchase decision-making compared with other channels creating a 5.2x increase in purchase intent

  4. About 49% of peter users would listen to an influencer than their friends when it comes to making a purchase

linkedin influencer marketing statistics

  1. LinkedIn is the leading platform for professional influencers

  2. LinkedIn has 90 million senior-level influencers

  3. LinkedIn processes 9 billion content impressions

  4. LinkedIn content increased by 60% in 2020

frequently asked questions (FAQs)

  1. What value influencer marketing brings to a business?
    Influencer marketing helps in building a positive brand image. The process also helps in getting more customers to try your products and services. If you are a small business with a tight budget, influencer marketing enables scaling up the business operation to get more visibility online. Increased brand awareness drives more traffic to your website, which, in turn, also drives profitability.
     

  2. Is influencer marketing still relevant this 2022?
    Influencer marketing is always thought of as a fleeting trend, a fad. Some even said that influencer marketing is already dead. However, while influencer marketing activities are declining on specific platforms such as Facebook, it is still relevant this 2022.

    Marketers are planning to increase their budgets by 63%. For them, influencer marketing remains a viable part of the overall digital marketing strategy. Also, about 80% of marketers vouch for the effectiveness of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing, therefore, will continue to thrive because the quality of traffic that it brings to any brand is better than other channels or sources.
     

  3. Where can I find influencers?
    Finding influencers is easy. However, finding relevant influencers that resonate with your target audience can be tricky. You may use influencer marketing platforms for discovery, but you have a problem if you cannot differentiate a genuine influencer from those influencers' followers. Therefore, it would be wise to tap the services of an influencer marketing agency like Gushcloud in finding the right influencers for your brand.
     

  4. Why should I hire influencers instead of celebrities?
    Certain things make influencers more appealing than celebrities. Influencers are invested in their followers and interact with them, respond to their messages and give them honest opinions about products. This is also the reason why influencers tend to be more reliable than celebrities. Celebrities rarely know the products they are endorsing in every sense of the word. Influencers are also more affordable than celebrities who attach hefty talent fees with their names.
     

  5. How can I compensate influencers?
    There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to influencer pricing. Nonetheless, brands are paying one cent per follower or about a hundred dollars per 10,000 followers. If not for monetary benefits, there are creative ways to compensate influencers, such as giving them free products, inviting them to events, offering attractive deals, giving them exclusive access, sending them on all-expense paid trips abroad, and many more.
     

  6. How to set up an influencer marketing campaign program?
    Getting started with influencer marketing requires certain steps. First, you need to determine your main goal for the influencer campaign. Second, you need to define a suitable influencer profile so that you will only hire the most relevant influencers for the said campaign. Social platforms and goals and performance metrics are also defined at this stage. Third is discovering potential influencers. Reach out to us, so that we may help you with this process. With Gushcloud at the helm, fourth, we can create a compensation package for the chosen influencers together. We will provide inputs, but will not impose. Finally, we will measure the results of the campaign.
     

  7. How to measure the success of an influencer marketing program?
    The success of the influencer marketing campaign will depend on the performance metrics and goals initially set for this particular campaign. The number of engagement and the sales generated by the said campaign is monitored and measured.
     

  8. How can my brand do collaborations with Gushcloud?
    Get in touch with your country’s Gushcloud accounts representative to help you flesh out the best influencer marketing strategy for your brand. At Gushcloud, our service does not start and end with a list of influencers you can work with. Instead, we make sure that you are fully-equipped to complement your content marketing efforts. Expect a well-thought out influencer strategy across the most pertinent social channels, a data-driven approach to talent sourcing, an audience-based take on proposed executions, and a strong account management service to guide you at every step of the collaboration.

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