Influencers are authorities within their niche on social media, people who would usually not consider themselves famous in the offline world. The size of their following is less important than their reputation as go-to resources on a given topic. They promote themselves and brands they like to audiences they build single-handedly, giving them all the power to run things as they see fit (within platform guidelines, of course). Let this blog post be your influencer marketing guide. 

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Influencer marketing grew greatly from 2016-2019 and was boosted again by the pandemic of 2020. Now clearly part of the mainstream, spending is projected to increase into the mid-teens of billions for 2022 from just over 1.5 billion in 2016. Spending on influencers is generating a 5X ROI for every dollar spent. Below are just a big few brands that have used influencer marketing successfully.

• Audible
• Adidas
• Zara
• Blue Apron

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Why Should Brands Use Influencer Marketing?

Customers don’t trust traditional marketing anymore, and they are increasingly hesitant to trust celebrities on social media. They want as close to friend referrals as they can get, which is in this case people who they’d like to be friends with or people they look up to. Many customers would like to be influencers themselves. In order to reach new audiences, the ones growing and thriving today, you’ll need to tap into these grassroots marketers, many of whom simply have a knack for promotion and do influencing on the side. The credibility and brand reputation you can gain from everyday people promoting your offerings is practically priceless. 

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How to Find Your Brand’s Influencers

Even if you have a big budget, you shouldn’t just start reaching out to popular influencers randomly. Dial deeply into your community and find the influencers that are both available and best positioned to represent your particular take on the community you’ve chosen. 

• Comments: When you narrow down a list of influencers, look through their comments to make sure engagement is real and meaningful, not just a bunch of bots. 
• Online Reputation: You don’t want anything in an influencer’s past to harm your brand, so make sure their reputation is solid across the internet. 
• Paid vs. Organic Content: It’s best to find influencers with a mix of paid and organic ads so that your ad doesn’t get lost in the mix. That said, make sure they aren’t already overloaded with promotions. 

Types of Influencers

All influencers aren’t created equal—there are mega, macro, micro, and nano influencers, and which is right for your brand is for you to dial in. 

• Nano: 1k-10k followers with influence over a local market. 
• Micro: 10k-100k followers with super-strong pull within a particular niche. What they lack in numbers they make up for in conversion percentages. 
• Mid-Tier: 100k-500k on IG. 
• Macro: 500k-1M followers, big marketing campaigns that don’t have the budget for actual celebrities. 
• Mega: 1M+ influencers primed for promoting major brands whose offerings are already mainstream yet need to keep growing. 

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Craft a Goal

Influencers don’t just move product or service signups, though they certainly can. Sometimes you just want to build brand awareness, and create some goodwill you’ll cash in later for actual sales. Quest Nutrition doesn’t require big follower numbers to provide sponsorship, simply people who live the healthy lifestyle they promote, clearly to build an army of promoters big and small who make their brand name inescapable. In general, the most important goals of working with influencers are the following:

• Reputation: gifting, events
• Traffic: sponsored social media content, guest posts.
• Brand Awareness: brand mentions, giveaways, product reviews.
• Leads & Sales: shoutouts, discount codes, affiliate marketing.
• Followers & Social Engagement: brand ambassadors, takeovers.

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Who is Your Audience?

To find the right influencers, you have to understand your audience. Of course, this is the most basic step in social media marketing, and through running any business you’ll grasp who your audience is. However, you have to get familiar enough with influencers to know which ones A) you can access and B) actually have significant pull with your audience. 

• Influencer Discovery Tools: Software like Trendpop can help you discover your ideal influencers beyond the ones you have already found yourself. 
• Your Own Research: You can go this route and rely on what the influencers indicate their demographics are but be sure to double-check them just in case.

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Consider the 3 R’s

Reach, relevance and resonance are the 3 R’s that let you know if an influencer has the pull you need to make collaborating with them worth it. Reach is pretty simple -- do they have the follower count needed to make the impact you want. But resonance and relevance are more difficult to discern. 

• Relevance: Does an influencer’s content match your audience’s interests?
• Resonance: Does relevant content go the extra mile and convert your audience? A lot of influencer content is relevant—your people will click on it—but very little of that content resonates to the point that they click through and become so interested that they take the action you want them to take, ideally signing up for your service or buying your product. Often this simply comes down to how convincing the influencer is, and how well they do their job of marketing your offerings. Anyone can post a pic holding your product … some influencers simply do this based on how much their audience is enthralled with them alone. 

Match Your Metrics

Certain metrics can back up your influencer choices with hard data. 

• Impressions: Do they get the eyeballs you need? You already know that reach is the number of people that see an influencer’s content, but that’s not the only important metric—what about impressions? This is the number of times that a particular influencer appears in a user’s feed. Keep in mind that people close apps before seeing everything fed into their feed, so impression numbers aren’t 100% accurate.

• Engagement: This is what really matters because users are taking actual action. The low single digits are standard percentages of engagement, which mirrors conversion of every type across the web in general. Bigger influencers reach more people but have lower engagement, while micro-influencers reach less followers but convert more. 

• Branded Content Frequency: If influencers post too much—just like getting hit by too many emails from one brand—engagement declines. People unfollow. They don’t want their feed filled with too much of any one type of content, which is understandable, so make sure to target influencers who keep their audience wanting. 

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Give a Little to Get a Lot

Your influencers don’t just support your business efforts, you need to support them back. Besides building a feedback loop of impressions and conversions, you should genuinely enjoy the influencers who promote your business. Showing your genuine interest is an easy way to engage yourself and become part of the community on any particular platform, whether it’s a niche or mainstream interest. 

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What is Measured is Managed

No marketing campaign runs itself, and influencer campaigns are no different, meaning you need to measure them and tweak them to optimize results. Remember to track reach, engagement, and conversion to see where things are going right and wrong. If you’re reaching many people and they’re engaging but not converting once they hit your site, that’s on you. Time to tweak your offer. If influencers get your collaborative posts viewed, but nobody engages or clicks over to your site, consider working with a different influencer or changing your social content. 

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Conclusion

Influencers are the present and future of social media marketing, people who have the authority to get their followers to take the actions businesses want. While barely five years old, 90% of marketers say influencers are effective at promotion and the vast majority of firms project increasing their spending percentage in the following years on influencers. The faster you tap into this form of promotion, the better equipped you’ll be to move with the wave as it grows and learn how to create a successful influencer marketing campaign. 

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