Influencer marketing in its simplest term is when a prominent individual is commissioned to market a particular brand or product in order to increase brand awareness, leads or sales. However, this kind of marketing tactic has existed before where brands partnered with prominent figures with an effort to promote their brand and product through what had become known as ambassadorship. Does it sound familiar, guess it does. Though still exists.
Influencer marketing is sophisticated in a way that it has gained much trust from companies looking into reach, engage, and create brand awareness to a specific community or target market. However, it has its fair share of mistrust and scepticism, and advertising regulation association has responded by developing a policy to regulate influencer and online marketing. Be that as it may.
Marketers have seized the opportunity to recommend influencer marketing the engine to reach and communicate brand messages to the large community of marketplace most found on social media networking. Most influencers use Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook which isn’t that big in carrying messages for influencers.
As of this moment, there are three prominent categories of influencer marketing; the nano, micro (mid-tiers) and macro influencer (mega influencers) marketing.
With that being said, there are ongoing discussions around micro and macro-influencer marketers which are most effective and efficient when comes to ROI.
A micro–influencer is an individual who is an expert or thought leader in a particular subject matter. This individual would usually follow certain topics that are of their interest. They’d do reviews about a new product in the market. That is why it’s important when brands hand-picked particular micro influencer to do market for their products, they must select the one that is knowledgeable about their (brands) market. Micro influencers generally have followership of up to 10,000 across social media platforms.
In most cases, brands and marketers would select an influencer based on the followership they have on social media platforms. Customers, today, have the ability to see if the influencer is not genuine and that would not convince them to buy your product if your campaign objective is to push sales.
That said, it doesn’t mean that micro influencers aren’t effective. The secret is in the vetting of the perfect person to represent your brand. Brands and marketers are most concerned about the buck – ROI /ROM. Micro influencers since are known to be experts and thought leaders, obviously people who are following them do so because they know that particular individual’s content is what they are looking for or they always get the answer for certain subject matter. Therefore, they have trust and credibility to convince them to buy your product.
Macro influencer is one of the most preferred categories by big brands. A Micro influencer is someone with a mad following of above 300 000 across platforms. Big Brands and Marketers would usual select a Macro influencer because of the number of follows they have, for example, Cassper Nyovest has been named the new face of Samsung because of his numbers, not credibility or the trusted person to represent this mega brand.
However, brands and marketers always take a gamble with macro influence because the content reaches a large number of people, here the aim isn’t much the right target market but it’s about spreading the content to the biggest pool hoping that few fishes shall bite the bait. Similarly to micro influencer followers, macro influencers are known to partnering with brands when they post content about a particular brand especially sponsored post it becomes apparent that there’s no authenticity, therefore, customer do not buy it.
Now that we’ve extrapolated on different types of influencer marketing, and the criterions of selecting a perfect influencer for your marketing purpose.
It is imperative that brands and marketers select platforms suitable for effective influencer marketing campaigns.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub, Instagram is the most important platform for influencer marketing by far, and thus there has been an exponential growth and popularity of Instagram as a social network. Indeed, it is now the network of choice for most influencer marketing campaigns.
Given the above statistics your influencer marketing efforts should obviously be driven by your overall campaign objective, thus your selection of which platform to utilise for optimising the campaign. The fact that Instagram is the biggest platform for influencer marketing doesn’t automatically detect the brand manager and marketing managers should use it, Facebook is another platform wherein to reach a diverse pool of people from across demographics.
Lastly, always know what the overall objective for your influencer marketing campaign is. Thereafter, select the most appropriate influencer who will integrate well your brand or product.
