5 Influencer Marketing Trends That Will Lead Your Digital Business To Success
Influencer marketing today is not just a buzzword but a powerful tool to attract new customers. Before we started talking about newest trends, let’s actually figure out who are influencers and can this channel really can bring you a crowd of customers?
The definition of the term influencer is quite simple – it is a person who is popular on social media, i.e. Instagram, Youtube or Twitter, and whose opinion really matters. Take a Kylie Jenner as an example. In February 2018 one her unflattering tweet about Snapchat caused the company’s stock to lose approximately $1.3B of its value.
According to the recent statistics from emarketer, 81% of marketers who cooperated with influencers find this marketing channel effective. Research from Twitter shows that about 40% of Twitter users bought a product a Twitter influencer recommended to them. And the Google survey claims that 60% of YouTube users are influenced by YouTube creators when choosing what to buy.
Cooperation with famous influencers can cost a company a pretty penny. For instance, Kylie’s sister Kim Kardashian is paid $250 000 for one Instagram post. In case a company has not that much money, collaboration with a micro-influencer may be a great solution. It is a person who has 100K or fewer followers in social media. According to statistics, 96% of these people charge less than $1000 for a blog post and less than $250 for a tweet. This step helps middle-sized and small companies to attract customers with reasonable spendings.
No doubts 2017 was a year of influencer marketing. Let’s find out what has changed in 2018 and which strategy will drive new customers to your digital business.
#1 Use various platforms
There is no denying that Instagram is the number one platform to collaborate with influencers. But it doesn’t mean that other ones are ineffective. Take into account that an influencer can be active in several social networks at the same time.
The cost of cooperating depends on how many followers have an influencer, what are their engagement rate and the scale of the campaign. The bigger the number of companies willing to collaborate with the influencer, the bigger is a price of his services.
And since the IG is the most popular platform, promoting here will be more expensive. If you have a small business and a limited budget to spend on cooperation with an influencer, ask them about the promotion on another social network. Although the number of people who will see an ad is lower, you could get an increased ROI.
#2 Software to help you find an influencer
A great popularity of this marketing channel resulted in the appearance of different platforms that will help you find an appropriate influencer. Using such tools is a new trend in influencer marketing since they let business owners find influencer faster and with better accuracy.
Without this software you typically need to take the following steps:
- Search influencer on a social network like Facebook, Youtube and so forth
- Contact via DM or e-mail.
- Discuss the details of your collaboration
- Pay for promotion and wait till influencer publish the post
This process can be greatly simplified buy tools like Upfluence and Tapinfluence.
#3 Transparent cooperation
At the dawn of influencer marketing, only a few companies told honestly that they collaborated with influencers. In turn, influencers promoted products and services without saying that a company has paid for it.
In September 2017 the Federal Trade Commission decided to make this collaboration transparent and set the strict rules of influencer marketing. According to the updated endorsement guidance, now users should be aware that the post is paid. To meet this requirement, influencer should simply add hashtags #sponsored, #partnership or #ad.
Social networks also made a step towards facilitating cooperation. For instance, Instagram introduced its Branded Content Tools. Now influencer has no need to add hashtags, they only need to mark paid post like on the picture.
Facebook also offers its own Branding Content tool to help influencers and companies avoid all legal issues. So be open concerning your partnership with celebrity or media influencer to avoid problems with the law.
#4 Only a high-quality content
No more boring advertisement! Of course, you can ask an influencer to write a few lines about how much they love your product. But don’t think that this approach will drive a tens of thousands of customers immediately. Stop using programmatic ads, instead think creatively. Otherwise, influencer’s followers will find this advertisement boring. As a result, your marketing campaign won’t work.
So if you’re an owner of small or medium-sized business but tight in budget, try to find creative ways to promote a product and make your collaboration outstanding.
#5 Metrics analysis
The quantitative and qualitative analysis is the cardinal rule of every marketing campaign. You won’t know whether you influencer campaign is beneficial for your brand without tracking metrics. Here you can also see a plethora of tools to track the success of the campaign. Among the basic ones are UTM parameters. In plain English, this is a code that tracks how many users came on your website from an influencer’s page.
Use of promo codes is another great solution that is easy to track. First, allocate a unique promo code for influencer and they paste it into their post. Then consumers enter this code on your website and get bonuses for doing this.
Companies using influencer marketing
Influencer marketing can be profitable for most business areas, including digital business. Let’s discover how most popular companies in the digital sphere use influencer marketing.
Tech giant Amazon works with social media influencers to advertise their products like Audible and Prime Now. To date, Amazon cooperated with 11 IG and Youtube stars who made 14 paid posts for the company.
Another great example is a Chinese company Baidu. Apart from the search engine, the company creates mobile applications and then asks Youtube and Instagram stars to promote their products.
Airbnb is another great example. The company works only with celebrities – Airbnb pays for their stays, and in turn, a famous person writes a paid post on a social network. In the last 2 years, the tech giant collaborated with 37 celebrities and gained 18M likes.
In 2017 Next Games came up with a great idea of how to promote its game for mobile devices called The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land. Next Games paid famous YouTubers Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso, and Anwar Jibawy in order to create a great video about this game.
As you can see, such tech giants like Amazon and Airbnb successfully use social media marketing in order to drive new customers. So it is high time to jump on the bandwagon and follow these 5 trends to promote your brand effectively.
Author bio:
Nataliia Kharchenko is a Technical Writer at Cleveroad. It is web and mobile app development company in Ukraine. We are focused on helping startups, small, and medium businesses create competitive and winning software. I enjoy bringing a digital world closer to people and writing about technology, mobile apps, innovations, and progressive management models.
