Influencer marketing is when businesses sell products and services by promoting them with those who have gained a definite trust (read influence) within his/her audience in a particular industry
It is important to remember that universal influencers do not exist and you need to find those in your niche by research and analysis.
The number of brand sponsored influencer posts is growing. In 2017, there were 14.5 million posts on Instagram. The volume of sponsored content is projected to amount to 32.3 million posts in 2019. [Statista]
In influencer marketing, you can go big with Selena Gomez, David Beckham, Shakira, or you can go small with industry experts, bloggers, and niche-market personalities.
Who to choose?
You should consider your goals before choosing collaboration with Macro or Micro Influencer
Micro Influencers (1,000-999,999 followers)
Pros: low budget, active followers, high engagement, trust
Cons: low to medium reach
The guys and gals at MarketingProfs prove that if you are looking for qualified leads and sales, you should choose Micro Influencers. As the number of followers increases, the number of likes decreases.
Macro Influencers (1 million followers)
Pros: high reach
Cons: low engagement, high cost, passive followers
A macro-influencer can reach a lot more people in a much more efficient way, but use them only for brand awareness.
Start with your Buyer Persona
You need to understand who are you reaching in order not to spend money on people followed by wrong followers. Here is a handy table which you can fill in with your information: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1Wmpe4zMfqvHRp565J-y5wIH70czNeWhv
Different types of influencers respond to different incentives, so think carefully about what influencers in your target market will prefer.
For example, Clothing industry influencers would like to receive money and special coupons they can share with their followers.
You need to pitch influencers and agree on conditions on your own. You also need to pay for them, and you don’t need those tools every single day. The only I’d recommend you is ninjaoutreach. If you’ve decided to use a software tool in your arsenal, let it be this one.
How I search for influencers on Instagram for free:
Follow hashtags of your competitors to define who they pay for and how effective their budgets are spent.
Check on posts and engagement under them.
Contact them with taping on their profile and click on email.
How To Work With Influencers
- Sponsored Posts
- Product Reviews
- Gifts
- Competitions
- Affiliate Programs
- Guest Posts
- How to Measure Influencer Marketing Success
The metrics used by marketers to measure influencer marketing success in the United States as of November 2017: 46% of responding marketers stated that they used product sales to measure influencer marketing success and 90% consider engagement to be the most important factor. [Statista]
All the charts, deep research, and visuals are available here: http://en.promorepublic.com/blog/use-influencers-spark-sales/