What is influencer marketing?

About Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a mainstream form of online marketing yet there are still people who don’t understand what it is all about. Over the past few years, the popularity of social media influencers has been growing exponentially, making influencer marketing prevalent. Influencer marketing is an ever-changing tool brands are using to sell their products and increase their online exposure. It is a hybrid of social media marketing that involves endorsements and product placements from influencers. The influencer marketing market size worldwide has grown from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $13.8 billion in 2021.

Influencer Marketing and Influencer Relations

There are two terms to define an influencer’s role in marketing. These are influencer marketing and influencer relations. Influencer marketing refers to short-term and paid activities, whereas influencer relations links to unpaid, earned, and shared media content. Influencer relations aims to strengthen and create long term relationships between influencers and their audiences. Brands and advertisers invest in influencers and their relevant posts and content which link to the brand’s target audience.

What is an Influencer?

What makes someone an influencer is their large following on social media, influencers unlike the average celebrity can be anywhere. An influencer can be a popular fashion stylist on Instagram or a gardener with a plethora of knowledge on all things green who tweet their top gardening tips daily or a respected business professional on LinkedIn. Any and every industry has influential people, you just have to find them. Influencers spend a long time building their brand and cultivating their audience, this makes influencer marketing organic and more receptive for the consumer.

Levels of Influencers

Some of the top social media influencers are the well-known famous Kardashian sisters. For many brands, smaller influencers with a niche follower base may be more effective than the Kardashian mega-influencers plus the cost is much lower. There are different levels of influencers depending on their follower size, these are broken down as below;

• Nano-influencers (10K or fewer)
• Micro-influencers (10K - 100K)
• Macro-influencers (100K - 1M)
• Mega-influencers (1M+)

Why is Social Media and Influencer Marketing so Important?

Social media creates an interactive environment for every user where they are able to view or create content in any form or genre. It is key for marketers to focus on how they can enhance their engagement with influencers who have significant power in their followers’ purchase decisions. In a digital world, it cannot be denied that influencers and their strategies have become one of the key impacts on consumers’ decisions and their lifestyles in general. Social media influencers appear to be the gateway to reaching more consumers and building better, stronger, and longer-lasting brand relationships.

How Can We Help You with Influencer Marketing?

We can help your business or brand build long term success with ongoing ambassadors, influencer sampling, and paid influencer campaigns. We will carefully research the perfect influencers to help enhance your brand over time in an ongoing relationship. Once the perfect accounts are chosen, we will manage an ongoing relationship for your brand for continued brand building, content creation and organic exposure.

• Influencer sampling: getting your product into the hands of influencers in exchange for some content posted on their channels.
• Paid influencer campaigns: putting your product right at the heart of an influencer’s content for a fee, this could include product placement, tutorials, how-to videos and reels.
• Ambassador management: building long term success with ongoing ambassadors.