Influencer Marketing Definition
Influencers
An ‘influencer’ is an individual (could be anyone, unlike celebrities) with high social media status and a large following of people on social media sites, who are able to influence people to potentially purchase the products and/or services that they advertise/recommend on their profiles via posts or stories etc.
The number of followers can range anywhere from less than 10,000 to over 100 million followers and can be influential as a beauty account on Instagram, a successful marketing director with an account on LinkedIn or anything in between.
Influencer Marketing
‘Influencer Marketing’ is a type of marketing in which brands, anything between small independent brands or larger international brands such as H&M or Zara, collaborate with said influencers (through endorsements or mentions) to advertise their goods or services to a target market via popular social media sites.
The key difference between social media marketing and influencer marketing is that through social media marketing the brand showcases the product directly to its customers who are usually already following them. Whereas influencer marketing has an intermediate who shows the product to their following in a way of targeting new customers and boosting sales.
Influencer Marketing Benefits
Improves brand awareness
It is much easier to sell things if people have already heard of your brand, consumers rarely buy products and services from brands that they have never seen or heard of. Influencers are able to showcase your brand through posts, videos or stories on their social media to thousands of followers who regard their opinion and they have already built a level of trust with. This means there is a greater chance of increasing sales for the brand.
Help brands appeal to younger audiences
60% of younger audiences trust recommendations from their favourite influencers on social media, this is due to being able to create content that is much more real, visually engaging and genuine. Brands should find influencers that are specific to their brands image, this means that they are meeting their target audience and will have much more success in finding new customers who will most likely remain loyal to the brand.
Any business can use influencer marketing as it is cost effective
Influencers can be people with any amount of following, therefore what brands pay can be different depending on the influencer they choose. For example, someone with 10,000 followers would charge a lot less to post content online than someone with 2 million followers. Although, there is no need for businesses to hire professional models, photographers as well as expensive locations, as influencers have become very creative and can do these shoots themselves, this cuts out a lot of production costs for brands. Also, due to the rise in people purchasing ad blockers, many ads are not being seen like they used to be, consumers can now pay to block ‘annoying’ and ‘boring’ ads on many sites such as YouTube and Facebook, this means businesses could be paying thousands for ads that are never even seen by their target audiences.
Influencer Marketing Trends
Nano-Influencers and Micro-Influencers
Nano-influencers are those which have a following base of 0-10k, micro-influencers have anything between 10-100k followers, anything below 500k is classified as a macro-influencer and any individual with even more followers would be at celebrity status. It is becoming increasingly more common for brands to partner with these smaller influencers when creating content, this is due to their following being more engaged, much more specific as well as having a sense of loyalty. We have seen this trend increase across the past year and is expected to grow even further into 2023.
Authenticity
Over the past year or so, the more natural vibe has been trending. There is much less use of filters compared to a few years ago, people want to see real people without all the falseness. This ensures that when a brand and an influencer collaborate it feels a lot less like a staged advertisement that many people would not pay attention to but a lot more relatable and engaging.
Tiktok Creator Marketplace
In 2020, popular social media platform Tiktok introduced the ‘Tiktok Creator Marketplace’. This is a place where brands can connect with influencers to produce content. It is a great way for brands to be able to find ‘Tiktoker’s’ who fit with their particular brand image based on budget and business goals and who will portray their products and services in the way that they want them to be shown. This is becoming more and more popular.
LinkedIn is classed as a social media site but it is for professionals to connect together, an individual’s profile shows their career as well as education and extra-curricular activities, it is often how people find job roles. However, over the past couple of years we have seen an increase in people building their own platform on the site, they are advertising products and services (different to that of Instagram and Tiktok), short blogs as well as posting ‘off work’ content from their holidays to their following of potential buyers. In 2021, LinkedIn launched their own creator fund worth $25 million, this means that we can expect to see an increase in consumers and active users on the LinkedIn platform in the near future.
Influencer Marketing Platforms
An influencer marketing platform is one that provides an end-to-end solution for brands to find potential influencers that they want to collaborate and produce content with. It is a platform that makes it possible for brands to organise new campaigns and advertisements etc. Some of these platforms provide discovery tools for example; a large database with potential collaborators making it even easier to find exactly the influencers that would fit with their brand in terms of their content, following, age, gender and price.
Grin is one of the largest influencer marketing platforms out there, they provide an easy-to-use platform for E-commerce companies looking to work with online creators/influencers. When a business signs up to Grin they first import all their existing influencers to the private Grin CRM or are able to use the large database to find influencers. They then can use Grin for every part of their content with influencers, from contacting them through email to sending products to them; brands are also able to create discount codes and affiliate links. Businesses can then use the Grin Platform to track all metrics on the influencers content such as engagement, sales and ROI. Some businesses that are partnered with Grin include L’Oréal, Olaplex and Skims (by Kim Kardashian).
Other popular platforms include Creatorco., #paid and Upfluence.
Influencer Marketing Success Stories
Levi’s – “Buy Better, Wear Longer”
Levi’s partnered with 6 very well know influencers/celebrities; Jaden Smith (Actor/Musician), Emma Chamberlain (Macro-Influencer), Xiye Bastida (Climate Activist), Xiuhtezcatl (Activist), Marcus Rashford MBE (England Footballer) and Melati Wijsen (Activist), to create the ‘Buy Better, Wear Longer’ campaign.
The main purpose of this campaign was to spread awareness about the environmental impact of fast fashion and clothing production in general. They wanted to enhance their corporate social responsibility and also advertise how their products are made to last through generations to come and not fit trends. This was a very successful campaign because of the clever use of the influencers and celebrities that they used, from famous celebrities to activists fighting for climate and the environment.
Gymshark – 66 Days: Change Your Life
Gymshark used influencer marketing to gain over 3.5 million followers on TikTok alone. They started a campaign called ‘66 Days: Change Your Life’, the purpose was for users to post a TikTok of themselves on 1st January 2019 with their fitness goals for the next 66 days, they were then to post another TikTok of them after the period of time. They partnered with respected gym influencers on the app with an already high follower base who would help promote the campaign by doing their own version and using the #gymshark66. After the 66 days, the #gymshark66 had received 1.9 million likes, 45.5 million views and 13,000 comments proving a success for gymshark in terms of sales and engagement.
SKINN – A Product Seeding Organisation
SKINN, a small brand with an even smaller budget set out the goal of creating a ‘buzz’ about their brand. To do this they sent free products to over 100 influencers that aligned with their brand image; both micro and macro-influencers. They hoped that these creators would post their products to social media. This actually worked for the company as when one of the most followed influencers that they sent products to posted it on their Instagram story; their sales of that particular product went up by 193% and their web traffic increased by 19%.
Authors:
Tia Duffield, Sara Martínez Correa y Giulia Taiola