Is Influencer Marketing Good for Your Business – How to Work With Influencers

Are you itching to harness the undisputed power of influencers and propel your brand to unprecedented success?

Let us guide you through the delightful world of influencer marketing as we uncover exciting stats, tips, and strategies to help you conquer this traction-gaining social media marketing approach.

Over the past few years, influencer marketing has become the go-to strategy for startups, entrepreneurs, and even established brands to make waves and help their businesses thrive. The secret to its success lies in the ability of influencers to influence and inspire the needed consumer behavior.

Before we delve deeper into the rewarding influencer marketing realm, let's explore what this marketing approach entails.

   

What Is Influencer Marketing & Why Is It So Effective?

Influencer marketing is a kind of social media marketing in which brands use influencers and creators to endorse their business, products, and services. These social media influencers have dedicated followers and have established themselves as experts within their industry.

So, why is influencer marketing so effective?

Imagine your best friend recommending a business or product to you with all the conviction in the world. You will instantly be tempted to test the brand/buy the product because you trust your friend's recommendation.

Influencer marketing's effectiveness lies in a similar trust that influencers have nurtured within their followers. Brand or product recommendations from them serve as social proof to your prospective customers. According to a report, 50% of Millennials trust the influencers they follow for product recommendations, compared to 38% of them trusting their favorite celebrities.

Since this marketing strategy involves a trusted source on a casual and social platform, a sponsored post from an influencer comes across as a vetted recommendation made by a friend. It's a great way to introduce your brand to an engaged, trusting audience.

When you partner with an influencer in your niche, you get direct access to people likely interested in your industry and brand. It eases the process of jumpstarting your relationship with potential buyers and making a lasting positive impression.

Is Influencer Marketing Good for Your Business?

While we have established the effectiveness of influencer marketing, it's only fair to wonder if influencer marketing will be a good fit for your business. Here are some benefits of influencer marketing that will help you make that judgment call:

It Offers an Incredible ROI

With an estimated value of $24.1 billion by 2025, influencer marketing is set to remain a top marketing strategy for businesses. The popularity of influencer marketing stems from the fact that it offers an exciting return on investment and enables brands to build trust with potential customers.

According to a report by HubSpot, 1 in 4 marketers that currently use influencer marketing say that it provides them the second highest ROI in marketing trends. So, it's evident that your investment in influencer marketing will deliver fruitful results.

People Trust Influencers

Both Millenials and Gen Zers trust influencer recommendations. In fact, according to the Gen Z, recommendations made by influencers are more valuable to them than the ones made by their family and friends.

While previously, people used to rely on reviews from their loved ones and other consumers before making a purchase, today, the younger generations are more inclined to trust influencers. So, working with creators and influencers on social media will give you that edge and earn you the trust of their followers.

Influencers Can Help You Save Money

While you might be operating under the assumption that creators and influencers charge exorbitant fees to promote their products on your platform, that's not true for all influencers.

Micro- or nano-influencers are social media personalities with a small yet engaged following. These creators don't demand steep charges for promotional content.

However, since they have built a respectable following by becoming experts in their field, their platform enables brands to engage with their followers and derive the needed results on a limited budget.  

Influencers Promote Your Brand Authentically

Today, consumers don't appreciate brands that churn out overtly promotional content as they are already bombarded by all types of promotional content. They want to turn to brands that put their needs first. It's why influencer marketing works.

The best influencers generally introduce your brand, product, or offering in the context of their content, making your name and product highly relevant to their followers. Instead of selling your product directly, they create authentic, humanized content around it so that the consumer learns about you without getting annoyed with yet another overzealous sales pitch.

Influencers Inspire More Purchases

In 2022, 33% of Gen Zers purchased a product based on a creator or influencer's recommendation in around three months. This statistic goes to show that the right influencers can help your brand generate more business by encouraging their following to buy your products. So, if you have a younger target audience, you must try influencer marketing to boost your business.

Influencers Help Build Brand Awareness

According to HubSpot's report, Influencer marketing is the top marketing trend for generating authentic promotional content, establishing social proof, and elevating brand awareness. With influencer marketing, your business can build credibility because a voice your target audience trusts and values will promote your brand.

Influencers in your specific industry can also help you build brand awareness, especially if you are a new business. They can help instill a sense of trust among their audience and help them learn about your values and offerings.

Influencer Marketing Can Help Your SEO Efforts

Influencers can help improve your SEO efforts as they include links to your business website in their promotional content. These quality links can help improve your website's search engine rankings. Backlinks help improve your website's performance in organic search and bring more organic visitors to your website.

What Are the Different Types of Influencers?

Here are the four types of influencers you can collaborate with on social media platforms:

• Mega-Influencers: 1M+ Followers
• Macro-Influencers: 100K-1M Followers
• Micro-Influencers: 10K-100K Followers
• Nano-Influencers: <10K Followers

While you might be tempted to go for the biggest fish in the sea of influencers, partnering with an influencer with millions of followers might not always work. It's because these influencers often have broad audiences segmented across several demographics. You might benefit more from collaborating with influencers that have more targeted, engaged communities.

Here's an overview of these four types of influencers:

Mega-Influencers

Also known as celebrity influencers, these individuals have a massive follower count surpassing 1M. These people are often athletes, actors, musicians, or other well-known public figures. Their celebrity status earns them a large and diverse following.

Mega-influencers are the perfect fit for large-scale brand awareness. They can offer your business unequaled exposure. However, they have incredibly steep collaboration charges. Also, their engagement rates might not be as high as influencers with a more niche following.

Working with these influencers benefits businesses with a large budget and broad audiences. Luxury fashion brands or high-end tech brands can create a sense of exclusivity and more exposure by collaborating with mega-influencers.

Macro-Influencers

With an impressive 100K to 1M followers, macro-influencers are established social media personalities. These are usually people who have earned their followers and reputation via consistent content creation and follower engagement. Their efforts have enabled them to become leaders in their industries.

Macro-influencers usually have followers that share common interests, resulting in a more targeted marketing approach. Partnering with these people will offer you substantial reach. However, they will still be relatively costly, so you must have a significant budget.

You can work with macro-influencers if you're a startup seeking credibility or rapid exposure and have a sizable influencer marketing budget. Businesses that wish to target a specific but vast audience can also work with these influencers.

Micro-Influencers

Micro-influencers have a highly engaged following of around 10K-100K people. These influencers usually have a strong and authentic presence on specific platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Businesses love working with niche-based micro-influencers as their audiences are typically passionate and trusting.

These influencers build their reputation based on relatable and genuine content and recommendations. They are also more affordable than influencers with larger follower counts. However, that doesn't mean they are less effective.

Since they often come across as approachable, authentic, and reliable, micro-influencers have impressive engagement on their profiles. Their persona makes their recommendations feel more personalized rather than celebrity endorsements.

Nano-Influencers

With fewer than 10K followers, nano-influencers are the most affordable social media influencers. They also deliver personable, authentic, and creative content that drives strong engagement. These people tend to be the ideal partners for brands targeting specific demographics.

Additionally, since nano-influencers work on a small scale, they tend to dedicate more time to each partnership. It often results in highly tailored, well-thought-out content that can help your brand build personal connections within the influencer's community.

Nano-influencers are excellent partners for local businesses targeting niche communities, small businesses with limited budgets, and entrepreneurs or home-based artisans with one-of-a-kind products that attract a niche audience.

Knowing what each influencer can offer you in terms of engagement, reach, and cost is crucial in choosing the right one for your business.

How Much Do Influencers Charge?

The charges of influencers depend on various factors, and there is no one-size-fits-all cost or an established pricing structure. That said, many businesses start with the one cent per follower rule of thumb. It means that if an influencer has 10K followers, you can pay them $100 for a collaboration.

However, influencer rates are typically determined by the following factors:

• Follower count and engagement
• The type of content included in the collaboration, such as a story, post, reel, or carousel
• Repurpose rights for the content
• The time and resources used to create the content
• The campaign's length

Depending on these factors, even micro-influencers can charge a significant collaboration fee. That said, macro- and mega-influencers typically charge thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for a sponsored post. On the other hand, nano- and micro-influencers have more affordable charges.

How to Find the Right Influencers for Your Brand

The best influencer marketing collaboration will help you engage your target audience, build brand awareness, and generate more business. So, how can you find the right social media creators and influencers for your business?

Here are six tips to help you find your perfect match:

Define Your Ultimate Target

You must pinpoint the ultimate goal you hope to achieve with influencer marketing before choosing a collaborator. For instance, do you wish to build brand awareness, generate more authentic leads, or drive a specific product's sales?

Consider how your collaboration will align with your broader social media marketing strategy and which collaborator can help you achieve your goal.

Look for Influencers Across Various Networks

The digital realm offers a diverse and exciting array of content platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Influencers across these platforms use various formats to engage with their audiences. These include stories, videos, reels, challenges, etc.

Look for popular and well-loved influencers across these platforms, use various content formats, and have an engaged following that resembles your target audience. It will help you engage with prospective customers creatively.

Keep an Eye on Influencers Already Talking About Your Brand

Influencers in the nano and micro categories often tag brands in their stories, posts, and comments, even when not working with them directly. If you monitor your mentions, DMs, tagged posts, branded hashtags, etc., from influencers, you will already have people with large followings interested in collaborating with you.

Since these influencers are already aware of you, it makes reaching out to them for partnerships easier and more organic. That said, don't forget to vet them first and explore if they fit your brand. You must also assess if their endorsements are genuine and if they generate the required buzz.

Ultimately, you must engage with influencers who understand your niche and products. Looking for legitimate collaborators who already post a lot of content that fits your niche and have worked with similar brands will automatically make your collaboration more credible to your target audience.

Consider Influencers Your Target Audience Engages With

A crucial step in finding the right influencer is choosing people with followers that fit perfectly under the umbrella of your target audience. Look at your existing community and see if they follow the influencers you are interested in.

Explore your audience's interests in creators and niches and see the common trends. Consider if the influencers they trust and engage with align with your vision and goal. If you find influencers that fit the bill, approach them with the opportunity to partner with you.

Assess Influencers' Key Performance Metrics

Once you find a creator you like, evaluate their metrics to determine if they can help you achieve your targets. This proactive exploration of their followers, the comments their posts receive, and the general engagement on their accounts will help you surmise where they stand in your industry.

You must assess the influencer's followers are full of bots and spam accounts and gauge the authenticity of their engagement and community. Do a Google search, talk to their contacts, and scroll through their previous posts before coming to a conclusion.

Employ an Influencer Marketing Service

Opting to work with a comprehensive influencer marketing service will help you research and find influencers best suited for your brand. An agency offering this service will consider legitimate creators with prior experience in your niche and followers that resemble your target audience.

How to Create an Effective Influencer Marketing Campaign

While influencer marketing is an effective social media marketing strategy, you must take calculated steps to find success when collaborating with creators across social media networks.
Here are four tips for creating a successful influencer marketing campaign:

Research the Payment Structure of Influencers & Choose Your Platform & Creator

Select the social media platform you want to work with, ideally, the one you already have a strong presence on, and choose an influencer whose content will align with your overarching goals. Consider your industry when selecting a platform to begin your influencer marketing efforts. For instance, fashion and beauty brands thrive on TikTok and Instagram, while the gaming industry gets traction on Twitch and YouTube.

Next, consider the type of influencer you want to work with and the cost a potential collaboration with them will incur. Compensation will vary greatly depending on your choice. If you have a limited budget and a specific goal, working with micro-influencers is best.

Research if your preferred influencers work independently or have agency representation. Their collaboration costs will vary accordingly. Consider the expected ROI of your campaign and how much you can afford to pay the influencer from the get-go. Assess how much you would pay for a traditional form of digital marketing compared to the budget of an influencer and compare the ROI to make an informed decision.

Define a Campaign Management Strategy

Running a successful influencer marketing campaign involves carefully monitoring each step and following up with the creator when required. It's not an automated ad strategy. Instead, it requires proactive human collaboration and cohesion of ideas.

For instance, some influencers might fall behind on their commitment to post about your brand timely or make errors in the requested CTAs or hashtags. You will need a hands-on approach to ensure the effectiveness of the campaign.

Alternatively, you can work with a trusted marketing agency like Content Development Pros to manage your influencer marketing campaigns. We can develop a well-defined, tailored strategy to work with multiple influencers.

Determine Your Campaign Messaging

Your campaign messaging should be aligned with your campaign goals. Consider your brand's most immediate or pressing needs when determining your goals. They could be launching a new product, attracting a new demographic, or something equally specific. It will help you narrow down your niche and connect with an influencer with relevant followers.

Once you have determined your goal and the influencer who can successfully deliver it, work on the content they will share. Ideally, it's best to give the influencer creative license since they know their audience best, but it doesn't mean that you don't share your input.

After all, it's a collaborative process, and you must ensure your needs are being met through the content. Influencer content with an authentic, personal, and conversational tone works well with specific niches. Your message should align with the values of the community you wish to engage. It needs to have a creative and unique edge that will encourage people to engage with your brand.

Review & Refine Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

Working with a marketing agency that offers influencer marketing services will enable you to create a scalable influencer marketing campaign that resonates with your audience. Furthermore, an influencer marketing service will entail seasoned marketing professionals monitoring and measuring the success of your campaign.

The marketing agency will track KPIs, website traffic, conversions, and other goals you want to monitor to assess if your efforts are working and make the necessary tweaks for improvement. This way, you can ensure your campaign is reviewed and refined by professionals who understand what they are doing to ensure your business's success.

Tips to Work With Influencers for a Successful Marketing Campaign

Here are some tips that will help you work with influencers effectively:

Involve Influencers in the Brainstorming Process

While it might sound like a recipe for disaster, involving legitimate influencers in the conception of new ideas and campaigns can help you resonate with your audience. So, instead of telling the influence what you want from them, collaborate with them and use their insight to develop original and creative campaign ideas.

After all, they understand their followers and know the type of content that will receive the maximum engagement on their platform. Most micro-influencers also have a specific way of approaching their following. So, if you want them to retain their authenticity while partnering with you, give them the creative freedom to retain their voice instead of forcing them to stick to your pitch.

Choose Influencers with Massive Engagement, Not Numbers

Instead of letting yourself be dazzled by the millions of followers of a creator, focus on working with influencers that offer exceptional engagement. Choose creators who have the ability to connect with their audience with authentic content regardless of the follower count.

In a world where it's too easy to buy impressions and fake followers, your best bet is to find influencers who give their undivided attention to each collaboration. Ensure they receive impressive engagement on their sponsored and organic content, signifying a deep connection with their audience.

This approach entails looking at audience quality instead of quantity. If you focus on the type of engagement an influencer receives, you will realize whether their audience is truly interested in what they have to say. It will help you determine if they will be the right fit to promote your brand.

Consider Organic Micro-Influencer Partnerships

Micro-influencers are a great fit for brands looking to grow their following organically and build customer relationships over a long time. They also don't charge as exorbitantly as mega- or macro-influencers, which is always a plus for any brand.

Moreover, micro-influencers give you the opportunity to build a relationship with a creator on solid ground, enabling both parties to grow together. It is an organic, authentic, and mutually-beneficial relationship that has the potential to produce content that will resonate with your audience and encourage customer loyalty over a long time.

Prioritize Authenticity to Form Connections

Consumers, especially followers of social media influencers, respond to authentic, relatable storytelling. According to a report, 88% of consumers value influencers that display authenticity and genuine care about their interests.

If your chosen influencer is not genuine in their recommendations, their audience will see through the façade, and your brand will lose credibility along with the creator in question. So, research the influencers you like to find an authentic creator.

It's best to work only with creators deemed genuine by their following and those around them. It will help you collaborate with them to share the most engaging influencer content that comes from and speaks to the heart.

Be Honest & Define Your Expectations

When spending money on a collaboration, communicate your expectations to the influencer. Clearly outline your campaign's timeline and the deadlines for all deliverables with specifications for everything. Sign an agreement regarding the deliverables and the payment structure, terms, and schedule.

This way, you can remain on the same page while creating the content and work with its results accordingly. Be clear about the tweaks you expect to make in the campaign if it doesn't deliver the expected results and engagement.

That said, you must accompany your honesty with the best creative spirit and professionalism. It will help you foster marketing relationships with the influencers you like beyond the original campaign. If things go well, those creators can become your regular collaborators and promote all your offerings to their audience.

Have a Well-Defined Onboarding Process & Brief

When approaching an influencer for collaboration, have an airtight onboarding process. Have clearly-define objectives and specifics in the paperwork or digital contract. If you are working with multiple influencers in your industry, ensure your collaboration process is streamlined to avoid frustrating paperwork.

Moreover, ensure your brief is well-structured and informs the influencers of your goals and the resources you can provide them without being overly restrictive. Include your company's background, core values, brand information, and products or services you sell and wish to promote.

Mention the benefits, features, and USPs of your products. Don't forget to include your target audience persona, campaign budget, timeline, etc. Lastly, provide the influencers with your preferred brand colors, logo, and fonts.

Monitor the Creator's Campaign Metrics

Influencer marketing demands you to look beyond conversions and revenue and focus on holistic campaign metrics to gauge its impact. When working with an influencer on a campaign, consider the engagement metrics, such as the comments, likes, and shares their stories and posts receive.

Focus on brand awareness among the audience by measuring the clicks, views, and website traffic you receive. Track your new follower growth to measure your brand visibility. Lastly, check the number of inbound leads, i.e., the number of messages and inquiries you have received since the campaign's launch.

It's best to work with a reliable marketing agency offering comprehensive influencer marketing services. This way, you will not have to worry about finding the right influencers and creating, launching, and measuring your campaign. The agency and influencers you finalize will work collaboratively on your behalf, enabling you to focus on running your business and reaping the benefits of influencer marketing.

So, Is Influencer Marketing Worth It?

The short answer? Yes!

Influencer marketing works amazingly well for businesses across varied industries. Whether you are an entrepreneur just starting a new business, a small business struggling to gain exposure, or even an established brand looking for more customers, the right influencers can help you achieve your goals.

Since influencers are trusted for their opinions and content by their followers, the promotional content they churn out is also received positively. They can inspire the required action in your target audience. All you have to do is invest in the right influencer marketing services to benefit from the influencer marketing goldmine.

CDP – Empowering Your Brand With Influencer Marketing Excellence 

Content Development Pros offers dedicated influencer marketing services to businesses of all sizes. Our tailored services, starting from a mere $150/month (yes, you read that right!), will enable you to connect with the right influencers. So, be prepared to forge authentic, long-lasting collaborations to empower your brand.

We offer an in-depth understanding of the ever-evolving influencer marketing landscape and provide tailored solutions that will align with your brand's objectives. We work with businesses and influencers across all industries, including fashion, beauty, travel, music, food, fitness, lifestyle, gaming, photography, and more.

Our influencer marketing services include:

• Multi-platform influencer marketing
• Curated sourcing of pre-vetted influencers
• Creative brief development
• Niche & trend-based audience and competitor research
• Influencer onboarding & management
• Promotional content creation
• Campaign strategy creation
• Campaign performance audit & management
• Expert influencer marketing consultation
• Detailed analytics & reporting