Brands are always looking for ways to raise awareness, get their products and services seen, and build more rapport, trust, and credibility with their target audiences. Marketing agencies, on the other hand, are also constantly looking for strategies that can help their clients improve their return on investment and bring added value.
Influencer marketing can be an excellent answer to both of these pain points. But what is influencer marketing exactly, and what’s the best way to get started? We asked our social media experts to help us answer these questions.
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What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves collaborating with an online influencer who promotes a brand's services or products. The partnership can also focus on other marketing aspects, such as raising brand awareness, improving product recognition, or building trust and credibility with your target audience.
Some imagine influencer marketing as a partnership with a celebrity to create a series of ads for a paid campaign or even television. While there are some similarities, teaming up with influencers has a much broader set of applications.
Unlike traditional celebrities, influencers are everywhere and can be anyone. The main factor that makes them stand out is their massive following on social channels. They can be talented fashion photographers, musicians, or bloggers that offer financial tips — regardless of the industry, you can find someone in every niche to enhance your brand’s social media marketing efforts.
Why Bother With Influencer Marketing?
Many digital marketing experts have speculated that the trend of “deinfluencing” could mean the end of traditional influencers, but others see it as a logical evolution of influencer marketing.
Trends and ethical questions aside, influencer partnerships work. They let brands leverage their trust and credibility, evoking trustworthiness and making their products more enticing by association. Think about influencers as a mutual friend who vouches for a person you’ve just met and claims things you’re a bit skeptical about.
Establishing a partnership and creating a strategy can help you expand your reach, especially when your brand’s values, mission, and vision are shared with the person. Why? Chances are that the people who follow them share similar values and like similar things.
Taking advantage of such a partnership can help you drive more traffic to your relevant digital touchpoints, increase your online exposure, help you better understand your audience, and sell more of your products.
Influencers can also help you boost your content marketing efforts by creating their promotional assets, in which they usually review or demonstrate products, helping consumers build rapport with your offerings before the purchase.
If this isn’t enough to convince you, we’ve also gathered a few impressive influencer marketing statistics to showcase the power of the method.
- In 2024, the global value of the influencer market is forecasted to reach $24 billion, while 22.4% of business owners have stated that they’ve allocated 10 to 20% of their marketing budget for influencer marketing. 26% have said that more than 40% of their entire budget will go to influencer marketing.
- US-based brands spent an estimated $7,14 billion on influencer marketing in 2024.
- In 2022, around 69% of consumers trusted influencer product recommendations, while 81% of the same group embraced influencer marketing in some form.
- YouTuber MrBeast was the highest-paid influencer in 2023 with total earnings of around $82 billion.
- The average ROI for brands that invest in influencer marketing is around $4.12 for every dollar spent on Instagram. That means a campaign worth $500 can lead to a $2,105 return.
- 85% of businesses believe that influencer marketing is an effective strategy.
- TikTok mega-influencers with more than a million followers received average views of 329,283 in 2022, while macro-influencers get around 28,517 views.
Affiliate Marketing vs. Influencer Marketing
Is influencer marketing a form of affiliate marketing? While often used interchangeably, there are subtle differences between the two terms. Both have the same goal to create partnerships with a third party and boost marketing efforts, but they focus on different things.
Affiliate marketing strategies are mostly driven by sales through focusing on product promotion to increase revenue. Companies also pay commissions for direct conversions only. Influencer marketing, on the other hand, focuses more on brand awareness and building trust.
That said, any brand from any industry can get started with influencer marketing, especially with the right kind of help. From small businesses to large corporations to nonprofit organizations, any entity can leverage the benefits of these partnerships.
However, influencer marketing is all about patience. Just like building a thriving online community, influencer-generated content does get a better engagement than traditional branded content, with an average engagement rate of 4.2%. However, that doesn’t mean that the better metrics will translate into sales instantly.
With influencer marketing, you can gain more traction, acquire new followers, and build more loyal relationships with customers.
How To Find the Right Influencers
Finding the right person for a partnership can be a daunting task, especially if you have no prior experience working with influencers as a business owner. As such, there are two typical paths you can take.
Finding the Best Match Alone
As the subheading implies, this approach involves doing the legwork by yourself. Whether you’re an agency specialist who’s been tasked to look for influencers for an upcoming project or a business owner who wants to boost their social presence, the best way to find influencers would be using influencer databases. These search tools can help you create a list of potential partners quickly, and you can also get a glance at their following, collaboration types, pricing, reviews, and more.
You can also opt for recommendations from other specialists, agencies, or businesses that have worked with influencers in the past. Their experiences can vouch for the partnership, but that doesn’t guarantee that the partnership will work for you. There could be differences in budget, target audience, etc.
Opting for Expert Help
To get the most out of your efforts as a business owner, we highly recommend opting for dedicated social media agencies and influencer marketing experts. They won’t only help you find the partnership that will benefit your campaign the most, but they will also help set up the campaign with the influencer, aid in creating the content, track the campaign’s performance, and more. Typically, this ensures that you get a fully tailored approach, maximizing the potential of your efforts.
How To Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy
Finding the right influencer is only a part of the equation. After establishing a partnership, you also need a strategic approach to make the collaboration fruitful. Below is a short list of some best practices that can help maximize your results.
- Establish your goals
- Focus on your messaging
- Collaborate on content
- Set clear expectations and terms
- Measure campaign performance
Establish Your Goals
What do you want to achieve with your campaign? Raise awareness, boost engagement, or increase sales? Knowing what you want will help you determine other aspects of your strategy, measure campaign performance, and can even help you find the right partner if you haven’t chosen one yet.
Focus on Your Messaging
Concentrate on crafting a message that will resonate with the influencer and their audience. Better yet, work together to create an authentic narrative. Forced promotions and unrealistic promises feel unnatural and can deter prospects and damage your credibility.
Collaborate on Content
Whether you are working on your own branded content or collaborating on a client’s project with an influencer, you should take an active part in devising a content plan and creating assets that fit into the influencer’s style and platform while also addressing your own needs.
It’s also vital to point out that taking an active role doesn’t mean scrapping the influencer of their creative freedom and style. Don’t forget, it’s their audience and they know them best. Allow them to create content that works for both of you.
Set Clear Expectations and Terms
Establish the terms of the partnership and highlight deliverable timelines, your requirements, and compensations. This will avoid misunderstandings and may even lay down the foundation of a long-term partnership.
Measure Campaign Performance
You also need to track how your campaign performs. You can agree with the influencer if you prefer to monitor your performance together or see if they can provide you with regular reports. Either way, monitoring your performance can help you finetune your upcoming campaigns and give you a better understanding of how well influencer marketing works for you.
Influencer Marketing Best Practices
While working with influencers seems easy at first glance, it’s imperative to put in the effort to keep the partnership going and ensure every side is satisfied, from your brand through the influencer to the audience. As such, focus on the following:
- Research the influencer: Fake influencers can cost you dearly. Thorough research will help you find the right person with the right target audience, media kit, authenticity, style, and content.
- Don’t prioritize follower count over engagement: With influencers, it’s quality over quantity. A smaller community will often be more engaged than a large following. This is especially true if you are in a specific niche with peculiar demographics.
- Define clear goals: The lack of clear goals can hinder your ability to measure campaign performance and prevent the influencer from creating goal-specific content to help you achieve your objectives.
- Write thorough briefs: Poorly written briefs can do more harm than good. They can misguide influencers, leading to misrepresentation and wrong information.
- Check-in regularly: Don’t forget, an influencer can also become a brand advocate. By nurturing your relationship, not only will you make the collaboration seamless, but it will also lay down the foundation of an ongoing relationship and constant promotion.
Influencer Marketing: Finishing Thoughts
Influencer marketing can be highly beneficial for your brand’s online recognition, given that you do it right. On paper, these partnerships might look easy, but they require constant communication with the influencer. As such, if you are flooded with other business obligations, but still want to leverage the advantages of influencer marketing, your best option is to partner with a dedicated agency that will execute the collaboration based on your requirements, while you can focus on what matters the most — growing your business.
Influencer Marketing FAQs
Is influencer marketing dead?
Deinfluencing has led people to believe that working with influencers has come to an end, however, the landscape of influencers and their tactics are simply evolving while platforms introduce new features and follower behaviors change.
Can you do influencer marketing alone?
Yes, you can partner with an influencer on your own and execute campaigns together. However, if you have little experience or don’t have the time to regularly check in with them, hiring a dedicated agency is a better idea.
What’s the most important thing in influencer marketing?
Many experts will say that the most important aspect is finding an influencer who shares your brand's values and mission. Chances are, their target audience will also resonate with your brand, which is the basis of any successful collaboration.
