The birth of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., provided a unique new forum for communication that gave rise to an entirely new animal: digital influencers (Shiau W. et al. 2017).  While these influencers pervade almost every industry, they have a notable presence in health/fitness/food and fashion/beauty businesses (Klasseen K et al. 2018) (Raggatt M. et al. 2018).

The sheer breadth of possible influencers makes it difficult for small businesses to pinpoint individuals that best correlate with their brand. Choosing an influencer that positively embodies the brand is crucial for a successful digital marketing campaign (Sokolova K. & Kefi H 2019).

This blog post delineates how best to approach this process, outlining the steps that small business owners should take when choosing which influencer will best promote the company’s desired image.

 

Step 1: The Target

Before searching for the perfect influencers, you must first determine how best to interact with the target audience by evaluating the profile of the desired customer. This can be done by analyzing customers’ most used social media platforms and any consumer preferences that pertain to your business’s unique product/service offering (Backaler 2018).

A great research tool to uncover these metrics is google trends, which allows you to search the most discussed online topics in different regions around the world.  

 

Try it here 

 

Step 2: The Main Goal

 

Next, determine what outcome you hope to achieve through the campaign. For reference, small retail brands typically seek to increase brand awareness and/or sales.

In regards to brand awareness, traditional word of mouth marketing has transformed into electronic word of mouth advertising that spreads to targeted audiences on much larger scales (Alalwan A. et al. 2017).  Digital influencers epitomize this new realm of marketing as they can advertise to a mass amount of people that all fall under a specific niche/demographic.  

Sunny Co Clothing company used this exact marketing strategy in 2017.  The startup, which sells women’s bathing suits, created an Instagram campaign announcing free “Pamela” bathing suits for Instagram users who reposted the image below.

 

Rather than targeting mass audiences (macro influencers), the company targeted the niche group (nano influencers) of teenage girls to advertise their campaign.

The post was re-posted over 10,000 times and the company’s followers increased from 7,350 to 753,184 in one day!  While they were unable to fill most orders, which caused a social media backlash, awareness of the brand increased and they were featured in publications such as Teen Vogue, Daily Mail, and TIME (Kelsey 2017).

Click here to view their Instagram page and here to see more of nano influencers through brand ambassadors.

After determining which niche market to target and which social media platform to use, you can then utilize your influencer marketing campaign to drive sales (Backaler 2018) .  

Mason Jar Storage, which uses micro influencers on Pinterest to exemplify ways people can use their products, is a company that did just that. By enlisting the help of influencers who already have a following in categories like “do it yourself”, they integrated their product into the influencer’s established community while also creating one of their own.

Check out their Pinterest and use of influencers here

 

Step 3: The Influencer Search

Now you are ready to begin your influencer search.

Instagram and Twitter are excellent tools for finding influencers.

Instagram, for instance, offers the Search and Explore feature that allows you to look up hashtags and general topics that relate to your products.

 

Similarly, Twitter utilizes hashtags that you can tailor to address your topic

After finding your influencers, there are many ways to entice them to partner with your brand.  For more information, check out my last blog post here.

Another great option for finding influencers is through platforms such as FameBit, BuzzStream, and Heepsy, which connect potential employers with viable influencers.  

FameBit, for example, is perfect for small businesses because it is free to join for both the company and the influencer, only charging a 10% service fee once you and the influencer have agreed upon the publishing content. To use FameBit, your company must create a campaign and decide on social media platforms to use for the campaign (Famebit 2019)

 

(Salesbacker 2019)

You must also decide on a price to pay your influencers, the desired time frame for the campaign, and a photo of your product.   

 

(Salesbacker 2019)

Influencers can then “bid” on the campaign by offering different prices and ideas for their service. FameBit enables you to learn about the influencers that have bid on your campaign and also offers a statistical analysis of their reach. Lastly, you pick and pay your desired influencers (Salesbacker 2019).

Hopefully this blog will help you start strategizing how to launch your own influencer marketing campaign!

 

This blog was done as a part of a digital marketing assignment by a student.

 

References

Alalwan A., Raana N., Dwivedi Y., Algharabat R. 2017. ‘Social media in marketing: A review and analysis of the existing literature’. Telematics and Informatics, vol 34, no 7, pp 1177-1190.

Backaler, J. 2018, Digital Influence: Unleash the Power of Influencer Marketing to Accelerate Your

Famebit. 2019. YouTube’s Branded Content Platform. YoutTube. [Online]. Available at:  https://famebit.com/ [Accessed: 6 April 2019]

Kelsey J. (2017). ‘The Viral Sunny Co Clothing Instagram Giveaway Was Actually a Massive Success (And Not a Failure).’ Medium. 5th May. [Online]. Available from: https://medium.com/@justinkelsey/the-viral-sunny-co-clothing-instagram-giveaway-was-actually-a-massive-success-and-not-a-failure-327af68c590f [Accessed: 3 April 2019].

Klassen K., Borleis E., Brennan L., Reid M., McCaffrey T., Lim M. 2018. ‘What people “like”: analysis of social media strategies used by food industry brands, lifestyle brands, and health promotion organizations on facebook and instagram’. Med. Internet Res., vol. 20, no. 6 , pp. e10227

Raggatt M.,Wright C., Carrotte E., Jenkinson R., Mulgrew K., Prichard I., Lim M. 2018. ‘I aspire to look and feel healthy like the posts convey: engagement with fitness inspiration on social media and perceptions of its influence on health and wellbeing’. BMC Public Health, vol 18 no. 1, pp. 1002

Salesbacker. 2019. Salesbacker.com. [Online]. Available at: https://www.salesbacker.com/blog/64/A_Step_by_Step_Guide_to_Using_Famebit_in_Your_Advertising [Accessed: April 6 2019]

Shiau W., Dwivedi Y., Yang H. 2017. ‘Co-citation and cluster analyses of extant literature on social networks’. Int. J. Inf. Manag., vol. 37, no 5, pp. 390-399

Sokolova K., Kefi H. 2019, ‘Instagram and YouTube bloggers promote it, why should I buy?’ [online] Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2019.01.011 [Accessed: 2 April, 2019]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How you can use digital influencers for your small/medium business

 

For a business to see success in the modern world, they must find ways to use the internet to target and reach consumers. Initially, standard online marketing was done through interruption advertising such as web banner’s and imbedded video advertisements (Backaler, 2018). Though these forms of marketing are still popular, the digital world is now seeing the rise of influencer marketing which uses individuals on social media to market products. These individuals must have a platform such as a blog, YouTube channel, or Instagram page that have a following. Influencer marketing has been proven to be a great form of marketing because it provides a spokesperson that consumers trust (Backaler, 2018).  With the new age of social media and its millions of users, your small and medium enterprises too can reap the benefits of this hot new trend.

 

You might be intimidated by the massive paycheck mega influencers charge such as Kylie Jenner’s estimated cost of $1 million per sponsored Instagram post (Mejia, 2018).  But are these Macro influencers the only avenue for successful influencer marketing?

 

Targeting Nano and Micro Influencers.

 

A common misconception of influence marketing is that to be an influencer, one must have a huge following.  If a company has a huge marketing budget, they might be interested in hiring a celebrity as an influencer.  Though celebrities do have a large influence on the perceptions of their fans, it can be obvious when they are promoting a product for a quick cash grab.  This ideal has given rise to the micro and nano-influencers who might only have a following of a thousand people.  See the breakdown of Influencer tiers here.

 

 (Mediakix, 2019)

 

Even big companies such as H&M exemplifies the benefited of micro influencers through their new campaign which targets smaller influencers to promote their brand.  According to H&M, this focusing on micro-influencers has increased their engagement form influencers to 294.1 per mention (Dan, 2018).  This trend is great news for you as small business owner if you don’t have the capital requirements to hire larger influencers.

Couple of men is a great example of a micro influencer with under 44,000 followers that H&M used for an Instagram campaign.  Click here to check out their page:

 

Too see some examples micro influencers used by big brands check out these Instagram posts:

Sperry

Audible

Michelob Ultra

 

Why Instagram is the Best Platform is Best for Influencing?

 

With an estimated $1 billion revenue from influencers, Instagram remains the most popular social media platform for influencer marketing.  According to Brandwach, about 70% of the most popular hashtags are associated with a brand (Fields, 2019).  Because Instagram is so polluted with influencers pushing products, it is important for your influencers to differentiate their advertisements by to seeking out unique ways to capture audiences.  You can do this by asking your influencers to promote their product through Instagram stories rather than traditional posts.  According to Instagram, brands see a 75% completion rate of Instagram stories posted relating to their content, providing a more interactive experience for consumer rather than scrolling by a traditional advertisement.  With its recent updates, these Instagram stores which were once only available to view for 24 hours can now be permanently saved on an influencers page (Fields, 2019).  Other platforms might work well with you company (such as blogs and podcasts), but Instagram still remains the most popular.

 

To see some examples of some smaller brands using micro influencers on Instagram, check out these posts:

Tessemae’s

Visible Mobile

 

How to attract your influencers without financial compensation

 

The best way to attract influencers to promote a brand is to offer financial compensation.  If you own a business that is trying to use multiple influencers, financial compensation can be unrealistic. Thankfully, there are a plethora influencer who will promote products for just recognition.  These influencers are attracted to the idea that promoting a company will help advertise their own brand and increase their follower base.  Offering influencers access unique information such as new products, sales, and offering discounts on products will attract loyal and personable micro and nano-influencers to your company (Dada 2017).  This allows a mutual beneficial relationship where the popularity of the influencer grows along with your business.

 

Neli Zapryano is a great example of one of these micro influencers who is teaming up with smaller businesses to gain the benefits of influencing without getting payed.  She is a relatively new blogger seeing successes as an influencer with her fashion blog Defined Fashion (Zapryano, 2019)

Click here to check it out

 

Negative aspects with Influencer marketing

 

Though influencer marketing is a great new trend for businesses to reach new consumers, it’s imperative that you vet influencers carefully before attaching your brand to these individuals.  It is also important to note that not all businesses always see a massive result when using influencers as a marketing strategy.  You must make sure to set a straight forward agreement with your influencers in order to avoid any unwanted association to your brand.

 

This blog was done as a part of a digital marketing assignment by a student.

 

References

Backaler, J. 2018, Digital Influence: Unleash the Power of Influencer Marketing to Accelerate Your Global Business, Springer.

 Dada, G. (2017). ‘What Is Influencer Marketing and How Can Marketer Use It Effectively?’ Forbes. November 14, 2017. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2017/11/14/what-is-influencer-marketing-and-how-can-marketers-use-it-effectively/#64f2231e23d1 [Accessed: 3/3/19]

Dan, S. (2018). The 6 Best Social Media Campaigns That Created Trends in 2018.  [Blog] TalkWalker. Available at: https://www.talkwalker.com/blog/best-social-media-campaigns [Accessed 3/1/19]

Fields, M. (2019). Top Social Media Platforms For Influencer Marketing [Blog] BrandChamp.io Available at: https://brandchamp.io/blog/top-social-platforms-influencer-marketing/ [Accessed 3/3/19]

Malambo, A. (2018). ‘How Small Businesses Can use Influencer Marketing in 2019’. Business Achievers. 14 December 2018. Available at: https://www.business-achievers.com/general/how-small-businesses-can-use-influencer-marketing [Accessed: 2/29/19]

Mediakix Team (2019). What Are Mid-Tier Influencers?, Mediakix.  Available at: http://mediakix.com/2019/01/what-are-mid-tier-influencers/#gs.bXLRWo0n [Accessed 3/5/19]

Mejia, Z . (2018) ‘Kylie Jenner reportedly makes $1 million per paid Instagram post – here’s how much other top influencers get’. Make it CNBC. 31 July, 2018. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/31/kylie-jenner-makes-1-million-per-paid-instagram-post-hopper-hq-says.html [Accessed: 2/29/19]

Zapryano, N. (2019) Defined Fashion [Blog] Neli Zapryano Available at: http://nelizapryano.com/

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