Influencer marketing has a huge impact on the target audience these days. Even now, when the blogosphere has taken shape, big brands continue to explore the specifics of influencer application, and those, in turn, want to monetize their popularity.
But what is influencer marketing, and why is it so important for brands? What should you pay attention to when working with bloggers? And how is it that they have become one of the important tools for the promotion of brands?
As we already know, influencer marketing is a way to promote products or services through so-called influencers. Today, they are divided into several types: nano influencers (around 2,000 subscribers), micro-influencers (from 2,000 to 50,000 subscribers), and opinion leaders who have a few hundred thousand to a million subscribers.
Micro-influencers are the "golden mean" in this case because the engagement of their audience can be higher than that of social media influencers. Moreover, the audience of opinion leaders, although huge, is too "fuzzy" and often includes people from completely different segments compared to micro-influencers. And in most cases, media personalities with such an audience are usually approached to increase brand awareness.
All that said, social media influencers can powerfully influence audiences to represent the value of a particular product or service, which in turn drives us to buy. To avoid contacting influencers directly, you can contact an influencer marketing campaign or install an influencer program to get comfortable.
How to competently find Instagram influencers?
Almost all companies understand how effective it can be to interact intelligently with influencers, but brands still make mistakes when working with them.
The most common misconception when working with social media influencers is that "the number of followers solves everything." Many believe that by paying a blogger with a large number of subscribers on social platforms and then placing ads with social media influencers, they will lead their companies to instant sales. Believe it or not, these are mostly empty numbers and myths. Sales have a long-term effect.
However, if it is a special promotion in which the blogger participates, sales can increase instantly, but the effect will be short-term. For long-term growth, we recommend using a long-term collaboration with a blogger, perhaps even hiring a blogger ambassador. Let's find out how to find Instagram influencers.
Top Instagram influencers
Influencer lists:
👉 Charli d'Amelio.
👉 Zach King
👉 Pewdiepie
👉 David Dobrik.
These are not all top influencers, but the best ones. You can read more about popular bloggers separately.
Find Instagram influencers based on the audience
When selecting relevant influencers with a high engagement rate, it is important to pay attention to the reach and engagement rate of the audience. The right ratio of views to reach rates is usually 10-20% for a post, and 30% for a post. For example, if Instagram influencers have 100 thousand subscribers and 300 thousand post views, then the subscribers of such a blogger are most likely just "dead souls" who have been tweaked. Accordingly, you should not start working with him. You should be very careful when choosing Instagram influencers. What to pay attention to when finding Instagram influencers?
Coverage
It is recommended to ask Instagram influencers for real-time statistics, the video format would be best since much fake information shows old or non-existent numbers.
Instagram influencer database
It is important to know the statistics of Instagram influencers: views of posts and stories, audience, and geography, but many Instagram influencers flatly refuse to disclose these data for absolutely different reasons.
What to do in this situation? Study statistics yourself. Do not be frightened, you do not have to sit and read every post on Instagram influencers. Thank God, we live in an age of technology that allows you to analyze Instagram influencer's data for you. Here are some influencer databases that will help you with that:
👉 Clincher is a popular influencer database with in-depth Instagram account analytics. With it, you can analyze one or more business profiles and the output is detailed and accurate data about user activity.
👉 Instajet.io is an All-in-One Influencer Marketing Platform. Find, pay, and collaborate with Instagram creators around the Globe! Open database without subscriptions and long registration process. InstaJet reviews all influencers accounts before adding them to their catalog. You will definitely choose among real and high-quality accounts.
👉 Minter.io is another powerful tool for tracking statistics that makes it easy to analyze multiple accounts at once. The influencer database allows you to find out the dynamics of subscriber growth, the distribution of followers by country, city, and gender, the reach of subscribers by the number of their subscriptions, engagement by the number of likes and comments, the effectiveness of hashtags, the best profile posts, the relationship between likes and the time of posting.
👉 Iconosquare - this site is suitable for both novice marketers and marketing agencies. Allows you to analyze and manage your account: post photos, respond to user comments, and more.
👉 Hootsuite Analytics is a high-quality service for collecting analytics and statistics from American developers. An interesting trick: it allows you to monitor and respond to comments via Telegram. The service itself divides data into two categories: static and analytical. They are also paid separately.
👉 Creator Studio is a cool service for Instagram analytics. The minimum fee starts at $10,000. It also has a special extension for Google Chrome to find out the ER of any account. The app is free and works for any account.
Own influencer database in content marketing
An influencer marketing program will require not just a competent influencer marketing strategy with engagement levels, but influencer databases.
There are several kinds of influencer databases. The first type is influencers-based software, which allows brands and businesses to research, find and track possible influencers across all influencer marketing platforms. The other kind of influencer database is influencer data software that you follow, and the last kind is CRM, which you can create to list and track the ideal influencers you have relationships with. This includes ideal influencers who have been your customers or have partnered with you. It helps in finding influencers.
ER in influencers
Engagement Rate or ER. It is an engagement rate, which is calculated as a percentage and serves as an indicator of audience engagement on your Instagram profile. As a rule, it takes into account likes, comments, reposts, and the number of posts saved and reposts.
ER is calculated as the ratio of the average number of all interactions on the posts to the number of subscribers for a certain period:
ER = (Total Actions Taken/Total Coverage)*100
Let's look at an example to make it clearer. The blogger you want to send the cooperation proposal to has 1 million subscribers on social media platforms, and his last post has 120 000 likes and 1 500 comments. It turns out that ER = (120 000 + 1 500) / 1 000 000 * 100% = 1%.
For optimum ER considered the following indicators:
1) From 5-10 thousand subscribers - 10-20%;
2) Over 10 thousand subscribers - up to 5%;
3) Over 100 thousand subscribers - 3%;
4) For millionaires - up to 1%.
So we have the right ER coefficient. So such an Influencer on social media platforms can be trusted.
Location
It is better to request statistics from social influencers by location countries and city. Agree, it will be strange to place ads if your company operates in the U.S. and the blogger's target audience is in Japan. The benefit of such cooperation will be zero.
The age of the target audience
After finding Instagram influencers worth paying attention, to because the target audience may be different. And if the average age of your company's target audience is 25-45 years, then you're unlikely to need an influencer from a social media network with a target audience of 15-20 years. Why? This target audience is unlikely to want to buy a product or service that is intended for an older generation.
Quality of influencer posts
The quality of content for social media influencers is quite difficult to assess with any numerical metrics, but before you start you should check it thoroughly and monitor how the influencer maintains his profile. In this case, we are interested in how the content is consumed, how active the target audience of the best influencers is and is involved in the topic of the post, and whether it coincides with the one indicated in the profile statistics. Agree that you would want to collaborate with a blogger who is highly engaged with the topic of the post, not just an emoji of hearts and flowers in the comments.
Features of influencer discovery
As we said before, micro-influencers are the "golden mean" for all brands. This is confirmed by research from Cambridge University, which calls bloggers "digital friends. Indeed, native integration is perceived differently by bloggers with large audiences than it is by micro-influencers. Their audiences see such content more as advice from a trusted friend.
Also, micro-influencers already have the kind of narrow targeting that brands need. For example, if an advertising campaign needs channels with a paying audience in the culinary industry, bloggers who talk about recipes are picked up. Yes, the engagement of such social media influencers can be much higher than those who talk about business, startups, technology, etc.
Hidden influencer marketing
Pros of hidden influencer marketing:
1) Increased brand or product credibility.
2) Increased conversions to the product/service page (when posting comments with links).
3) Since in most cases with influencer marketing links are (that is, direct links with associated words like "here", "here", leading to the product or page services) and no follow (not transmitting the "weight" of the site where they are placed, the site to which referred), and they are transferred, then search engines take them for the natural, placed by real users. Hence, we have an increase in natural factors indirectly influencing the site's search engine ranking.
4) Comments posted on the forums are quickly indexed and remain on the site for a long time. The work done will bring results even after the campaign is over. This is a great free plan.
Example of a free plan
It is recommended to use social media influencers together with hidden marketing in adequate proportions to achieve the goals set by the client. What does it mean?
1st month
Preparation of the influencer campaign. Hidden marketing. Such actions prepare the ground for the relevant issue of our mentions by the search engines.
Month 2-nd
Discreet marketing with influencers. Coverage increases dramatically when you place through influencers. When people see the influencer's placements and start looking for all the information on the new product, they will see the positive mentions they placed a month ago in the search engine results. This way, they will get a first impression of the product: the product is selling well and people are actively interested in it, and they will show real interest themselves.
3rd month
It's the right time to monitor and analyze the total number of mentions of the brand and our product on the Internet without stopping. That is why it is recommended to use special services for monitoring activity on social media. Most of such systems allow us to track the number of mentions and their emotional coloring, as well as the sites where the product or brand was mentioned. All of this is in real-time, which allows the most effective response to negativity, including competitors' reviews.
Thus, the right choice of promotion strategy and effective analytics allows for quality work with such a channel as hidden influencer marketing and promotion through potential influencers.
Useful tips for influencer campaigns
👉 Respond to comments, even negative ones. Negative comments ignored under the post negate all efforts. No need to ask the blogger to delete them - show professionalism and write decent and adequate responses on the merits. And if the commenters are right, publicly admit it and promise to fix it. Often this works better than the praise itself.
👉 Ask the Youtube blogger not to remove the promotional video or link to you. It's rare for bloggers to remove videos as it is. That said, such videos continue to be indexed on Google as well as on the video hosting itself. This means that by posting a link under a popular video, you're providing yourself with traffic and leads for months or even years to come.
👉 When discussing the advertising task with your influencers, be sure to ask for their views on the scripts and texts of the advertising activity. More often than not, working together with a blogger brings much more results.
👉 Remember that the maximum effect is achieved by repeatedly "touching" the target audience in different ways and through different channels.
👉 Don't forget to mark your links with UTM tags during activities that involve putting a link in the video description or any other place. As a rule, bloggers themselves don't think about it.
👉 Come up with promotional codes associated with the name of your influencers. These individuals for each blogger promo code can be used for a discount, getting an extra service, or any other bonuses. On the one hand, this will increase the audience's interest in your product, and on the other hand, it will show that relevant influencers care about their subscribers. And you'll get another tool for marking up and evaluating the effectiveness of the channel.
Offer Influencers
Once you've figured out how to find influencers and which influencers you need, and you've studied their subscriber count, audience demographics, and content quality, it's time to send niche influencers an offer. The deed is done, and now you expect to get a lot of responses in a few days, but only 1-2 influencers have responded.
That's not to say that you didn't present the offer of cooperation correctly. Often, Influencers may not respond to emails because their direct/email is flooded with offers, they don't check their emails, or the mailbox hasn't been used in a while, the offer is not interesting, the Influencers are away, or other personal circumstances have arisen.
Do not hesitate to remind yourself, if you do not do it, the influencer may not get in touch for months. Of course, you can work with niche influencers who respond better, but what to do if that is the one on your priority list?
If you want to avoid this problem and not waste your time, you can use Influencers platforms like InstaJet. After requesting an advertisement, you will receive feedback within 24 hours.
Influencers didn't do what you wanted
You don't have to dictate to an Influencer what he should write. He understands his audience and how best to present the material to them. If you put pressure on the blogger to publish the text exactly in your editorial, you can lose twice: the audience will perceive the post badly, they will see falseness, and, as a result, it may affect the attitude toward your brand. Also, we want to point out that Influencers have their own "hangouts" in which they share the news. If your communication has gone badly, influencers can tell "their own" that it's not worth working with you, and this can threaten you with a kind of isolation from the blogosphere.
However, there are times when an influencer can get "creative" and go on a "free flight" with your offer, ignoring absolutely everything you've told him. As a result, the message you wanted to convey to the audience will be distorted.
To prevent this kind of situation, we recommend writing a detailed and articulate term of reference (TOR). To do this, formulate clear goals, objectives, the essence of the action or message from the brand, as well as the KPI (how you will monitor the effectiveness of the post), and point out the benefits of the product that you would like to highlight, its facts and accompanying figures. Even if the Influencer is a professional, he's still not as familiar with the product as you are, and it's not like he'll want to take the time to research it in depth.
Offer him to write his version of the text, and only then work out a compromise that suits both of you. Considering all the features of cooperation is necessary at the start. This will be the key to fruitful work with the influencers and will lead to a "win-win" result because it is important to integrate and adapt your brand to the blogger's audience and style, and not to try to impose your formats and values.
QUESTIONS TO ANSWER
Is there an influencer database?
Yes. Upfluence is an influencer marketing platform that includes a database of nearly three million influencers.
Yes. Try InstaJet, an Instagram influencer platform, provides an open database of bloggers and helps automate posting to Instagram Stories.
