Introduction: What Is Influencer Marketing?
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a unique marketing channel that builds meaningful connections between you and your audience through authentic brand promotion. Authenticity is really the bread and butter of influencer marketing.
In influencer campaigns, your brand is connected to a highly engaged and trusting audience. The person bridging or facilitating this connection is the influencer. Successful influencer campaigns depend on successful collaborations. It’s all about identifying the right influencer that supports your brand’s goals and has a highly dedicated audience that subscribes to their values. It requires identifying your brand values and determining your target audience that you would like to reach through a campaign.
What is an Influencer?
Sure, you’ve heard of influencers. But do you really know what an influencer is? It’s not just for the Kardashian-Jenners of the world, the influencer space is a vast industry of creators who have generated important connections with their audience.
Size Doesn't Matter
There is a common misconception that the more followers a user has, the more influencer they are. We’re here to tell you that this isn’t true.
In fact, follower count and true reach have little to no correlation. This means that a large audience doesn't mean that a large number of users are exposed to a user’s content. This is where authenticity comes back into play. A large audience doesn’t always mean an authentic audience. With Influencer pods and other forms of fraudulent activity, it is critical that you have methods for identifying influencers with real and authentic audiences.
Audience Authenticity
We’ve been talking a lot about audience authenticity, so what does that actually mean?
Authenticity noun: the quality of being real or true
An authentic audience is an audience that is composed of real accounts (i.e. fake accounts) and will contribute real engagements (i.e. bot liking accounts). There are several methods for assessing the authenticity of an influencer’s account:
1. True Reach: An estimation of the number of views an influencer averages per post
2. Audience Safety Score: A metric for identifying fake profiles in an influencer’s network
3. Klear Influencer Score: A 1-100 score that represents how influential a user is on social networks
Micro-Influencers
A perfect example of the “size doesn’t matter argument” is micro-influencers. These influencers have a follower count of between 5K-30K, yet they are the most in-demand influencer in the industry.
Micro-influencers often specialized in a niche industry, and as such their audience is highly engaged. This makes micro-influencers a top choice. Though their audience is smaller, they often have the highest True Reach and engagement metrics and are the most cost-effective influencers.
Influencer Marketing ROI
Influencer marketing is extremely unique because it is the only marketing channel that offers brands the ability to target highly engaged audiences at cost-effective rates. According to soulmates.ai, influencer marketing is 10.5X more cost-effective than paid media. Meaning the ROI of influencer marketing far surpassed that of traditional marketing channels.
Collaborating with influencers is extremely cost-effective because they are service providers that offer multiple capabilities. They are the talent, the content creators, the content editors, and the content distributors. Influencers are the complete package.
In this influencer marketing guide, you go through the important steps of planning and managing an influencer marketing campaign. From identifying influencers to analyzing campaign impact, this guide will help you familiarize yourself with influencer marketing so you enter campaigns with confidence.