Influencer Marketing

What exactly is influencer marketing? How does it differ from other forms of advertising? And why should marketers care?

Influencer marketing has become a powerful tool for businesses looking to reach new audiences. Marketers use various strategies to identify influential individuals and gain access to their followers.

 

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing uses celebrities, athletes, bloggers, and other influential figures to market brands.

Influencers are those who have large social media followings and have the ability to influence their audience.

Brands normally use influencers to promote their product or service through paid advertisements, free giveaways, and endorsements. In addition, they can generate significant brand awareness and loyalty through paid or unpaid posts.

The goal is to get them to share valuable information and create excitement around particular topics, products, or services. The key benefit for brands is that they reach a larger audience at a lower cost compared to traditional advertising methods.

 

The Right Influencer

Let’s not forget that this opportunity comes with some responsibility on the part of the brand.

Brands must be careful when choosing an influencer because it’s easy for them to fall in love with the idea of working with someone influential.

Unfortunately, without thorough background research, this can lead to a situation where a potentially ideal influencer promotes products that aren’t aligned with a brand’s values. Therefore, it’s important to make sure the influencer you want to work with aligns with your brand’s goals and values.

Influencer marketing also requires brands to pay influencers fairly. If you don’t pay your influencers what they deserve, they won’t promote your brand in the vision you want them to. Additionally, you can risk a potentially fruitful relationship.

 

Influencer Marketing for Agencies

How many clients does your agency currently have? That’s how many new influencing opportunities your agency has at its fingertips.

Agencies can use their clients, the ones they like and like them, to help promote their agency for them. It’s like receiving a referral or customer review.

If someone enjoys working with you and the business next door asks how they got so successful so quickly, they’re going to tell the next-door business all about your agency and how you helped them.

 

The value of influencer marketing

While Instagram influencer marketing is a well-known strategy, there are many other networks and platforms that are growing for influencers. According to Adweek, the industry reached $10 billion in worth by 2020. Other networks like Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok have their own set of influencers with different demographics.

The marketers surveyed at the end of 2018 when asked what their feelings on influencers were for the new year, told that 89% said ROI from influencer marketing was comparable to or better than other networks. The same survey noted that 65% of marketers planned on increasing their budgets for 2019.

 

Types of social media influencers

When you think “influencer,” does the Kardashian-Jenner family pop immediately to mind?

While these famous sisters are certainly some of the top social media marketing influencers, you should remember that not all influencers are celebrities.

In fact, for many brands, influencers with a smaller but dedicated or niche follower base might be more effective. Influencers with 15,000 followers have some of the highest engagement rates on all platforms. The cost, of course, can also be much lower.

There are different types of Instagram influencers based on audience size. There’s no strict cut-off for this parameter, but generally the types of influencers are broken down as:

  • Nano-influencers
    Nano-influencers have 10,000 followers or fewer, like mommy blogger Lindsay Gallimore (8.3K followers)
  • Micro-influencers
    Micro-influencers have 10,000 to 100,000 followers, like lifestyle blogger Sharon Mendelaoui (13.5K followers)
  • Macro-influencers
    Macro-influencers have 100,000 to 1 million followers, like food and travel creator Jean Lee (115K followers)
  • Mega-influencers
    Mega-influencers have 1 million+ followers, like TikTok star Savannah LaBrant (28.3M followers)

 

 

How much does social influencer marketing cost?

Influencers with extensive reach rightly expect to be paid for their work. Free product might work with Nano-influencers, but a larger influencer campaign requires a budget.

For large brands working with celebrity influencers, that budget may be quite large. U.S. spending on influencer marketing, for example, is set to top $4 billion in 2022.

Think about what kind of payment structure makes the most sense for your goals. But be willing to consider the influencer’s needs, too. For example, an affiliate or commission structure might be an option instead of a flat fee, or to reduce the flat fee.

In fact, 9.3% of U.S. influencers said affiliate marketing (through affiliate links and promo codes) was their top source of income.

That said, the most common baseline pricing formula for influencers’ Instagram posts is:

$100 x 10,000 followers + extras = total rate

What are the extras? Check out our post on influencer pricing for all the details.

Remember that micro-influencers and Nano-influencers will have more flexible payment terms.

 

Our Services at Dreamize on influencer marketing

  • SET KPIs
    What are your goals and objectives? What do you want to achieve with the budget allocated towards Influencers? Within which core markets? We will focus your Influencer Marketing Campaign based on your vision, mission and achieving the goals you set.
  • TARGET AUDIENCE
    Who are your targeted customers in terms of gender, age and market? What are their interests? Which social media do they use? Our influencer marketing agency will help define these personas in order to create influencer marketing campaigns that reach the right target audience.
  • INFLUENCER IDENTIFICATION
    Our influencer marketing agency will be able to match your target audience with the relevant influencers. Our clients have full access to the influencers’ target demographics and can see which ones are the perfect ones for their Influencer Marketing Campaigns.
  • CONTRACTING INFLUENCERS
    The relationship between you and an Influencer has to involve a legal agreement where the Influencers know their rights and obligations. We will take care of having each Influencer that will be part of your Campaign sign an agreement and commit to the deliverables.
  • CONTENT CREATION
    In order to make any Influencer Campaign successful, you cannot just rely on the Influencers following, you need to think how to best engage with their users. We will help you create concepts and content that will make the Influencers followers interact with.
  • TRACKING RESULTS
    Tracking results is the most important thing to do when you want to understand the success of an Influencer Marketing campaign. We will put in place tracking pixels and tools that will provide you extensive reporting and tangible metrics for any of the activities.

 

conclusion

Influencers are here to stay but how the world of influencer marketing looks and operates has changed a great deal in a short time, and in five years may be drastically different from today. Our influencer marketing agency in Dubai will help you get started with building your strategy, but like any social strategy it’s important to be ready for change.

Dreamize is a global full service influencer marketing agency in Dubai. Our team of experts includes campaign managers, digital marketing specialists and media experts that will help your company and support your brand from defining KPIs, goals and needs, passing by influencers identification and storytelling, to campaign execution, tracking and reporting. 

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