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What is Influencer Marketing? 10 Answers to Common Influencer Marketing FAQs

Influencer marketing is the new buzzword.

Do you know why?

Traditional advertising went down the drain faster than businesses imagined.

And digital advertising is also facing the same fate with most of young audience using ad blockers to get rid of digital advertising.

Can you tell me when was the last time you clicked on an online banner ad on any website visited by you?

Ten years ago, on average, it took a person four exposures to an ad before they took action – meaning if they had an interest within four exposures, the average person would follow through, get the information, make the purchase, whatever. Today that number has multiplied by four. It now takes 16 exposures before the average person takes some form of action.  –     Tony Robbins

I’m sure you won’t remember.

Even if a banner was clicked, 99% of chances are – it was clicked accidentally.

So, with cliched digital advertising slowly dying, everyone is talking about influencer marketing with bigger hopes.

INFLUENECR MARKETING

Good news is – it’s not a passing concept that will fade away due to its inherent power of reaching to the target audience.

Bad news is – Many of the modern marketers are nowhere near to leverage the influencer marketing for their businesses.

One of the key reason for not leveraging the influencer marketing is the lack of information and knowledge about influencer marketing.

Let’s back up for a minute.

Before you think about leveraging influencer marketing, it’s important to understand it properly, its benefits, and how to make the most of it.

This blog article will address this need by answering top 10 frequently asked questions about influencer marketing.

Here I go:

Q 1: What is influencer marketing?

Ans:

Standard Definition:

Influencer marketing (also influence marketing) is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole.

Simple Definition:

Influencer Marketing is about leveraging industry experts with engaged followers to get higher brand visibility.

It’s kind of middle point between authorized recommendation and a delicate product reference or promotion.

Q 2: Why Influencer Marketing Works?

Ans:

It’s all about human psychology.

We all seek trusted endorsements in our daily life coming from family, friends, and trustworthy experts.

Reason?

A trusted recommendation comes with more credibility than paid advertisement.

Trust and authenticity is a rare combination.

That’s where influencer marketing gets this mix right.

When an industry expert, a brand, a blogger, a thought leader, a celebrity or a group recommends a product, their followers will listen to them

Celebrities are often used to market products because they have a large following among masses and their public visibility is very high.

When a celebrity uses a brand’s product, the brand gets the masses’ attention that helps the product sell better.

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Fashion Nova is a brand that has leveraged influencer marketing to great extent to promote its brand.

“We work with 3,000 to 5,000 influencers,” said Fashion Nova’s founder and CEO, Richard Saghian.

Fashion Nova partnered with Kylie Jenner who made a passing remark on her Instagram account, ‘I’m obsessed with Jeans from Fashion Nova.

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Kylie has 94 million Instagram followers – 8th place for most number of Instagram followers in the world.

This post got a whopping 2.7 million likes and 558K comments.

The idea was to showcase that you can too feel like a star by having jeans from Fashion Nova.

So, by associating brand with a celebrity on digital channels not only assures you a lot of impressions, likes, comments and global exposure but also higher brand credibility.

Q 3: What Type of Influencers are out there?

Ans:

My answer will be – all types of.

You name it, you got it.

Just to clarify, when I say ‘type of influencers’, it means how can we categorize them based on their style of functioning.

Here is a quick list of popular categories:

Public Figure: Sports stars, Celebrities and other public figures have a huge following among their fans thanks to their professional work.

Educator: This type of influencer plays a role of an educator for his engaged fans. He uses his knowledge to engage the fans. He/she can educate the audience with tips, how Tos, DIYs, e-books etc. Thanks to the influencer’s knowledge, the people look towards him/her for useful information.

Instigator: This type of influencers are controversy makers. They make statements that create a stir or start a troubled debate. Not always the best choice however depending on the industry and the situation, this type of influencer can help your brand grab the attention of the audience swiftly.

Thought Leader: This type of influencers is present on all popular experts’ speaking panels, workshops, and consultation boards. They are hyper active on online channels and around the industry events. They are the most sought-after influencers as their perspective carry a lot of weight.

Bloggers: Bloggers are the key influencers online in their respective industries. They pick topics in their industry and write blog on the same and make something trendier or happening by writing about it. Many brands try to reach out to bloggers to write about their brands in their articles.

Q 4: WHAT SHOULD I LOOK FOR IN AN INFLUENCER?

Ans:

When you choose an influencer, look for three key things:

1. Audience reach by size

2. Engagement power

3. Industry relevan

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If an influencer has large number of followers who are highly engaged by the influencer’s conversations in your industry, then he/she is right fit for your brand.

Don’t get tempted to go for influencers who has large number of followers. Only having large number of followers doesn’t mean that all of them are engaged fully.

Instead, focus on ‘goldilocks’ (Influencers with less number of followers but all of them highly engaged). So, don’t ignore influencers with ‘smaller’ followers size.

Q 5: HOW MANY INFLUENCERS SHOULD I TARGET?

Ans:

There is no set number of influencers you should try to achieve. It all depends on the number of campaigns you are running at any given time and how many best-fit influences you can associate with in your industry.

It also depends on the kind of product, service or topic you want to cover. Topics like global warming may get a wider reach and higher number of influencers.

On the other hand, for a typical SaaS based product may get limited number of influencers to talk about your product.

I will recommend you start with 50-100 influencers across categories – micro influencers (with less than 10K followers) and macro influencers (with more than 50K followers).

You will be tempted to go for large number of influencers but only quantity shouldn’t be your focus.

Instead try to find out different influencer groups who influence the right mix of global and local communities.

Q 6: IS INFLUENCER MARKETING A FORM OF CONTENT MARKETING?

Ans:

Yes. It is.

Content is the soul all marketing campaigns and influencer marketing is no different.

Both content marketing and Influencer Marketing are executed for sole purpose of spreading out the relevant content for the targeted audience.

So, in a way, Influencer Marketing is a form of content marketing.

If you understand the benefits of content marketing, only then you can go for Influencer Marketing.

The only difference is – in influencer marketing, you associate with an individual, create content with influenecr’s help and then distribute it.

Also, the content will be little more personalized as influencers will craft content in the form of stories from their personal perspectives, and make your brand part of that story in interesting manner.

Q 7: IS INFLUENCER MARKETING APPROPRIATE FOR EVERY BRAND?

Ans:

Ask yourself – does your brand aim to engage your customers on social media?

If answer is an emphatically Yes, then influence marketing is right for your brand.

Otherwise not.

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Moreover, you can consult with an industry expert / an influencer to find out how they can help you to promote your brand among your target audience.

What is more important to understand here that each influencer marketing campaign can be easily customized to your brand characteristics and your marketing objectives.

Q 8: WHAT ARE THE NEGATIVE THINGS AN INFLUENECR MAY HAVE I SHOULD AVOID?

Ans:

It’s important to find out the negative aspects of an influencer which may harm your brand.

First of all, try to find out the difference between real followers and fake followers. There are various tools available to find out the fake followers.

More fake followers should be a red flag for you.

It’s not possible for an influencer to have all real followers since as a profile grows, some of the fake or inactive followers will be there.

However, the overall ratio between fake and real followers should be proper (less fakes and more real followers).

Then, look for the post frequency used by an influencer.

If an influencer hasn’t posted for a while anything worthwhile, then that should be a concern you shouldn’t ignore.

Also, check how consistently they are maintaining their post frequency.

If they are not steady in engaging their fans with relevant posts at regular frequency, then it’s better to avoid such influencers.

Q 9: How do you approach the influencers in your industry?

Ans:

Create an email outreach program to reach out to the influencers in your industry.

Try to tailor the message specifically for each influencer covering the context, brand theme, expected marketing objectives and why you think a specific influencer fits your brand.

Don’t forget that personalized communication with an influencer is very critical to bring him on-board.

A cornerstone of any successful influencer campaign is the personal nature of the communication.

Q 10: HOW DO I BEST MEASURE MY INFLUENECR MARKETING CAMPAIGN’S SUCCESS?

Ans:

The first step is to start tracking your influencer marketing campaign.

‘What should I track?’, you may ask.

Start with the volume of outreach to Influencers.

If you try to approach 100 influencers, the chances are, only 10% to 20% may respond back.

This ratio lessened a lot if you’re trying to get free marketing promotion from certain influencers by sharing engaging content.

Once you are able to hire/engage certain influencers, then you should start tracking the engagement aspects (how effectively influencers are able to engage the followers and how many followers are responding to the influencer marketing campaign.)

Third point to track is the brand mentions you get not just from the followers but also from other influencer community during and after the influencer marketing campaign gets over.

Fourth area to track and measure is the brand awareness among the social media followers as well among the influencer community.

Fifth and the most important aspect to track is the site traffic generated by the targeted audience and your influencer community.

Therefore, if you track above mentioned areas effectively, you can measure and judge the performance of your influencer marketing campaign successfully.

Summing Up

I have answered top 10 influencer marketing FAQs which can help you understand influencer marketing better and leverage it smartly.

I hope you have learned some of the good tips about influencer marketing from this article to generate more targeted influencer marketing campaigns for your brand.

Start testing these influencer marketing tips for your digital branding.

The desired effect may take little longer but these influencer marketing tips will form the crux of your long-term influencer marketing generation strategy.

I focus on helping brands engage with their industry’s influencers to help them more effectively influence their target audience.

I can enable you to identify, track and engage with influencers.

If you’re looking to get started with an influencer marketing program, or want to scale your existing influencer marketing efforts, I can help.

Over To You

Are you now ready to implement these tactics and optimize your free trial sign ups generation strategy?

Share your experience after leveraging these tactics and how did it improve your free trial sign ups rate?

Read here which followers you must follow in 2017 to learn and make the most of influencer marketing.

Few Question for You

I have few questions for you:

Is there any other question regarding influencer marketing you would like to be answered?

What challenges are you facing in executing your influencer marketing campaign?

What are your thoughts on the influencer marketing tips shared in this article.

Do you have any tips to share?

Share your thoughts with me in the comments below!

Let me know in the comments section below or tweet us @iamnitinmalik.

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