Definiton
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing. A third person advertises products for a brand or an enterprise. Influencer marketing is based on cooperations and Influencers can reach certain target groups better. It’s the marketing strategy that is used on social networks to spread advertising messages with a bigger reach. An Influencer is a person who enjoys high respect on social networks. The Influencer acts as a multiplier for the advertising message. Examples for Influencers are Social Media users with a huge amount of followers, blogger, youtuber, celebrities, politicians,…
Functions of the Influencers
The first purpose of an influencer is the content production. They can create different ideas for content, because they know what content ist working on which channels. The second purpose is to distribute and to seed the content so the range of messages can be increased. The third purpose is the opinion leader. The status of an influencer can positively influence the reputation of a product, a campaign and a company in a long term.
The Job of Influencer Marketing
The job of Influencer Marketing is to spread enterprise content in relevant target groups and to arouse interest in purchasing. So it’s the job to increase visibility of brands and enterprises. In addition an Influencer can argue and giving valuable feedback to single contents from a customers perspective. Furthermore the job is to optimize distribution of contents and to improve the reputation of an enterprise. Influencer Marketing can influence the call of a product or a campaign positively. Application fields are for example new product launches, campaigns for awareness and image, product tests and product assessements, product placements or content parnterships. On YouTube that could be by sponsored videos, webseries, product placement, video advertising or affiliate links.
Different Arts of Influencer Marketing
WOM marketing means word of mouth marketing and is the technique of promoting a product, service or business by soliciting positive comments from customers. The customers don’t get money for talking about the product and the company has to derived enough satisfaction that they are willing to spread out about it and even recommend it to others. The goal of BUZZ marketing is, to have many media reports about the action and indirect about the brand. An example is the space jump by red bull.
Viral Marketing is a digital and spectacular advertising message which is viral spreading by users in the internet. The sender is the brand and the content is always ordered by the brand. Viral Marketing means advertising content with Wow-Effect and the marketing goal is publicity and attention for the brand/product/company.
Performing Channels for Influencer Marketing
It’s a huge decision which social media channels to choose for sponsoring content on. There are various channels for successful Influencer Marketing. Which one to choose depends on the personal goal, the drive awareness of a brand, the drive consideration and the trial of product or service. It’s important to determine what the most wanted goal is. The Top Five of the most popular and effective channels are Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, Pinterest and Twitter. However, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn are also popular and often used channels.
Top Influencer
There are different persons making a fortune on social media. You can differentiate between numerous categories, namely fitness, beauty, home, entertainment, travel,gaming, fashion, comedy, parenting, food, tech&business and sports.
Here are two examples of German power players who have turned social media platforms into fortune and empires:
Category Fitness:
Sophia Thiel: She is a German fitness youtuber with her own 12 weeks fitness-program. She helps girls to get in the shape of their life with effective training and healthy nutrition which are both part of a so-called “fitness lifestyle“. She has 700.000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.1 Mio Instagram-Follower.
Category Beauty, Fashion & Lifestyle:
Bibis Beauty Palace: Bianca Heinicke is the most successful German Beauty-Vlogger. On her YouTube channel she publishes clips all around Beauty, fashion and lifestyle subjects. She has 3.8 Mio subscribers on YouTube and 4.3 Mio Instagram-Follower.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves reaching out to people who are extremely well connected to your target market and then having them promote your product for you. It’s important to consider the pros and cons and decide if the high upfront investment influencer marketing demands can be justified by the potential return on your particular marketing goals. The first pro argument is the large range you can reach, especially relating to the younger audience. Influener marketing also receives twice as many sales as paid ads. Customers that find a company through influencer marketing have a 37 % higher retention rate. In their study, Twitter also realized that influencers are considered almost as trustworthy as friends, when recommending products. On the other hand there are also negative aspects of Influencer Marketing. For example, it can be very expensive to hire a big influencer. The bigger the audience is, the more money it’s going to cost the company. Another problem is that you only reach the people who are active on social media. Elderly people are harder to reach when you’re using an influencer. There is also a negative stigma around influencer marketing.
Performance Measurement of Influencer Marketing
There are different methodes to measure Influencer Marketing. Referral traffic is Google‘s method of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine. With referral traffic you can analyze where your website traffic comes from. With the website traffic number you can determine the overall brand awareness of the website.
Another way to measure your influence is Brand Awareness Metrics. With the tools SocialMention or TrackurSentiment you can measure the positive, neutral, and negative conversations.
With engagement you can extend the brand’s reach to the existing and new audience. Moreover, with tools like blog comments, social conversations, likes and shares you can measure this engagement. Trackable links prevent customers from typing long URLs.
With the tool Bitly you can create custom links per campaign, which allows you to group activities in a Report.
Some statistics
92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people – even someone they don’t know – over brand content.
70% of consumers reported online customer reviews as the second most trusted source.
What we discuss in Lesson
How can it be, that so many people click on random videos? Because the people in the video are like your friends. The most important thing is to be authentic.
There are different types of stars (YouTubers, Songwriter, Politicans). Influencers are the earlier journalists. They are people who want something to say and need a channel for this. In the past it was the press and now it is social media, youtube…Influencers aren’t important only for Marketing, they are also important for Politics and the social life.
Alina Hahn, Katja Großmann, Elianne Ruijter and Theresa Birker
Sources