In recent years, influencer marketing has grown into a global billion-dollar industry. Anyone with a mobile phone can become an influencer, if you just have enough fingertip around what followers want and the ability to create engaging content
Behind the trend is simple psychology: Instead of traditional advertising, which is experienced just as advertising, a post from an influencer can feel like a close friend is recommending a good shampoo or an affordable electric subscription.
If you have followed a person on social media for a long time you develop a relationship with the person and it ends up in a kind of extended friendship. When you have that kind of relationship with someone, you become much more influenced by sales messages. If the influencer has 10,000 social “friends” it can have a pretty big effect on a post.
There are key success factors for influencers:
Credibility. The influencer should appear reliable and knowledgeable in their subject.
Trust. The influencer should be clear about what values they stand for and not violate them. For example, it would be detrimental to both the trust and the credibility of someone who blogs about vegan cooking to collaborate with a meat company.
Attractiveness. The more attractive we think someone is, the more credible we consider the person to be.
Unfortunately, attractive people have a head start. When someone looks good, we tend to attribute them to other qualities, such as credibility,
is the experienced sphere of friendship.
It may be shoes or horses or what you are now interested in. I don’t think you can just think that now I’m going to write about this to make money. It takes hard work and continuity and it is based on that you are really interested and can keep up.
An influencer should also be interested in their target audience.
It is not enough just to post a post and content yourself with it, then you will not get far today when the competition is so tough. You must reply to all comments and follow up on the post. It should be a dialogue, not a monologue.
You can see influencers as “a small media agency”
That’s how companies should look at them when they propose collaborations. An influencer is a person who is skilled at several things, not only in his field but also in photography, storytelling, packaging and follow-up.
Therefore, it is important that companies have respect for the professional role and pay for cooperation. A common question that is discussed in influencer groups on social media is companies who hear about and want to pay for shampoos or whatever. So it’s an important rule: pay in money and respect the profession.
If you are interested in influencer marketing, it is important to do good research. What influencers are there in the area and what target group do they have?
This can take a lot of time and that’s among other things what we help with. When talking about target groups, it is important that you not only look at age and gender, but also factors such as lifestyle, leisure interests and media consumption.
It is important that the brand and the influencer fit together and that is of course always a matter of budget. We like to work with micro-influencers, with down to 3,000 followers in some cases, because you get a much better conversion rate then than with larger influencers. Then big influencers can also work really well in some cases, it all depends on the product.
A micro-influencer is a person who has between 1,000 and 100,000 followers in social media. Nano-influencers are called those with fewer than 1,000 followers. Often they are experts in a narrow niche, such as guitar pedals or organic skincare. The interest in micro and nano influencers depends on two things.
One is that awareness of influencers is increasing. We understand that someone who has many followers is likely to make money from their sponsored posts. This allows them to roll outside the experienced sphere of friendship.
The second is a case law that says that you always have to print when posts are paid or sponsored. It helps people become more aware of how much sponsorship and advertising there is in social channels and we become more cautious about buying. Influencers with smaller numbers of followers often have more engaged followers and they are easier to stay in the personal sphere.
Just as in traditional marketing, different products require different strategies in influencer marketing.
An electricity contract takes longer to sell than a new mascara, so we need to work long term in building the brand. The cheaper and simpler product, the shorter the cooperation you can have.
What then is the next step? Something that has already come in, for example, the United States is AI influencers, fictitious people who are invented by companies that want to sell products.
They can market all types of products and services.
Obviously, it seems to work in the US, but we will see how the phenomenon develops in the future. I don’t think it will be that long before we have AI influencers in the whole world.
Contents
How to succeed with influencer marketing
Find the right influencer. Look through the person’s flow and see what the activity looks like and how great the commitment is among the followers.
Take contact. After you find out who or whom you want to collaborate with, it’s time to contact them.
Find out what it costs. You will earn more than it costs. Therefore, implement a return on investment (ROI) system.
Set a measurable goal. What do you want to achieve with the campaign? It may be to increase brand awareness or increase sales of a particular product.
Follow up on the results. The follow-ups are A and O. The campaigns that succeed have clear KPIs and a good system for measuring these.
