Chapter 1: What Is Influencer Marketing?

Now, we’ve gone through who an influencer is and how your brand can benefit from collaborating with them. But let’s spend a minute on understanding the concept of influencer marketing as a whole. For starters, this is not a new concept at all. If you are an established brand with a big budget, you have probably been doing this all along in the form of celebrity endorsements.

You pay a famous person to put their vote of approval on your brand and compensate them for it. It is one of the most traditional ways of marketing a product or service. But here’s the kicker. It is different from influencer marketing in more ways than one.

Customers are moving away from traditional marketing because they understand that celebrity endorsement is a marketing strategy and doesn’t actually mean that the celebrity recommends or has even used the product or service they are endorsing. That’s why they are more inclined to find fresh voices on the internet. Voices that are talking about the product or service after giving it a go. This channel of voices used to come in the form of reviews on platforms like Yelp.

But, over time, they have started making the same associations with their favorite influencers on these platforms because that follower base is more often than not filled with people who either have the same questions as the individual or the answer to their questions. Influencers are also perceived to be regular people, unlike celebrities who are likely to be from a different class of people than the guy on the street.

So, here are a few ideas in any brand’s starter kit when it comes to collaborating with an influencer on a social media platform.

• Paying the individual for sponsored posts that are clearly marked as such.
• Giving them exclusive access and striking a deal with them to post X number of reviews which increases brand awareness and reach.
• Give influencers merch or discounts on merch and get an honest review.

This is a huge financial bargain compared to traditional channels of advertising, not only because the terms and conditions can be adjusted depending on the goals of a specific campaign, but also because influencers are all about flexibility. Even when their focus is on making money, they strive to stay authentic with their followers. This is why your (potential) customers might be inclined to doubt big celebrities but will trust social media influencers who they perceive to be more like themselves.

Now, it is important to remember that some collaborations are not going to get you tangible results, meaning they will help you improve your brand recognition, which cannot always be measured. You might end up making 10 videos with an influencer instead of a short television ad. But rest assured that your influencer is likely to get you more engagement than the television advertisement.

In the introductory chapter, I also touched upon the importance of picking the right influencer for your brand. This is an interesting aspect of influencer marketing. Now, these minor celebrities can be found anywhere on the internet. That is part of the thrill and the challenge of finding them.

Typically, what makes them an “influencer” is the size of their following on social media. But that size can vary from hundreds to millions of followers. So, don’t get hung up on the numbers alone. Don’t count on their accounts being exceptionally jazzy either.

Some of them are known for their anonymity. Faceless internet entities like content creators Dream and Corpse or the hacker group Anonymous are extremely popular and influential among their followers. Sometimes they have a huge following and sometimes they have a small but extremely loyal, cult-ish following. If you can tap into that, you’ve really got something.

Influencers are not just individuals who talk about your niche. They might be photographers or bloggers or an industry insider who is known to reveal trade secrets to help the audience make better purchasing decisions.

The bottom line is that no matter the subject of the content they create, influencers have a phenomenal capacity to deliver your message to their followers while being true to both parties. They are like double agents except they do their best to be true to both parties and everyone (you and the audience) is aware of what they are dealing with.

How This Works

When you want to move away from traditional marketing channels because you want to capture more or a different set of audiences, you not only look for influencers with the right kind of follower base but also individuals who are trendsetters. Individuals who can recommend your brand in a way that makes it more palatable to potential customers.

This is how influencers deal with brands. They are essentially content creators that want to make stuff that is likable and shareable. They create material that you can repurpose for your mainstream promotional channels like email marketing to name one. But influencer marketing is not restricted to social media posts and videos.

You can think of:

• Product reviews
• Product placements in their content
• Unboxing videos
• Promoting your campaigns and new launches
• Sharing discounts and coupon codes
• Announcing giveaways
• Partnerships that go for more than one video or post
• Supporting influencer causes (because it’s a give and take) by taking part in their events
• Planting your product in their events

These are just a few ideas that are open to every brand that collaborates with an influencer. What more can be done depends on your brand and the influencer you engage with. So, let’s elaborate on that.

Types of Influencer Marketing

Here are five ways in which you can get started.

1. Contests

Depending on your pricing, you can allocate a portion of your budget to organize contests and giveaways. This can be a monthly event but you can make it more frequent if you can afford to do so.

Announcing contests through videos is a great way to engage the audience with your product. It is original content from the influencer and you get to measure audience interest in the form of likes, shares, redirected followers to your social media pages, more sign-ups for your newsletters and viewers tagging their friends who might be interested in your product.

You can get your influencer to do unboxing videos on your product on their social media channels. This will highlight your offer and maybe lower the price for viewers who come through the influencer.

Giveaways are also a big part of influencer marketing which means they can dedicate a day every week or month to unboxing the product and giving it away to winners of the contest. This is a great way to place your product in their content, do a few lines for a review even if you don’t want to do a full unboxing video.

2. Create Sponsored Content

This is another popular way of getting users to engage with influencers and through them with your brand. It is a common marketing technique too. It gives you the opportunity to ask the influencer to endorse a particular product or service through their blog posts, images or videos.

You can launch entire campaigns using this premise with pre-decided terms and conditions. But make sure you let the influencer use their own voice and creativity because that’s what their audience responds to the most.

3. Content and Product Collaborations

This is a mirror image of celebrity endorsements. You can create products along with your influencer which benefits both parties very well. It’s a common practice in the fashion industry where an entire line of products is launched with a celebrity.

You will be producing the products but their branding will piggyback on the popularity of the influencer who is already an established presence.

4. Takeovers

This practice has been around for a while but is picking up pace quite rapidly in recent times. You allow the influencer to take over your social media channels for a period of time (more often than not, it is for a day) but you can do it for a particular season marking a special occasion.

This takes the brand to the behind the scenes of an influencer’s life or your brand, whichever works best with the audience in question. They can create text-based posts, pictures, videos or stories that will excite and intrigue the audience. Engagement is high for these kinds of posts.

It starts with a certain level of trust and you must remember to change passwords at the end of the takeover period. On some platforms, like Snapchat, you can do this without giving your login details. Look into those options before you launch the idea.

5. Reviews

This takes us back into the realm of traditional marketing except, your influencer is the one reviewing the product. You can strike a deal to make it a favorable review or get an honest one. If you’re gunning for a favorable review, you will have to offer a freebie but they will have to do a full disclosure to their audience.

Unboxing videos often give you the opportunity to try this technique. With influencers, the idea is that they have never used this product or service. So, they will be coming into the experience with fresh eyes and it will all be done while the camera is rolling. This is exactly the kind of stuff that lends authenticity to the review and the brand gains the audience’s trust.

These methods often give:

• More credibility to the brand.
• Bring in a new audience to your fore.
• Repeatedly advertising your content makes it easy for the audience to remember your brand.
• Lends reliability to your brand through the influencer.

It is not hard to see how brands have benefitted immensely from influencer marketing.