April 12, 2019

Influencer Marketing- The Rundown

What is influencer marketing?

Put simply, an influencer is someone who uses their social media presence as a platform to sell the products they are being paid to promote to their followers. However, social media influencers operate almost purely on Instagram. This is because this platform is made of purely image posts. This makes it easier to post multiple photos of the products they’re being paid to wear or use.

The power many of these influencers have is unpresented, sometimes unbelievable. Celebrities such as Ariana Grande and Cristiano Ronaldo have over 150 million followers each. This provides a massive audience to promote to. Ronaldo uses his for brands such as Nike, Grande uses hers for brands such as MAC. These are massive brands who can afford to collaborate with celebrities with massive followings. However, what if you are not such a big, well know brand? Can you still take advantage of Instagram’s influence on the marketplace?

How useful is it?

Unbelievably. With 800 million monthly active users, the social media platform holds the most potential for brands wanting to reach a wider audience over the internet. Facebook and Twitter may be more popular social media platforms. Yet they do not enjoy the user interactivity that Instagram does. It is also a lot easier to be visible to your followers compared to other social media platforms.

This is because of how simple and easy Instagram’s system and software is to use. As there is only two type of posts that can be created it lowers the amount of content to be competed with. Furthermore, you cannot share or ‘retweet’ other people’s content which prevents an Instagram newsfeed from becoming as crammed as Facebook and Twitter.

Therefore, if you pay a person with a significant Instagram following to promote your product, there is a very high chance of a guaranteed impact. There are plenty of instagrammers with thousands of followers who will be willing to promote almost anything asked of them for reasonable payments. This make influencer marketing accessible to most sizes of businesses.

How to use it

Influencer marketing is a lot easier than it seems. All that is needed is:

• a product that a social media audience is likely to buy
• an instagram account with thousands of followers
• a payment plan that will convince the instagrammer to sign up to the promotions

The types of products that influencers promote the most are clothes and makeup. This is because the target audience of most influencers of teenage girls, the most common demographic  among instagram users.  Therefore, if you provide clothing for teenage girls and makeup you are more likely to succeed with your instagram marketing.

Usually the smaller the following, the less you need to pay for promotion. However, if the instagrammer’s following is too small, then their reach will be too small to be of significant value. Therefore, the ideal type of influencer to target on instagram would be with a following between 5000 to 10k followers. They will have affordable costs but still have a worthwhile influence with your products.

If you fit the type of business that would benefit from hiring instagram influencers, don’t hesitate to get started. It is usually affordable, the results can come quick and in large numbers and is a technique that can be used over and over again.