2022 holds great potential for influencer marketing as brands are currently rushing to revamp their marketing strategies and campaigns to connect with millions of consumers who have turned to online platforms for their e-commerce needs.
A report from IPA has shown that advertising had a 20% fall due to pandemic but influencers saw a 46% surge. Influencer marketing is expected to hit $13 billion by the end of 2022.
What Makes Influencer Marketing Effective?
Did you know that 49% of the consumers depend on the recommendation of influencers and 86% of women use social media for purchasing advice?
Influencer marketing is very effective because people see influencers as friends and people trust friends more than brands.
Even though the followers know that the influencers are paid to promote that product, there still is a genuine connection between the influencer and the follower that feels real.
The influencer has already built rapport and trust that even when the influencer is delivering the ad content the followers accept the content as if it came organically because they believe that the influencer would only work with brands they truly support.
Influencer marketing is now recognized as a significant advertising strategy since it is used in 93% of marketing campaigns.
Here Are 5 Quick Steps To Understand How To Create An Influencer Marketing Strategy For Your Brand
- Set a goal
The first step is to set a clear goal of what the brand is looking for in influencer marketing. The brands will have to be clear with why they need a campaign and on what platform they want their ad campaign. It could either be for creating brand awareness or for direct sales.
- The right platform
For example, if the brand is more into sharing visuals of the product, they are likely to stick to Instagram. If the brand has requirements to show product demos and reviews, they are much more likely to choose YouTube.
On average, businesses generate $6 and 50 cents for each $1 they invest in influencer marketing. Choosing the right platform will ensure that the ad reaches the right audience demographics.
- The right influencer
The brand will then have to look for an influencer on the platform best suited for their brand based on the following categories such as follower count, relevance to the product, and engagement rate.
The easiest way to sort through this would be to search for industry-related hashtags to find the influencer that would best match the brand’s requirements. One of the salient features of influencer marketing that works in favor of brands is that every influencer has their own set of niche audiences which the brands can easily leverage for their growth and success.
- Research your competitors
The audience would respond more favorably if the campaign was modeled after the competitors’ methods and whatever had worked out for them. Assess the audience’s reaction to the content the competitors use. Learning from their mistakes would be a smart move.
- Track the results
Keep track of the data based on the audience interaction to determine what you should continue doing and what you shouldn’t. Be sure that you have taken every component of the campaign to better the results of the next campaign.
9 Trending influencer marketing strategies in 2022
We know that navigating through influencer marketing with all these new strategies can be a little overwhelming.
Finding what best suits your brand with too many influencers emerging could give you FOMO.
The following 9 trends will give you a complete idea of what is going on in the world of influencer marketing and what to choose for your brand.
- Ad campaigns
Listed below are the types of campaigns best suited for growing businesses.
- Giveaway campaigns: Giveaway campaigns may be a clever strategy for creating excitement and interest when introducing a new product or service and are a terrific method for generating a lot of engagement.
- The way it functions is by giving influencers a service or product to give away to their followers. It functions by providing influencers with a product or service that they can give away to their audience and it has the potential to produce a greater ROI.
- Product seeding: In this kind of campaign, a brand offers influencers gifts of its products or services. In exchange, the influencer will post a review of the product or an unboxing video on their social networks. Influencers will get the chance to use the products first-hand if they are new consumers.
- Pre-release campaigns: The purpose of this is to give the target audience a sense of exclusivity via the influencer. Being the first to use the product fills them with great joy.
- Customization is crucial
Brands must just be talent scouts and find the influencers who would bring talent to the camera. Brands need content for Facebook feeds, Instagram ads, and YouTube ads.
Influencers can create content that is not overproduced or over-polished but like they usually would in their own authentic way simply because they know how to engage the audience better than the brands.
On Instagram, it is usually a story slide tagging the brand including a link to the website and a feed post that mentions the brand. In YouTube videos, it could be a small segment in the influencer’s new video mentioning the brand and linking the website in the description. This also acts as a hybrid User Generated Content.
- Selfless content
The idea behind selfless content is to assume and create content with the undeniable truth that people don’t care about the product but what they do care about is consuming good content.
In other words, if the content that the influencer has created for the brand is new and selfless that it keeps a lot of audiences engaged that they stay on the platform watching the content, the platform will automatically push the content further and both the brand and the influencer will profit from it.
- Micro-influencers are the new big fish
More followers don’t necessarily mean more influence. Unleashing an army of micro-influencers builds quicker brand awareness and much-needed credibility.
According to HelloSociety, micro-influencers have 60% higher engagement rates than influencers with a larger audience. Micro-influencers exist in higher volume and it is cost-efficient for brands to work with them.
There is also very less skepticism involved when compared to the ads run by big influencers or celebrities.
- Timing counts: The content’s reach is based on frequency, time, and day. The frequency must be once a day. More than that would give the audience ad fatigue.
Surveys show that the best time to post the content would be 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM EST or 5:00 PM or 2:00 AM EST for night owls. Mondays and Thursdays give the most reach and Sundays tend to do worst.
Spending 30 minutes on the platform after posting the content to respond to the engagement always pushes the content further maximizing its reach.
Yet another smart way to do this would be to research and follow the competitors and colleagues and then model the posting time and frequency accordingly.
- Leveraging User-Generated Content
Generally, people put enormous faith in commoners than they do in brands. Finding photographs and content from individuals beyond the brand’s workforce could be difficult for brands.
Brands could ask the influencer that they are collaborating with for consent to use their content on the brand’s page. Brands will then be able to repost their content so that their audience can see both their photos and content as well as the collaboration they have had with this influencer.
- Incentivizing the influencer
In 2017, the co-founder and CEO of Pura Vida bracelets, Griffin made a huge discovery when it came to his company’s brand ambassador program. 75% of his influencers had never made a single sale.
To combat this, Pura Vida bracelets created an incentivized framework that would reward the influencers at various levels based on the levels of results they brought to the company. It is always wise to use incentives that would bring huge excitement among the influencers.
- Establishing credibility with testimonials
Every business needs more customer reviews on its website, but frequently customers forget to return and give their feedback and insights. When businesses collaborate with influencers, they record their testimony.
These testimonies when showcased on the site give their potential customers additional social proof about their products so they feel more comfortable making purchases.
- Measuring the outcome
One of the easiest ways to measure the success of the campaign is by looking at the engagement received from the audience via likes, comments, shares and follows.
A deeper way of measuring the traffic to the website, new prospects and sales would include use my code strategy and UTM codes.
- Use my code
Influencers can easily include a link to an e-commerce site while they are discussing or endorsing a brand or product. The chances of a potential customer getting lost trying to find the brand’s page is much less this way. Offers are ever tempting.
Here, the brand’s influencer gives a promo code that customers may use to receive a discount on their purchases. It is also one of the best ways to track consumers who come to the website after watching the influencer’s ad content.
- UTM codes
The Urchin Tracking model is essentially where the brands put a tracking code in the URL so that they can track where the clicks originated from.
One of the easiest ways to create UTM code is by using google analytics UTM builder. The brands will have to provide different UTM codes for each influencer to track the clicks.
Conclusion
There is no way to reach success by evading influencer marketing. It is still evolving with new strategies and new influencers every day. The brands should be ahead of the pack to develop strategies based on the versatility of the grounds of influencer marketing to not only keep their present audience engaging but also to support new prospects.
