Companies are quickly adopting influencer marketing because it is an effective way to promote their products and services. Huge corporations and small businesses are all taking advantage of this trend. While this is not a new concept or tactic, social channels like YouTube and Instagram have catapulted influencer marketing to a whole new level.
What is influencer marketing and why is it so hot right now?
Our very own Mauricio Sanchez sat down with Avery Schrader, founder of Modash, an influencer marketing platform. According to Avery, Modash is a tool that allows marketers to access micro-influencers anywhere in the world. It enables its users to easily measure impact, performance, and reach thousands.
What is a micro-influencer?
A micro-influencer is someone who has an active, engaged, and loyal audience online with under 10k followers. The world of micro-influencing is more profitable and desirable than an online personality with 100k followers. It sounds crazy, right? Engagement is what matters most in influencer marketing. Someone with 5k followers could easily have a higher engagement rate than someone with 100k followers.
Influencer marketing is all about the relationship the influencer has with the following they’ve built. It really boils down to how solid and active their relationships are what translates to dollars for brands. Typically, an effective influencer will have a very well defined niche for which they create content. This could be fitness, overall wellness, makeup, beauty, fashion, yoga, cooking, children, etc. The goal of an influencer is to establish themselves as an expert in a field. Then collaborate with brands that supply that niche with products and services.
How does influencer marketing compare to other forms of digital marketing?
Facebook ads, Google ads, email marketing, are still reliable forms of digital marketing for brands and the easiest to measure. Schrader states: “The truth is that Facebook ads and Google ads and all these things are the best bet for performance marketing right now. And that’s what we tried to change about influence in marketing because we want it to sit there too. When you can measure it really well, you can get a lower CPA cost per acquisition with influencers than you can with Facebook ads.”
Influencer marketing has swept the world with so much success because people want to be sold by other real people. People who have interesting stories or viewpoints to share. It’s difficult for someone to relate to an untouchable celebrity or Facebook ad selling a product or service.
The power of a brand aligning with an influencer or micro-influencer is exponential. Forbes laid it out very clearly in an article written on the topic in 2018. This is something we’ve never seen to this degree before. It will surely change the way in which brands create and sell products and services for long into the future.
“Brands can find influencers that speak really specific to their target audience.”
What should businesses look for when hiring micro-influencers?
Avery Schrader has created a platform specifically to facilitate this process. Companies can always approach this form of marketing on their own. Although if they use tools like the one created by Modash it makes the process faster and straight forward. According to Schrader, Modash is like the matchmaking service between brands and influencers. It helps its customers find and align with the right influencer. Modash takes the trial and error part out of the equation. It also gives its users a clear and reliable way to measure conversions.
Quick tips for hiring micro-influencers
- Someone who is already talking about their brand
- Is in their niche
- Has a high engagement rate on posts/videos
- Is trusted, respected, and admired by their followers (read the comments)
- Is not a liability
Successful influencer marketing begins by evoking emotion in the consumer through a connection to a public figure. The emotion that is connected to the desired lifestyle is the sweet spot.
Schrader says, “So then the trick is how do you find people that other people trust and respect and admire and want to be like and have them say, this is the place you go to get your coffee.”
The key is trusting that the opinion of the influencer or micro-influencer that will translate into real sales.
The Startup published on Medium, “Marketers have noticed that once an account is over a certain size, however, fewer people bother to engage questioning the value of a multimillion army of fans. The ratio of likes and comments to followers peaks when an account has around 1,000 followers. Get more than 100,000 followers, and engagement starts to flatten out; users just aren’t as keen to interact with a celebrity as with someone they can relate to more closely.
How should businesses approach or negotiate with influencers?
Brands want products depicted and promoted in a positive light. The influencers who will post as “all opinions are my own” may not be as attractive; as an influencer who can be incentivized to promote the product or service in a positive light.
When a seemingly regular person is vouching for and actually using a product that they love it creates real results. That genuine sales pitch becomes the most profitable form of marketing a brand can engage in. It’s all about relationships and influencers are working really hard to establish meaningful relationships with their followers.
How can a brand approach and negotiate with influencers?
- Sending an email with an offer
- Reaching out via DM (direct message)
- Offering either affiliate marketing or free product for exposure
- Building a scalable profit margin for the amount of sales/conversions
It is crucial to allow the influencer to do what works best for them and their community. This helps to devise a system that is high performance and low cost.
What is the potential ROI of influencer marketing?
A common misconception about influencer marketing is that it’s an expensive, not effective, and potentially huge risk. Quite the opposite is true actually and Schrader makes some great points:
“If you can scale the influence of marketing, it’s like crazy underpriced. People will work for free if you can inspire them to action. And Zuckerberg doesn’t work the same way. So you’re always paying for those converts.”
He went on to say, “So you can get lower CPA if you can experiment well, and really get the numbers right and your users will be better than the rest.”
Influencer marketing is the present and future of brand success
“If you can’t beat em, join em” is the perfect adage for where we find ourselves in marketing right now. Influence is power, and trust is gold.
If you’re wondering if influencer marketing is the right fit for you, check out Modash. If you would like to work with us directly then let’s discuss your success strategy and how we can best help you to leverage influencer marketing. Fill out our discovery form to get the conversation started!