For a short while ago, advertising was the only tool that comes to one’s mind about marketing. Nowadays, marketing environment of brands shelters many other tools to reach their audiences in the most accurate way. The idea of 360° marketing have bursted based on certain needs. Advertising is an explicit method to promote a product; the texts, visuals, scenarios obviously shows the brand’s intend on selling their products. The exact reason why, consumers start to find this method kind of intimidating and many people are skeptic about reliability of ads. Therefore, it has to be supported; in other words completed by another marketing method. At this point, influencer marketing lend a helping hand to brands. Audiences can be careless about the brand; however they care about the lifestyle and taste of influencers they follow. Influencer marketing storifies brand’s message instead of directly telling it in an exaggerated way: an authentic and fun way to present benefits of products.
So, what is influencer marketing, what are the benefits of influencer marketing compared to conventional advertising, how influencers can manage to affect their audiences’ purchase decision, who are the influencers and how to reach them, how to use influencer marketing tools and what are the new trends of influencer marketing? We will check on all these questions together! To find out more keep on reading!
What is Influencer Marketing?
Let’s start with the essential idea beneaths under influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is not a tool for selling products but a lifestyle. It is effective due to the fact that audiences rely on the expertise and decision making of the influencers. So, how come do people think that influencers are opinion leaders on a certain product line? It comes from their popularity and reputation but most importantly their lifestyle. Think about a makeup vlogger. The design of her room, places she drinks her coffee or buys her dresses, her flawless skin, self confidence and lastly happiness! Everything surrounds her reflects that she takes good care of herself and knows how to enjoy life. Doing things that she does is equal with having a little taste of her fantastic lifestyle in audiences’ eyes. Also, followers certainly know that the mentioned influencer stands firm about her standards; thus she would never ever suggested a low quality product. If she uses the product, then it has certain quality and benefits.
Besides of being authentic and reliable, influencer marketing is more down to earth compared to advertising. Usually, influencers do not claim to create magic or instant changes come from a single product. They have their daily routines and the product just makes a nice touch to their habits. A makeup vlogger shows how to use a bright pink blush as a light eyeshadow or a travel vlogger shares the moments of tranquility in his new camp chair. These examples still promotes happiness which is experienced with benefits of a certain product; however it is humble, real and yet imaginative.
Influencer marketing is also more interactive than conventional advertising. Bloggers, instagrammers and vloggers are highly engaged with their audiences opinions. They share these opinions and respond in an instant and fun way. Moreover, they are engaged with interests of their audiences. They create campaigns, raffles and even send presents their chosen followers. This two way communication encourages customer engagement more than ever.
Lastly, audiences feel that the influencer keep on living this way whether he or she promotes a certain product or not. In a nutshell, influencer marketing involves marketing products and services with the help of popularity and expertise of social media influencers who engages their audiences by authentic, interesting content and interactive communication.
How Does Influencer Marketing Work?
When looking from outside, influencer marketing can be seen so simple and lead you to think that it is all about finding an influencer with remarkable amount of followers or subscribers. However it may lead you to waste your money if measurability and relationship management are ignored. In addition to this, it has to be manageable and should not create unnecessary workload. The exact reason why, marketing activities are carried out with certain tools and influencer marketing is no exception. There are numerous influencer marketing tools and they offer very useful features in their platforms. Let’s have a quick look on essential qualities of influencer marketing tool which can boost the efficiency of your work.
First things first; to start your influencer marketing campaigns, you should find an influencer. Random search is obviously not the best way to reach the right person. Therefore, influencer marketing tools offer huge databases. To ease your search in these databases, there are multiple ways to filter it such as relevant conversation topics, social channels, keywords, hashtags, topics and you can you whatever method you want. Moreover, smart algorithm of these tools also make recommendations based on your historical search data.
Once you have found influencers, you can create efficient campaigns by using campaign creation and management tools to run your influencer marketing thoroughly. To make the communication process smoother, influencer marketing tools also offer centralized communication hubs.
Lastly and most importantly, they offer a solution to your initial question. Why do you run these campaigns and what will convince you that the work is effective? Measurability. Influencer marketing tools provide highly detailed campaign reports and virtualize them. Some of them even have their own measure tool of ROI.
To sum up, these tools help you to find correct influencers, run campaigns and communication process effectively and measure performance of your campaigns. Sounds like a whole package. So, what is next after you set up your campaigns in an efficient way? Of course keeping yourself updated and following the most recent trends. Let’s have a quick look on them too.
What Are the Most Recent Influencer Trends?
As the dynamics of social media and content creation evolve, trends of influencer marketing changes too. Let’s start with the main subject of our topic: Influencers. Influencers do not like to be called influencer anymore due to the negative connotations of the word. Influencing someone is a strong and in some extent an intimidating term. Also, it is highly engaged with selling something apparently. Therefore, there is a shift to the term of creator. The term of creator evokes productivity and creativity more than the term of influencer. This change is also highly supported by main social media channels such as Instagram and TikTok. There is another difference between an influencer and creator: Creators do not need much to produce interesting content like advanced photoshop skills, professional cameras, sound systems and so on. They have been proving that a simple video which were made by a smartphone is enough to amuse and engage their followers.
Secondly, corporations made with celebrities is in decline. There are many reasons behind this like lack of authenticity caused by their extravagant lifestyle. The apparent social inequality has been intimidating their audiences and they start to find celebrity content less exciting. On the other hand, nano influencers and micro influencers are on rise. Before effectiveness of an influencers has been measured by amount of their followers. However, it has been proved that followers of nano and micro influencers are more engaged and responsive than macro influencers. Thus, brands start to prefer nano and micro influencers for more niche and effective campaigns.
Take your marketing to the next level
With McAudience solution provided by Enkronos you can use influencer marketing tools to create and maintain an audience of people with predefined and tailor made characteristics.
You can find out more about McAudience on www.mcaudience.com.
We create and manage your influencer marketing campaign from A to Z. In order to do an effective Marketing Activity with Influencers you need to partner up with a company that understands your needs. With McAudience we tailor your Influencer Marketing campaigns based on your vision and your goals.
Here we have tackled the concept of influencer marketing, its essentials, the way it works and the most recent trends which shapes its frame recently. To find out more interesting contents regarding digital world, keep on following us!
Enkronos Marketing Team
