Influencer marketing, or influence marketing, has very quickly found a place of choice among the levers helping companies to gain visibility, notoriety and develop their sales. How to take advantage of it?
Influencer marketing, or influence marketing, has very quickly positioned itself among the best digital levers for companies and brands. Namely for the search for visibility and sales promotion among consumers.
Companies seeking to develop their sales and gain e-reputation on the Internet, will have recourse to different levers that they will have to work and master simultaneously:
- Mastering digital marketing,
- Develop influence strategies,
- To set up e-marketing actions,
- Develop scenarios using marketing automation,
- Use natural referencing by positioning on strong keywords,
- Mastering hashtags on social networks,
- Develop partnerships and collaborations etc…
- All these points combine within companies to improve the digital performance of their actions. Influence marketing then supports the reach of their campaigns.
Let’s discover what influence marketing is and how it works, its advantages, how to integrate it in your communication and how brands use it.
Definition of influencer marketing
Influencer marketing, or influence marketing in English, is the set of techniques that tend to use the power of recommendation or prescription of influencers. It is therefore, in a way, the ability to create prescribers or ambassadors for one’s brand, although there is still a difference between influencer and ambassador depending on the angle.
In its early days, influencer marketing mainly targeted active members of a community or from forums. We also worked with influential bloggers before social networks took over in digital communication.
In this universe where influence is present on every platform, web marketing and communication in the broadest sense now rely on this lever. Even the community manager works on influence marketing campaigns among his many missions.
At the centre is the influencer, the new prescriber of brands that has become essential in communication strategies. Thanks to him, companies can considerably increase their sales in a very short time. The implementation of inbound marketing strategies by targeting qualified audiences also succeeds to B2B players.
Influencers! discover a world of stars and scarification where massive audiences sometimes play a decisive role for brands. The goal being that they obtain a strong virality in their campaigns… and by extension a significant increase in their sales.
Thus, with the emergence of a generation of influencers very active on social networks and blogs, influence marketing has become indispensable for communication strategies. It is used in digital marketing or community management for social media operations through social media.
For a company, it is about selling, improving its visibility, its brand image and its e-reputation or working on its marketing content by relying on influencers. The targets are multiple, as are the themes through which the influencers express themselves.
Marketers have understood this, they work simultaneously on influence marketing and natural referencing. They thus gain more efficiently in visibility on social networks and search engines. To do so, they integrate bloggers who have a proven digital influence and who work on the SEO axis.
This is not only addressed to specific and isolated domains, but for many sectors of activity where influence marketing helps in the search for visibility.
The different types of influencers within influencer marketing
Influencers are classified by typology and mainly according to the size of their communities. The size of the community of influencers is still a relevant point for brands. Gradually the engagement rate is also becoming a key element in marketing influence. For an agency or a media, engagement can sometimes be more representative than a large community. This is how we can measure the influence of certain people.
It’s all a matter of objective, because some companies may just be looking to build loyalty in their own community by involving influencers. Loyalty is an axis that makes the difference for many brands. B2B companies are also doing it and are ready to collaborate with B2B influencers who are becoming more numerous on the web.
Celebrities
In influence marketing, stars are the first influential people on the Internet. However, appealing to them requires a large budget for the brands. Celebrities from the world of film, music, sports or business all have a major role to play with companies.
Influencing millions of people during the launch of a product for example, will be much more beneficial through a famous influencer. Brands play a lot on this lever and boost their sales via their e-commerce sites.
Macro-influencers
Macro-influencers are the biggest influencers outside of the stars. They have communities of tens of thousands to millions of fans. Their main advantage is of course the size of their community but also the great diversity found in these influencers.
They can be found in all fields and are listed by the majority of influence marketing agencies. However, there is a lot of pressure and stress to maintain their status. Among macro-influencers, there is a huge fake-influence due to a juicy business where there are many people living from their passion.
This has led many editors to work on tools to detect these fake-influencers. One of the best-known being hype-auditor. However, this tool as well as the detection of fake influencers in the broadest sense is often questioned. A well worked out brand-influencer relationship should not give way to a fake-influencer.
Micro-influencers
Micro-influencers or ‘influence in the middle’ will say many people. A definite advantage of micro-influencers is the commitment they generate. The connection with their community is more engaging than with macro-influencers in particular.
They often have better engagement rates, even if they always remain behind the quantity that is more important for the major brands. However, we must rely on them more and more to obtain interesting feedback and succeed in detaching the products from the influencer who is promoting them.
Nano-influencers
Nano-influencers may have small communities, but they have a strong commitment! Their often-specific fields do not generate millions of enthusiasts. They work on niches or are more animated by a deep passion without seeking quantity at the expense of quality. A category that companies will have to deal with in the years to come.
The different levers of marketing influence
Here are some levers used in influence marketing that can be managed by influence marketing agencies.
The Buzz kit
The company promotes its new product by sending it to an influencer, who will then test it to share his or her opinion with the community. This principle can also be linked to unboxing if the influencer makes the experience live from the moment the product is unpacked.
Content sponsorship
This technique consists in sponsoring a blog article or a publication on social networks, in order to reach a maximum number of people and gain visibility. It is an action that allows to gain in virality, but which can also become a perennial action for the brand, if the article is worked in SEO.
Thus, sponsored articles are the best levers for brands, when they want to gain visibility.
Product placement
Mainly used on YouTube, this technique calls upon the services of a YouTuber specialized in a theme related to the brand’s universe. It will then subtly (or not) place the product in question in one of its videos.
Travel blog
Travel bloggers are on the rise and some are managing to federate very active communities. To gain notoriety, some tour operators use this type of influencer to promote their products.
They generally offer an all-inclusive stay with sometimes even a camera, in exchange for several photos taken daily, and share via a blog and/or social networks such as Instagram in particular.
The benefits of influencer marketing for brands
From an economic point of view, the use of an influencer is less expensive than traditional communication. The return on investment is more easily measurable and the attrition rate (leads lost on the conversation path) can sometimes be relatively low.
On the technical side, influencer marketing allows to improve the referencing of a website. In particular via the mentions and the number of links that will point to it. Insofar as brands use influential bloggers.
How do influencer marketing agencies work?
Influencre marketing agencies generally accompany advertisers in the implementation of their communication campaigns. They use their expertise in the development of marketing strategies, the knowledge and know-how of influencers.
These agencies have a proven knowledge of the mechanisms and constraints related to this type of marketing (legislation, content creation, ROI analysis and the real impact of campaigns).
It is now possible to find on the web, influence marketing agencies that have developed their own application or platform. They allow to propose campaigns and thus maintain the relationships between brands and influencers by establishing trust.
Thanks to them, it is easier to identify influencers by sector of activity, by type of audience and to categorize them through many parameters related to their presence on social networks.
We can increasingly point out that influencer marketing agencies tend towards a 360° communication in order to work more efficiently on an entire project.
Would you like to get more information about influencer marketing method, contact us today?
Read our influencer marketing articles:
INFLUENCE MARKETING: WHICH AMBASSADORS FOR YOUR REPUTATION?
INFLUENCER MARKETING: ESSENTIALS, THE WAY OF WORKING AND THE MOST RECENT TRENDS
