Influencer Marketing 101

Education
Written By Catherine Miller

What is influencer marketing, how does it work, and what’s it for anyway?

Influencer marketing has become incredibly popular recently and continues gaining momentum. Because of the rate at which it continues to grow, it is essential to learn more about it if you're growing your brand. To effectively use this marketing tool, you must get acquainted with its main aspects. If you've landed on this blog post, you more than likely have some ideas about what influencer marketing is, and you may be curious to learn more. Well, you're in the right place! We will highlight some of the key points of what it is, how it works, and what it's for!

Photo of a female influencer in a blue sweater sitting at her computer while writing in her notebook. She is sitting at her desk with a clothes rack behind her. She also has a ring light and a phone set up to help her create content.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a popular marketing strategy used by brands to effectively reach and engage with their target audiences. It involves leveraging popular media personalities' influence on their follower base to help promote a company's products and services. The influencers can be celebrities, social media personalities, bloggers, etc. By leveraging their reach and influence, companies can reach a wider audience and generate more leads and sales. It is a means of advertising products and services through these media personalities - influencers. These influencers promote the brands they represent primarily on social media platforms through static posts on Instagram with in-depth captions, short-form video content such as Reels of Tiktoks, long-form video content such as Youtube vlogs, or written blog posts on their websites. 

An influencer can be any well-known person online – ranging from the most famous celebrity to a small-town mom blogger. These two types of people would have wildly different audiences and follower counts, but each inspires and has the potential to sway public opinion.

The lure of this marketing tool is that it does not look like spam or gimmicky since all the information about the product or service is given by a real person as a recommendation. The influencer will talk about how it positively affected their own life to a group of people who already know, trust, and like them. Typically, followers trust the person they follow to a great extent, even if they don't know them personally. On social media, you can get a very intimate view of people's lives who have large followings, and users feel like they know them! It is a beautiful element of social media- that sense of community that we can feel when we follow those who align with our values. 

When influencer marketing started taking off, often, influencers would get paid to use products in their photos and videos without disclosing that it was an advertisement. In the last couple of years, the ethics behind influencer marketing has come into question, and now it is standard practice to disclose when you are being paid to post using #AD or noting in the caption that it is a sponsored post. It is also much more common for influencers to use the products they are recommending more than ever before because they have a reputation to protect. If someone with a large following recommends a lousy product and their audience realizes this, the community will lose trust in this person. An influencer is nothing without their community. They work very hard to create organic, authentic relationships with those in their community so they can continue to have an online presence to monetize off of.

Who Are Influencers?

An influencer is, well, anyone who influences others online and in real life. It can be an A-List celebrity, a blogger, a content creator, a brand, or a public figure whose opinions about their niche are respected by their followers. It doesn't matter where they are online — whether on social networks, forums, podcasts, or live video hosting — they are well-known people with a trusted audience. There are infinite amounts of niches influencers can fall into. To name a few…

  • Interior Design

  • Fashion 

  • Thrifting / Antiques 

  • Cannabis

  • Beauty

  • Travel 

  • Wellness 

  • Sports

  • Gaming

A travel influencer looking at their PLANN feed to make sure she likes how her Instagram will look. She is planning her content and it is of travel photos from all across the world.

These are all very generalized. They can also get more specific such as…

  • Interior Design: Minimalist, boho, mid-century modern, eclectic, thrifted

  • Fashion: plus-size, mid-size, streetwear, thrifted, brand name dupes

  • Beauty: makeup, skin care, hair tutorials, curly hair care techniques

  • Travel: vanlife, traveling abroad, backpacking, domestic travel

  • Wellness: holistic health, ADHD management, fitness, nutrition

A black female makeup influencer is doing her makeup in a mirror for a product review. She is smiling and wearing a yellow shirt. Her phone and make up are visible on the table.

Each influencer has a niche. Depending on their audience, they may be dedicated to one specific community, or they may create content for a few related topics. These typically arise organically. The influencer starts their account posting one way, attracting similar types of people to follow them. Then, as they begin to share more about themselves and their area of expertise, they will have a little more freedom to intentionally expand their audience. They interact with their followers, build rapport, and get to know their community over time. Then, social media algorithms will be able to show their content to more people who may be interested in their account. 

Influencers can be divided into the following types:

  • Blogger: Maintains their website and regularly updates the content while promoting their blog on social media. They can do this for various reasons: for entertainment, bringing helpful information to others, and monetization.

  • Vlogger: Publishes video content on a YouTube channel. Many companies often turn to vloggers to create and distribute videos with promotions within the video. 

  • Brand Ambassador: A person who already uses a brand's products or services and is invited to cooperate on improving the brand's reputation, increasing awareness, and the number of sales by sharing with their audience about the brand. 

  • Content Creator: A person who creates photos and videos including products. Creators supply content to influencers who promote the products. They may not have many followers, but sell their content. More recently, content creators can also be people who start posting for fun and then begin to amass followers quickly. This is a newer definition of the term and is typically accounts that post educational or entertaining material. 

Check out the different tiers of influencers based on size here. 

A female influencer is doing a shopping haul, GRWM, or a outfit try on in front of her ring light. She is wearing a tanish brown cropped hoodie.

How It Works

It starts with identifying the right influencers who can help promote your brand. Once you have identified the best influencers, you need to develop a strategic plan to reach out to them and engage with them. One way to do this is a do-it-yourself approach. This can be a daunting task for business owners. Learning the process of getting a campaign going, a pricing structure and agreement with the creators, and measuring metrics to see if the brand campaign is moving the needle for your brand is all a part of what it takes to make influencer marketing work for you. Once you have established a relationship with the influencers you'd like to employ, you can provide them with information about your products and services and ask them to promote your brand through their channels.

Another way to successfully use influencer marketing as part of your advertising strategy in your business is to hire a company like ours, The Social Strategy US,  to act as the coordinator between you and the influencers. There are many fantastic influencer marketing agencies all across the United States. Using an agency takes out the guesswork of influencer marketing and guarantees results. Some services we offer for brands at our agency are influencer recruiting, brand campaign management, SEO and web design. 

Influencer recruiting is the first step of the process, where we find specific influencers with the same audience you're trying to reach. Then, we will create and manage the campaign – sorting out how many influencers will promote your product, what each of them will provide in terms of content creation, how much they will get paid, how long the campaign will last, and which key performance indicators (KPIs) we will use to measure the success of the campaign. 

We also offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) if you need extra support outside of influencer marketing. SEO is a method of optimizing web content to make it more visible and relevant in search engine results. It involves optimizing content with keywords and phrases, creating backlinks, and ensuring the website is user-friendly. SEO is integral to any digital marketing strategy because it helps you reach more people and generate more leads. 

All of these moving parts are essential parts of influencer marketing. Influencer agencies can help with every aspect of the process, from getting the campaign going with the best influencer(s) for your product or service to ensuring that once an influencer's audience knows about your brand, it is putting its best face forward online. Working with an agency can not only save you time and money when starting to use influencer marketing by working out all the details for you and using our streamlined processes, but it can also MAKE you money too by generating more sales and engagement online and finding new customers that will love your brand.

A food blogger is photographing a salad with greens on a black flat bowl. You can see the salad through the lens of their phone camera on their Iphone screen.

What It’s For

Ultimately, influencer marketing increases brand awareness, generates leads and sales, and builds relationships with potential customers. It is also a great way to increase your social media presence and engagement with your target audience. As a bonus, influencers can also provide valuable insights into their industry and help you understand how to serve your target market better. It is such a powerful tool that adds real value to your business.

Catherine Miller
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