Influencer Marketing:
10 tips for successful influencer marketing
- Influencer marketing offers excellent returns for those who choose to utilize it. A survey by Tomoson has shown that companies earned an average of $6.50 for every single US dollar they invested in influencer marketing in 2016.
- Find the right influencers for your industry. Choose between the very expensive celebrities with massive reach, the macro influencers as industry leaders, and micro influencers, with a small but very loyal base of followers.
- Influencer marketing is generally considered slow. It requires regular, patient work over an extended period to build a relationship with your potential influencers. Be patient and persistent!
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 1 Influencer Marketing:
10 tips for successful influencer marketing
- 1.1 What is Influencer Marketing
- 1.2 Who or What is an Influencer?
- 1.3 Why You Need Influencer Marketing
- 1.4 1. The beginning – getting started
- 1.5 2. Set Your Goals
- 1.6 3. Identify Your Target Audience
- 1.7 4. Define the Best Influencer Type for Your Brand
- 1.8 5. How to Find the Right Influencers
- 1.9 6. Influencer Outreach
- 1.10 Conclusion and Summary
- 1.11 Further Articles
If you have never heard of influencer marketing before, you probably think it is just another form of marketing and PR work. However, influencer marketing is more than that. Today, it is an important method for publicly showcasing your products and services online. Compared to other marketing campaigns, influencer marketing also offers an excellent return. As a study by Tomoson shows, in 2016 companies earned an average of $6.50 per US dollar spent on influencer marketing.
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What is Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of those few terms where the name means exactly what it says. In the case of influencer marketing, that means a company works with people who have influence and are thus able to help market products and services. Influencer marketing seeks to identify the most important and influential people in your industry or niche. These are then approached directly with the goal of helping you promote your products.
Who or What is an Influencer?
An influencer is someone who has an impact on other people’s purchasing decisions or can influence and change those decisions. An influencer can do this because they have authority. Moreover, they also possess extensive expertise and often hold a special role with their audience. Often there is a particular relationship with them. It usually refers to someone who has a large number of followers in their niche with whom they actively engage. How many followers an influencer has, or should have, depends, among other things, on the industry or niche.
Influencer marketing emerged from celebrity marketing. Known and famous personalities have been endorsing products for many years. Think of Michael Schumacher, Boris Becker or Steffi Graf and their appearances in TV commercials or on the radio. Participation in such campaigns is naturally associated with a hefty fee for the celebrity. Online celebrity marketing is still comparable to influencer marketing today, but modern influencer marketing is much more than a star appearing on TV or radio without actually having a real base of followers.
SodaStream produces a home-use sparkling water maker. Until recently, the target audience was mainly families. However, once sales data showed that the product was especially popular among people without children, the company launched its “Join a Revolution” influencer campaign. The campaign uses a scene from Game of Thrones and “The Mountain,” a character from the series played by Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson.
The respective influencers have built a reputation. They are considered experts in their niche or industry. Many even run their own blog on the subject and often have their own YouTube channel where they have created videos. In any case, most influencers are active on social media. They maintain popular accounts, comment, discuss and give advice. All influencers spend a lot of time building an extensive network with a cultivated audience around their topic.
If the influencers are able to understand how your product or service can help their own followers, they may be willing to collaborate with you. In that case, they make their good reputation, their name, as well as their experience and audience available to you. They also help promote your project to the influencer’s followers and thus make it known. However, there is a catch: influencer marketing only works if you intend to develop and bring a high-quality product to market. If your product is poor, vague or inferior to comparable products from competitors, the influencers will not be willing to support your project. And even if they did, success would be lacking.
Why You Need Influencer Marketing
When was the last time you consciously looked at a banner or ad online? You probably can’t remember. Most people today don’t even notice such ads and banners. Those who do notice them usually feel interrupted, install an ad blocker, and thus prevent ads from being displayed altogether. Maybe you also tried social media successfully. That has potential, as many people today spend a significant amount of time browsing various social media profiles. However, there is a big problem here: who sees your status updates and publications on social networks? Unless you have a huge network of fans with many contacts, the reach of such campaigns is limited.
It’s further complicated by the fact that social media doesn’t make it as easy for you as it did a few years ago. Companies like Facebook and Co also want to earn from their product and want you to place paid ads on the platforms. Accordingly, it is difficult to succeed with free organic posts. The latest changes on Facebook make this clear: the news feed now favors updates from friends and family. Fan pages and business pages have been deprioritized and now have only limited reach.
Most people have a few hundred friends on social networks. However, this reach is very broad. Friends and family make up an important part, but so do colleagues, classmates, acquaintances, etc. Some people are friends with actors, with people who share the same interests, or just because they know someone who is friends with that person. Facebook in particular suggests people who are friends of your friends. From a marketing perspective, this is impractical. You virtually have no fixed target group or clear clue as to who it actually is. Influencers are different: they have a carefully cultivated circle of people with the same interests. This base can be large, in many cases even huge. So you know exactly what you are getting.
Influencer marketing is highly efficient. Sony created the first zoom on Instagram (#InstazoomZ5) to show users how awesome the smartphone’s camera is. They took a high-resolution, high-zoom photo with the Z5 and divided it into many hundreds of smaller shots on five layers. Then the company created more than 100 Instagram accounts that were connected via tags. In this way, it was possible to zoom in on every area of the photo and find more than 50 surprises. Finally, Sony used 30 influencers to spread the photos as part of a contest. The goal: to find the secret code.
Imagine how many interesting and relevant people you can reach with a single influencer – compared to other, more random marketing methods! Some companies are so successful in creating an online identity that they themselves become influencers. Red Bull, for example, has taken social media success to the extreme. For most companies, of course, that is an unattainable dream.
Usually, it is much easier to find influencers and work with their audience than it is to build a comparable audience yourself and stay actively engaged with it. Influencer marketing differs from traditional advertising. One of the most important differences lies in the type of relationship you need to build with an influencer. Many companies – especially large corporate enterprises – traditionally try to maintain a lot of control and influence over their brand and marketing. This approach is only partially sensible in influencer marketing.
Influencers already have prestige and relationships before you even came into play. Even if you distribute a relatively successful and well-known brand, you cannot expect to have great control over your influencers. Maybe you pay them well, but they are not your employees! The followers want to hear what the influencer has to say – not the message your company wants to convey. They are not waiting for your opportunity! This is precisely where the biggest difference lies between traditional outbound marketing and new inbound marketing. Inbound marketing – which includes influencer marketing – brings customers to you. You cannot set conditions as you used to. Companies that try to exert significant control over their influencers only achieve disappointing results with this form of PR work.
The key to successful influencer marketing is trust. And here is the reality: consumers trust influencers more than they trust you or your brand! Successful influencer marketing creates a win-win situation for you and everyone involved.
Dunkin’ Donuts and the agency Trilia wanted to create awareness for National Donut Day. They entered into a partnership with digital network and entertainment studio Collab. The goal: a national Snapchat campaign showcasing visually appealing content. Dunkin’ Donuts simultaneously introduced a special offer for this day. Collab selected lifestyle creators who spread the content and special offer via Snapchat. For the project, they chose eight successful influencers to share teaser content and the special offer. In this way, the campaign reached more than three million people – a huge success!
1. The beginning – getting started
There is no reason – and it makes little sense – to choose influencer marketing just because someone told you it is currently trending or very successful. You must pursue a goal and purpose with your campaign! This is probably no different from other areas of the company. Ask those responsible in any successful business about the recipe for success, and they will tell you that goals played an important, even decisive role. We will examine this topic more closely in chapter two. For an influencer marketing campaign to be successful, you need high-quality content of excellent quality. A simple 500-word blog post written just to meet SEO criteria is very unlikely to catch an influencer’s interest.
For people to notice your content, it must meet the following requirements:
- It must be accessible
- It must call to action and be interactive
- It must look modern and appealing
You must offer your reader real added value. Here are some content examples you can use:
- Expert reports and opinions
- Interviews
- Listicles
- Ask your favorite influencer for a quote and use it in an infographic or SlideShare.
- Ask for expert tips and publish them all together in a blog post.
The most popular places or platforms where influencers make their good name are:
Blogs – Blogging influencers have spent a long time (often years) building a successful, popular blog in a specific industry or niche. Even though there are many more platforms and networks available today that influencers use, most of them owe their success to their blogs. You can collaborate with quality bloggers in the following ways:
- Guest postings on the influencer’s blog
- Try to convince the influencer to mention your brand on their blog.
- Attempt to obtain a product review
- Sponsorship of paid blog posts
Social media – Quite a few influencers (even those who have high-quality blogs) are active on social networks and have a large base of followers with whom they engage. Your goals here could include the following:
- Receiving positive mentions in social media posts
- Retweets or shares of your social media posts
- Posts showing how the influencer uses your product: for example, an unboxing or demo video on the influencer’s YouTube channel.
- Creative posts promoting your project or product
A major and important decision you must make before you begin influencer marketing is choosing the method you want to use to find the right influencers. You have three options:
- Organic – You search for influencers internally and build a relationship with them. This is the cheapest way, but it is also very time-consuming.
- Platforms – You pay for the services of specialized online platforms to find influencers. Many of these portals have systems that make managing your influencer campaigns significantly easier.
- Agencies – You pay an agency that specializes in influencer marketing. They help you find and manage the influencers.
2. Set Your Goals
There is a well-known saying that goes: “Fail to plan and plan to fail.” This statement also applies to influencer marketing! It makes little sense to look for an influencer or start a campaign if you haven’t already defined goals beforehand. It would be interesting to know how many of the 18% of companies that did not succeed with influencer marketing simply forgot to define goals in advance. You must know WHY you choose an influencer campaign. This directly impacts the campaign’s success and almost certainly influences which influencers you choose.
Your goals for an influencer campaign can, for example, be the following:
- Increasing the number of visitors to your website by a certain percentage
- Increasing the number of social media followers
- Improving brand visibility among the target audience
- Increasing sales by a certain percentage or number
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Audible is an Amazon company that offers monthly subscriptions for audiobooks and podcasts. The company’s marketing team regularly partners with celebrities and influencers of all sizes. This team also includes micro-influencers. On Instagram, photographer Jesse Driftwood (@jessiedriftwood) once commented on how he uses Audible to learn more about business management and productivity.
Your goals will influence which influencer you ultimately work with. If quick interaction and communication with people is your goal, the choice will probably be an influencer active on Twitter. If you focus more on visuals or photos, then influencers with experience and an audience on Instagram or Pinterest are more suitable. On the other hand, a blog or a technical publication might be more appropriate if your goal is in-depth articles or the B2B market.
However, it is important that each of your goals aligns with a specific performance indicator. Otherwise, how could you measure the success or failure of your campaign? For example, if your goal is to improve sales, you should have the current sales figures before and after the campaign on hand. If you want to increase newsletter subscribers, you need a good KPI to compare and track the numbers.
It is also important to be smart and deliberate when choosing your goals. Each goal must be specific, measurable, realistic and achievable. It must also have a defined timeframe. A vague goal like “improving product awareness” is too broad. You have no way to measure success. A goal like increasing Instagram followers by 20% in March, on the other hand, is specific. You can accurately determine whether the influencer met the goal and how successful they were overall.
3. Identify Your Target Audience
It is impossible to find a suitable influencer if you do not know which target audience you want to reach. You may already know your ideal customer. If so, keep this person in mind when searching for a suitable influencer. If you have previously worked with PPC and paid Facebook ads, look carefully at which audiences you targeted and how successful the campaigns were.
For an influencer to be successful, you must work with influencers who influence your desired target audience. For example, suppose you have a large marketing budget and could work with Justin Bieber as an influencer in your campaign. If your product is aimed at young teenage girls, Justin Bieber would likely be a perfect choice. The star has more than 100 million followers on Twitter and a Klout Score of 92. But if your product, for example, is about restoring old furniture, it is unlikely that Justin Bieber can convince many of his 100 million followers to buy your product. In this case, the influencer’s audience is simply not compatible with your product. The more you can narrow down your target market and audience, the easier it will be to find a suitable influencer.
4. Define the Best Influencer Type for Your Brand
Here is where most companies make the biggest mistakes. Many fail to invest enough effort and work in selecting the right influencers for their brand or company. A study shows that more than 67% of surveyed companies struggle with this. They find that finding a suitable influencer is the hardest part of the campaign. This was probably the biggest weakness of traditional celebrity marketing: although there were successes, most people still ask, “What does the celebrity know about my lifestyle and taste? Celebrities live in a different world!”. This makes it clear: You must choose an influencer whose audience also fits your target audience.
Celebrity Influencers
Celebrity influence is the oldest form of influencer marketing. Companies hire (and pay) well-known personalities to promote a product, brand, or project. Prominent examples include Vodafone with Mika Häkkinen or Krombacher with Michael Schumacher. Even today, some celebrity campaigns have real potential for success. However, working with celebrities often creates challenges, especially regarding cost. Moreover, many consumers quickly become suspicious when someone advertises something they do not use themselves.
Macro Influencers
Macro influencers have a massive number of followers. People view them as experts in their industry or niche. They often have many millions of followers on social media. The difference between a macro influencer and a celebrity is that the influencer is known for being knowledgeable about the product—an expert in the field.
Micro Influencers
Most influencers are micro influencers. They are a smaller subgroup of the enormous macro influencers. Unlike celebrities, these individuals are usually unknown outside their industry or niche. However, within the scene, people regard them as experts. Alternatively, micro influencers can simply be specialists in a certain area or topic. In any case, they usually operate on the fringe of or below macro influencers.
For your influencer marketing campaign, micro influencers are often the best choice. They have a very specific audience, the necessary experience, and a good reputation in the industry. On the other hand, they are not so large that they lack time, and the chances of rejection are lower. Unlike huge macro influencers or celebrities, micro influencers rely on income and are more willing to collaborate (without demanding extreme sums).
A typical micro influencer does not have a huge number of followers. They usually range from 500 to 10,000. However, micro influencers are very active, regularly communicate with their followers, and are regarded as specialists and experts. Micro influencers’ followers are often very loyal and dedicated fans. Additionally, most micro influencers are genuinely interested in purchasing products themselves. As a result, they also have a much better conversion rate.
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It isn’t always necessary to dig deep into your pockets and spend a lot of money on influencer marketing. The manufacturer of hygiene products Tom’s of Maine offers products made entirely from natural ingredients. The company wanted to increase awareness of its products among health-conscious people by having them try the various items and then share their experiences on social media. For this purpose, Tom’s turned to micro influencers. These encouraged their followers to publish their own posts. In this way, the company managed to achieve a snowball effect that reached 4.4 million potential customers in the first three months of the campaign.
Influencer Tzp |
Zielgruppe |
Kosten |
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| Celebrity | Große Marken / Bekannte Unternehmen | Sehr Hoch |
| Macro | Unternehmen auf der Suche nach Branchen Reichweite | Moderat bis Hoch |
| Micro | Neue Unternehmen / Kleinere Projekte | Gering |
5. How to Find the Right Influencers
You probably know the names of all the celebrities in your industry or field. In most cases, these individuals are more macro influencers than actual celebrities. The first step in your influencer campaign should be to find out which influential people you should actually contact.
A good starting point is to search Google for articles in your industry or niche. Look at the first few pages that appear at the top of the search results. Is there a particular name that appears regularly? While you’re at it, take a look at the most prominent blog results and see which authors appear frequently. It’s also worth checking for references to other blogs or guest articles. You might even find specific guidelines for guest writers.
On the other hand, you should ignore very general sites that cover many products or industries at once. You can usually safely ignore very large sites like Wikipedia. Once you have completed this first step, you can use tools like BuzzSumo to find key influencers in your niche or industry. This will give you a first clue. Alternatively, you can search using relevant hashtags on social media.
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6. Influencer Outreach
Once you have created a list of potential influencers for your brand, the influencer outreach process begins. This involves making contact and sending your pitch. Several important steps are required to establish contact and build a relationship.
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All crowdfunding platforms have their own fees and costs associated with each provider. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the best-known of these websites. Reward crowdfunding, where backers are rewarded for their support, is the most well-known form of fundraising. Such platforms do not charge fees to backers. On the contrary – backers even receive something in return for their support. To cover costs and generate the necessary income, portals like Kickstarter charge fees that the project leader must pay. These usually become due at the end of the campaign and consist of general fees, payment fees, and possibly additional costs. We will now take a closer look at which costs and fees the different providers charge.
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Respond to intro emails that influencers send you
When you subscribe to a newsletter or follow a blog, you often receive an introductory email. You should respond to such messages, introduce yourself, and possibly ask a question. It may be that these emails go unnoticed because they are often sent automatically. However, there is also a chance that someone notices you and, importantly, what you wrote. In that case, you make your name visible to the influencer. You are someone who stands out from the crowd.
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For the next few months (this process can take up to six months or longer), you should share and like the influencer’s posts. When you share a post, don’t forget to tag the influencer (@influencer). This way, they get notified that you have shared their post!
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Respond to questions the influencer asks their followers
It often happens that an influencer communicates with their community and asks questions. When you see such questions, make sure you respond promptly.
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Link to the influencer’s posts
You should be especially careful with this at the beginning. Unless the influencer posts something so interesting that you believe your own followers will benefit. Generally, you should only take this step once the relationship between you and the influencer has progressed to the point that they have contacted you or at least taken notice of you.
Your goal should be to create a natural link that benefits your influencer. For example, you could write a blog article on a topic similar to the influencer’s and then include a link to the influencer’s corresponding post. Once you have published the article with the link, email the influencer and let them know about the publication. Tell them which article you linked and how it fits into your article. Important: Do not demand anything in return and do not ask for it! If necessary, you can also mention the influencer in social media posts (@mention) to promote your article and let the influencer know that you linked to their article.
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Whenever you engage with an influencer, you should keep the following in mind:
- Explain the benefits: Influencers are no different from other marketing. You must be able to explain the benefits of your product or service and the collaboration clearly.
- Be specific: Influencers do not want extra work. If you want the influencer to help you, you must be specific. If you want the influencer to publish a guest article, you must detail what the article is about, when it will be ready, etc.
- Set deadlines: Without a deadline, the influencer will likely set your project aside and forget about it. It is much better to create a sense of urgency. If an influencer believes your proposal is advantageous for them, they will readily agree to a realistic deadline.
Conclusion and Summary
Crowdfunding offers a very powerful way to raise the money needed for a project or product. At the same time, you build a network of customers, prospects, bloggers, and media who are interested in your project. However, fundraising is only the beginning of the campaign and represents just a small part of the big picture. You must also market your project and – if the campaign is successful – have the product manufactured and shipped. A rather expensive undertaking! Add to that the fees and costs of platforms, service providers, agencies, and payment providers, and it quickly becomes clear what to expect with crowdfunding and how important a sufficient budget is.
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