Do you know that social media influencers contributed to the sudden increase and popularity of social media sites? As of January 2022, there are 4.62 billion social media users in social media, which is one of the indispensable tools of daily life. These users are a mine for marketers. Leveraging social media users is too big an opportunity for any marketer to ignore. 77% of these users are within the potential customer base of social media marketing.
Of course, like every business today, you have some tactics and strategies, right? So, are there influencers in these strategies? Influencers have started to take a very critical place in social media marketing. With any Instagram story they shoot, your brand can go viral on social media, and your brand can reach more people through the fans of these influencers. That’s why working with an influencer is so important for a social media marketing business.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing where influencers express their satisfaction and trust with your product or brand to attract the attention of their followers and audiences and to increase your brand’s potential customer pool. Influencers are people who are considered opinion leaders by some social media users and have a large and special fan base on social media. Product or service recommendations from them are often considered social proof that builds trust and loyalty among potential customers.
Types of Social Media Influencers
Before creating an influencer marketing strategy, it’s important to decide what kind of influencers your business needs. This is usually determined by the number of social media followers and the area the influencers are involved in. In this context, it is possible to categorize influencers as follows:
1. Nano influencers: Average number of followers on social media is 10,000 or less
2. Micro-influencers: The average number of followers on social media is between 10,000 and 100,000
3. Macro influencers: The average number of followers on social media is between 100,000 and 1,000,000.
4. Mega influencers: 1 million or more followers on social media
Depending on the type and size of your business or the products or services you want to promote, you can choose the most suitable influencers for your brand. Influencers with more followers are likely to receive higher payouts.
Extensive research is important here as it can help you find the right influencers for your campaign. The most important part of social media optimization is to reach the right audience on the right platform and through the right influencers.
Identifying the customer personalities you want to reach also makes it easier for influencers to reach the right customers. Being close to the customers you want to reach and the interests of the influencers you use gives you a great advantage in this way and positively affects your advertisement. Knowing your potential customers well can help you choose the right influencers for your campaign.
Essentials of Influencer Marketing
Here are some essential rules for using influencers in social media marketing:
Number of Reaches: It is the number of “target” audiences you can reach through the number of followers of the Influencer.
Relevance to Your Brand: The influencer needs to post content that is relevant to your industry, field, or business. The most important thing is that the influencer’s audience matches your target audience.
Resonance: The level of interaction that influencers can create with audiences related to your brand or business. However, access is not always the most important criterion. The campaign is meaningless unless this large audience is interested in your brand. For example, advertising a war game to an influencer who is famous for his makeup concept often does not attract the attention of his followers.
How Successful is Influencer Marketing?
Before starting anything, it’s important to define your short- and long-term goals and what you want to achieve with your influencer marketing campaign. These goals will have an impact on every tactic of your overall strategy, ultimately allowing you to measure the success of the campaign.
Your key performance indicators (KPIs) will be determined by the overarching goals of your influencer marketing campaign. It is very important to prioritize your goals throughout the implementation of your campaign. KPIs that can help you evaluate the success of your B2B influencer marketing campaign are brand trust, brand awareness, reach rate, and conversions.
Research Social Media Influencers in Your Field
Are your competitors making influencers part of their strategy? You should check whom they use, see how they use them, and see the response they get. Too many engagements on marketing posts? You can try to find someone with similar status and change the content just enough to speak to the unique qualities of your business. Do the posts have high engagement compared to the influencer’s other sponsored posts? Your competitors can be your greatest teachers in this regard, so it is very useful to both research the influencers around you and follow the businesses you are in the same market.
LinkedIn and Twitter have huge B2B audiences, making them great places to find a suitable influencer. You can even use LinkedIn’s advanced search filters to narrow them down by location, company size, and other relevant criteria. It’s important to be able to find popular people from popular social networks while researching.
Stick to your audience
Choosing influencers who are experts in your field is important, but choosing influencers that your target audience knows, trusts, and cares about is even more critical. When you partner with an influencer, you gain access to their target audience; Therefore, you must carefully select the people who can effectively tell the story of your brand to the right people. This will allow your influencers to connect more meaningfully and ultimately maximize the value of your partnership.
Train the social media influencers, discuss your real goals
Assuming your conversations with your chosen influencers have been positive, now is the time to start building your affiliate relationship. You should be transparent about what you hope to achieve from working with each other. You should ask them to tell you what kind of results they expect based on your situation and the scope of your project, and you should be able to calibrate yourself accordingly. This is also an opportunity to address any misunderstandings you may have about their abilities or domains. As we explained here, it is very important to make the right decisions in access conversion return.
From there, you can start educating your agreed influencer about your business, product, or service. The best brand advocates are brand experts, so you should adequately tell them what you do and why. You can think of it as a light “hiring” process. They don’t need to be overly involved and knowledgeable in every aspect of your operation, but everything you want your key people to know about what you’re doing should be in this relationship.
While following your social media campaigns, you should also pay attention to the comments made under your posts. In this context, you can keep your posts safe by hiding the spam comments made under the posts. By using Socialays social media tool, you can protect your posts from malicious comments by hiding malicious, hate speech and spam comments.
Think long term
It’s important to think long-term when creating a B2B influencer marketing campaign. B2B influencer marketing campaigns that run over a long period and consistently leverage the same team of influencers tend to have a higher success rate than campaigns that are less frequent in nature. Ideally, you want to establish a long-term partnership with these influencers. This will give your brand a chance to take full advantage of their followers.
Look beyond follower numbers
The main metric most companies use when putting together their impressive target lists is total follower count. Of course, reach is an important consideration when evaluating influencers. You want to build relationships with them, but it should be far from the only metric you look at.
Engagement is a more important metric that 88 percent of influencers use as their primary measure of campaign success. A small but engaged audience has as much an impact on your business as a larger but less engaged follower. Understanding the types of relationships influencers have with their followers is crucial to finding the right partners, especially when it comes to payouts.
Reasons Why Influencer Marketing Matters
One of the most important reasons is that people influence other people, regardless of industry and line of business. One of the most used phrases by marketers is: “word-of-mouth marketing is the best advertisement”. For this reason, you should not underestimate the power of people to influence each other.
Influencer marketing is most effective when someone is influenced to buy based on someone’s recommendation. This philosophy applies to everyone, regardless of what you’re working with. So whether you’re working with B2C or B2B, there’s a built-in mechanism within us that allows us to be influenced by the people we relate to and trust. The B2B buying journey is slightly different compared to B2C, which means you need to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Another reason is that the operators, who are among the target audience of tomorrow’s B2B companies, are being trained in the digital media environment. In other words, it is a great investment for the future that young entrepreneurs who are studying at the university, who will establish their own business, or the corporate purchasing managers of the future will hear your name right now.
Incorporating influencer marketing into your marketing strategy is becoming increasingly important, even for B2B companies, as younger generations such as millennials and millennials come into decision-making positions. These people grew up with social media and follow influencers with a variety of interests for both business and personal use. Thinking of new ideas and challenging old ways of doing business to keep up with and reach your target audience is very important for your business.
Social Media Influencers Marketing Statistics
If you don’t value these details, there’s always the risk that other brands can close the deal. You have to ask yourself: Are these trade shows and conferences still good value for money? Or are there other more effective and faster ways to reach your target audience? This is where the new influencers and marketing tactics of the digital environment come into play.
According to research, 94 percent of people are more likely to trust an influencer’s opinions when making a shopping decision. A YouTube poll shows that 4 out of 10 millennials feel that their favorite creator understands them better than their friends. The widespread trust individuals have in their chosen influencers causes businesses to earn an average of $5.78 for every dollar spent on influencers.
The effective use of influencers in social media marketing requires you to constantly monitor interactions and feedback to determine if your campaigns are on the right track. Several apps provide valuable insights and data on how influencers are performing in your marketing campaign. You can optimize your campaign using these applications.
If you are not using influencers in social media marketing yet, sign up with an influencer using these tips. If you want to move your business and brand forward and develop, influencers are a great tool for this.
