What Is Influencer Marketing?

You’ve probably heard about social media influencers, but not everyone understands exactly who they are or what they do. Influencer marketing is an incredible tool for marketers, no matter your product or budget. Understanding what influencer marketing is and learning how to leverage it can make a big impact on your overall marketing strategy.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencers are individuals that have an established, loyal following (usually on social media or through a blog). Influencer marketing is when brands use influencers to market products and services on their behalf. 

Brands that partner with an influencer can leverage their followers to increase awareness of their brand and boost conversions. Working with influencers—whether they’re celebrities or micro-influencers—helps provide social proof and increase brand awareness. This can then lead to more traffic to your site and potentially more sales—always good news for marketers! 

What makes influencers so effective is that their followers trust their opinions. When an influencer recommends a product, there’s a high chance their audience will make a purchase based on the influencer’s endorsement.

Word of mouth marketing and referrals have always been a powerful way to drive sales and spread the word about a brand or product. Brands can partner with influencers in a few different ways, but the most important thing is that the influencer fits with the brand’s values. 

Here’s an example: 

YouTube personality and influencer David Dobrik has over 13 million followers that are fans of his popular prank videos. He developed a close partnership with ticket-buying and selling app, SeatGeek, and the brand has become an integral part of his channel. 

By partnering with the brand, Dobrik was able to surprise friends with World Series and Super Bowl tickets, buy luxury vehicles, and even pay for a friend’s college tuition. In exchange, SeatGeek’s name and platform are regularly promoted to a highly engaged audience of over 13 million people.

Who are influencers?

David Dobrik is a YouTube influencer—and a very successful one—but he’s just one example. Influencers can be celebrities like athletes and actors, but they can also be “normal people” who are parents, students, and business people. In other words, influencers can be people just like you!

Micro-influencers are people with between 1,000 and 100,000 followers and they’re become a popular alternative to celebrity endorsements. YouTube and Instagram are popular channels for influencers, but they often also run their own blogs or websites where they share product reviews, demos, and more. 

Influencers are probably best known for working in the beauty and lifestyle spaces, but it’s expanded far beyond that to a wide variety of industries and even to B2B companies. With so many influencers available, it’s increasingly likely that businesses can find the right niche for their products. 

Why do you need an influencer marketing strategy?

Working with influencers has been proven to make a positive impact for brands, so it’s important to have a strategy on how to use them effectively. To start building a strategy, you need to know how partnering with influencers can benefit your business.  

Here are a few ways:

• Influencers help create brand awareness by spreading the word about products to their followers.
• User-generated content created by real consumers gets more traction than paid ads—and is more cost effective.
• Consumers are much more likely to make a purchase based on a recommendation from other consumers—49% of consumers rely heavily on recommendations from influencers.
• Successful influencers have a large, loyal base of followers, which helps brands reach more customers than they would have on their own. 
• Since influencers’ followers trust them so highly, their recommendations are more likely to create loyal customers that will make repeat purchases of a product. 

The most important part of developing an influencer marketing strategy is identifying the right influencers. One of the reasons influencers are so trusted by their followers is that they are seen as authentic and genuine—two traits that are highly valued by today’s consumers (especially Millennials and Gen Z). 

How to participate in influencer marketing

Influencer marketing primarily happens on social channels such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, blogs, etc. Picking the right platform is just as important as picking the right influencers. Figure out where your ideal customers are spending most of their time online and where they are most engaged. 

Start researching influencers that are active on those platforms, that are in your space, and are a fit for your brand’s values and voice. To maintain the authenticity that influencers bring to your marketing strategy, it’s important to identify influencers that are a natural fit and would be likely to enjoy and recommend your brand and products. 

Once you’ve identified the right influencers, make sure to vet them to make sure they’re legitimate and that they don’t have anything that could reflect negatively on a company that partners with them. 

Start reaching out to influencers with information on your company, why you think they’re a good fit, and what you’d like the campaign to look like. Be up front about compensation and your expectations—influencers are running businesses and should be treated like professionals.  

Influencers can make posts on their own channels or create content to be shared on branded channels (example: social media takeovers). One of the best side-benefits of influencer marketing is that the user-generated content created can be reused and repurposed for other campaigns. 

Influencer marketing has become popular for a reason. Consumers are becoming more wary of branded ads and instead are seeking out recommendations from their peers. Influencers help bridge the gap between brands and customers and provide social proof and authenticity to branded marketing.

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