Why should you choose Influencer Marketing to promote your brand?

Why should you choose influencer marketing to promote your brand??

Influencer Marketing focused platforms raised more than $800M in funding in 2021 alone, indicating the industry's significant growth.

According to a study by Influencer Marketing Hub, the industry had almost a 25% increase compared to last year and a nearly 80% increase compared to two years ago.

How often are marketers using influencer marketing?

According to Oberlo, 93% of marketers have used influencer marketing. On top of that, the companies' budgets for this industry are rising.

Another statistic said that over 20% of companies spend more than half of the budget on influencer marketing, even though most companies prefer working with their employees instead of an agency.

Reasons why you should choose influencer marketing

Promoting your products to the niched audience. The ads are a great tool to bring more customers. But you shouldn't rely 100% on ads. Promoting your products through influencing marketing can be very profitable. Choosing and working with the right influencer gives your company access to a niche audience, where you can find the ideal customers. Most of the time, people tend to follow an influencer because they present interest in the influencer's content.

Increase awareness One of the main goals of working with influencer marketing is awareness. Your brand can reach many people from your niche, but not only. An influencer with a high number of followers and good engagement can quickly create awareness of your brand.

Reduced costs This is mainly for small brands and start-ups struggling with marketing budgets. These small companies can reduce their costs significantly by working with small creators or so-called micro-influencers. A creator with 5k-10k followers earns an average 88$. The more followers the creators have and the better the connection between them and their audience is, they can negotiate a better price.

Possibility of creating high-quality UGC There is no better way to get your hands fast on good quality, cheap user-generated content. Creating a commercial takes time and money. But this is where UGC comes in place. Influencers can generate great content, and if you set the collaboration terms and conditions suitable, you can use the generated content on all your marketing channels.

Instagram has never been this popular for creators’ campaigns.

In the last couple of months, Instagram announced it would focus on creators. They are trying to bring even more people to the industry by promoting small creators.

Besides, Instagram has been declared the preferred social media channel for brands engaging with influencer marketing.

We don't say you should choose Instagram as your content platform necessarily. But this is just the main example of what the industry brings us, and you should take advantage of it.

Note: Brands have also started to use micro-influencers 10x more than mega-influencers. If most companies are doing this, you should probably do it also.

The reasons why Instagram is so popular are:

• Easy to use and visually appealing: Instagram is a user-friendly platform that allows creators to easily share photos and videos with their followers. Its clean and visually appealing interface makes it easy for creators to showcase their work and engage with their audience.
• Built-in audience and engagement tools: Instagram has a large built-in audience, with over one billion monthly active users as of September 2020. This provides creators with a ready-made audience to share their content with, and offers opportunities for engagement through likes, comments, and other tools.
• Opportunities for monetization: Instagram also offers creators various opportunities to monetize their content, such as through sponsored posts, branded partnerships, and sales of products or services. This can help creators to generate income from their work and support themselves financially.
• Access to influencers and other creators: Instagram is home to a large and active community of influencers and other creators, providing opportunities for networking and collaboration. This can help creators to learn from others in their field, and gain exposure to new audiences.
• Trend-setting and culturally relevant: Finally, Instagram is known for setting trends and being at the forefront of popular culture. This can make it an attractive platform for creators who want to be at the cutting edge of their field and connect with a culturally relevant audience.

People make buying decisions based on social media

There is nothing new when it comes to online shopping. On the other hand, half of the buyers seek guidance from social media influencers.

Influencers can remarkably influence buyers' decisions based on their expertise and reviews about a particular product.

With over 50 million people around the globe considering themselves content creators, it shouldn't be hard for the customer to find suitable influencers. Besides, most of the time, we follow people we admire or fulfill a need for us.

Choose the influencer suitable for your brand.

Your goal has to be close to their ability to promote your product or service. Here you have a couple of criteria you should check before you choose to work with a specific influencer:

• The audience is probably the most important criterion when choosing an influencer. Choosing an influencer with an irrelevant audience to your company doesn't make sense.
• Engagement rate - this depends on the size of the creator's account. For macro-influencers, this tends to be around 1-3%. For a micro-influencer, this should be somewhere between 3-7%.
• Content quality - When people think about quality, they tend to think about a professionally taken photo or video, but it is not necessarily the case. The truth is that the most important part is the quality of information and authenticity. This also depends on the industry, as it might be more relevant for an industry to have professionally made content.
• Frequency - Lately, the posting frequency is essential. Everyone is talking about the algorithm and how they can teach it to get viral. We think you must be consistent and ensure you put more price on quality than quantity.
• Authenticity - We call this the power of the influencers. Your content must be eye-catchy and informational. That is why creativity and uniqueness in content creation are rising every day. Regular people post videos that go viral and can become superstars overnight.
• Values - The influencer's values are fundamental. After being in the industry for a while, the first value an influencer should have is reliability. If you can count on him, you have already made the first step. Ghosting is one of the problems of influencer marketing.
• *Try to get their analytics -*This is hard to get. This is not a must if you are working with micro-influencers, as they are still building themselves. But if you are working with big influencers, ask them for analytics and take an in-depth look before deciding to collaborate. This tool by Grin has a nice touch on the influencers’ analytics. You can also see the most important metrics when looking at an influencer.
• Check old campaigns and collaborations - This is one of the best ways to determine your influencer's performance. You can not see the actual results in conversions, but you can have a good idea if it worked.

A small influencer's engagement should be higher than that of a big influencer. Still, one of the primary industry problems is fake engagement because of the bots or follow-per-follow loops.

🔎 At Social Cat, we manually check the engagement of each micro-influencer who signs up with us, and this is the best way to determine if they use bots, engagement, or follow-per-follow loops.

Conclusion

Before we wrap it up, we recommend influencer marketing. This strategy might be helpful for small brands and start-ups and is low-cost.

Make sure you choose the right influencers, set up the correct terms and conditions for the collaboration, deliver and communicate with the influencer, and everything will work according to your expectations.

If you haven't worked with influencers before, you should probably choose to do so with an agency or a platform like Social Cat because you can save a lot of time and work.

Social Cat puts you in touch directly with tailored influencers for your brand, and you can benefit from any of our campaigns: gifted, paid, or affiliate.