Influencer marketing is the shortest and most affordable way to bridge the gap between your brand and your ideal customers. 

Remember the last time you wanted to buy a new mobile phone? Who did you go and ask for suggestions? Maybe your geeky friend who is crazy about technology. When you wanted to look fashionable, who did you go to for suggestions? Maybe your sister keeps flaunting her gorgeous dresses. 

In general, our family, friends, and colleagues influence our buying decisions. 

When the same people shift to an online platform, build an authentic audience and a persuasive voice over them, they become ‘Influencers’.

Simply put, Influencers are people of a group of people having the ability to influence the behaviour or opinions of their audience. 

They build a reputation for their knowledge and expertise in their respective domains through consistent, relevant, and domain-specific content on their social media such as Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, and god knows what else.

What these influencers have is a sway over their audience. And when a brand makes use of this power of influencers to attract an audience to their product or service, it becomes Influencer Marketing. 

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is simply impacting the purchasing behaviour of the target audience through endorsements and product placements by an influencer.

The world of influencer marketing is becoming bigger and bigger day by day.

Let’s dive deep into it and understand how it works in 5 Simple Steps. 

1. An influencer on a social media platform has a profile that provides contact information about her/him and their social media account statistics.
2. A brand comes on a platform to look for a particular influencer to work with. They may use many filters, an influencer platform database, or any other tool available, and find the influencer who has the perfect audience to advertise their product/service to.
3. Now, the brand approaches the influencer and they begin to work. Influencers start promoting their brands on their respective social media channels. 
4. Simultaneously, an influencer marketing platform supplies statistics to measure the impact of promotions being done by the influencer. 
5. In return, influencers get financial rewards or gifts for every promotion they run for a brand as agreed between the two. 

Before taking a look at how brands are using Influencer Marketing to amplify their voice, let’s take a sneak peek into why it is becoming so popular. 

Let’s put ourselves into the shoes of a customer and think. 

Don’t we get irritated when an ad for a product we have no interest in keeps popping up on our screen? Do we buy skincare products because a celebrity puts on a dozen layers of makeup and yet advertises the same on television? 

Modern customers are very well aware of the traditional forms of advertising and can no longer be persuaded to buy stuff through traditional ways. Thereby, giving influencer marketing an edge. Aha!

What Influencer marketing does is pick the pieces of old-age celebrity endorsements and fit them into the new puzzle of modern marketing. 

And, we all know influencers are known for their genuineness along with domain expertise, which adds credibility to the brand. Moreover, influencers are perceived as people who put huge and huge amounts of effort into building up an authentic audience, which saves time and effort for marketers. These influencers have thousands or even millions of followers, and by partnering with them, brands can reach a much wider audience. However, while searching for influencers for your brand, beware of fake influencers with their fake influence. 

Isn’t it evident that people trust other people they admire rather than advertised content directly from the brand? Well, it is, which makes influencer marketing the hot potato of the marketing world. 

Every brand is now relying upon influencer marketing to reach an extensive audience and build genuine relationships with them, be it big and established brands like Gucci, Amazon, Mercedes Benz, Adidas, and Coca-Cola or smaller brands like Craftsvilla. 

But still, many brands are confused as to whether to adopt this new trend or not. And when brands are balancing them on the seesaw of whether to go with the flow or not, Coca-Cola has already extracted all the juice from influencer marketing pulp. Here are the top 2 campaigns run by Coca-Cola using influencers on different social media which left huge emotional footprints in the heart of the customers — #shareacoke and #ThatsGold. 

#ShareaCoke

Coca-Cola launched this campaign on musical.ly in 2016. They didn’t go with one influencer or a group of influencers; rather they challenged the users to create videos with songs printed on the Coke bottles and cans. A large number of people created videos and posted them using #ShareaCoke which generated more than 9,00,000 musical.ly videos and 134 million views. Not just this but #ShareaCoke became the number one trending hashtag at the time. 

Here’s the second one. 

#ThatsGold

This campaign was launched during the Olympic Games in 2016. The campaign was designed to attract the health-conscious group with the content of the influencers. With the world’s top athletes like Michelle Jenneke, Jodie Williams, and Nathan Andrian being part of, the campaign spread like wildfire generating more than 1.9 million views on Facebook alone. It was the brand’s highest-ever engagement with Facebook Live.

This is the power of Influencer Marketing.

The Power of Influencer Marketing

How do you Grow Influencer Marketing?

But, hey, what if your pocket is not as huge as Coca-cola?  

Well, to amplify your brand’s voice using influencer marketing, it isn’t necessary to collaborate only with influencers having millions of followers and empty your pockets. You can enjoy the superpowers of influencers without spending much as well. 

Now, you may ask how? 

Look, influencers aren’t just people with millions of followers. They are people with an authentic audience be it 1000 people or 1 million people. Yes, that’s right. 

There even exist 5 major categories of Influencers. Take a look below. 

• Mega: 1 million +
• Macro: 200,000 – 900,000 followers
• Midi: 50,000 – 200,000 followers
• Micro: 10,000 – 50,000 followers
• Nano: 800 – 10,000 followers 

Rather than spending a huge sum of money on one mega Influencer, you can go with a few micro or midi. You are free to explore the permutations and combinations. The main hallmark of influencer marketing is that it provides cost-effectiveness plus a wider and authentic audience plus higher engagement. That’s the whole point of influencer marketing.

If you’re still not convinced, here are some of the superpowers of influencers that promise your business a super-duper ROI.  

• Quality customers + Cost savings! What else do you need?
  Influencers are known particularly for their actively engaging authentic audiences. When an influencer recommends products and services to their audience, it gives a brand higher-quality customers and stronger leads. This helps you save time and cost on sales and marketing.
• Bye-bye traditional marketing!
  We all are guilty of blocking advertisements from brands we are not interested in. It is obvious that people hate forced advertising, but when someone they admire and follow every day tells them how great a product is, they are more likely to try it out once in a while rather than unfollow the Influencer.
• Superpower alert!
  Since influencers are ‘people like us”, their posts tend to draw higher engagement as compared to a post on a brand/company page. This is their superpower!

In a nutshell, Stronger ROI and fuller pockets. Influencer Marketing brings you more money compared to any other form of marketing. Period. 

In this digital world, influencer marketing is the shortest and most affordable way to bridge the gap between your brand and your ideal customers. 

But, the hardest part about influencer marketing is finding them. To find the perfect influencer(s) for your brand, you don’t need to scratch your head and spend hours on social media. There exists a wide range of platforms that help you in the process at each step from influencer discovery to tracking the progress of your campaigns in the shortest time possible minimizing your efforts. They provide a list of influencers along with their statistics and help you execute and manage your campaigns better. These are influencer Marketing Platforms. 

Now the question is, are you ready to rock and roll with Influencer Marketing? 

If yes, here is a bonus for you!

Here is a menu of the hottest 15 Influencer Marketing Platforms that we prepared so you could spice up your business using influencer marketing.