Influencer Marketing has been in the advertising industry in different forms for years now. With just Facebook and Instagram being billion dollar industries, influencer marketing somehow gathers the benefits of all social media platforms. This method has influenced these platforms so much that Facebook, TikTok and Instagram have evolved their features around accommodating influencers.
After managing many influencer marketing campaigns, Greenroom has devised a go-to guide for brands when they are planning to implement influencer marketing campaigns. Let’s handle the big questions first
Which platform is the best for influencer marketing?
This solely depends upon what the goal of the campaign is. Let us look at some advantages that come with each platform so that a brand will know which one to choose.
The campaigns in this platform mainly adhere to proper themes like fashion, fitness, food, beauty and others. Instagram with its billion-user database offers an extremely high reach and engagement from users, unlike any other platform. The platform is more suited towards a younger demographic with a heavy concentration on the urban population.
In fact, Instagram features like Stories and IGTV have proven to get more clicks and conversions for a brand campaign than any other social media platform. Not only Stories, innovative features like polls, Questions (AMA), countdown and customized filters have given the path to extremely high engagement for brands. Brands see success n their campaigns immediately.
One great example of how brands have used Instagram would be – Brand handle takeovers by influencers for a period of time (usually a day) – for increasing Instagram page reach.
Let’s look at a not-so-popular platform now: Twitter. While this isn’t gaining as many users as Instagram has been over the past couple of years, the platform is still at the top with its trending campaigns. This hashtag focussed platform still has brands still fight for the most trending hashtag on Twitter.
Some of the most common brand categories that use Twitter for marketing purposes are sports, finance, business, current affairs and technology. One quick tip is that topical content gives maximum reach and engagement. Twitter has also shown historically that campaigns and smaller tweets can be Amplified to a huge audience using micro influencers. This is the one platform where the demography favorably leans towards men.
While we have talked about Facebook, the golden child of marketing for years, here are some new, improved features that make it a key contender while choosing for a campaign. Facebook is ideal to share or cross-post a brand’s post or media. Brands have also been using the paid partnerships to promote from the brand handle itself. This shows the relationship between the influencer and the brand without compromising the metrics.
While Facebook has low reach and engagement compared to Instagram, mass brands still prefer using this platform over any other. This could mainly be because of demographic targeting. The platform works perfect for an older audience, and unlike other platforms has an urban and small-town skewed population.
Youtube
The video platform has been surpassing competition beating all the odds. Youtube has any kind of video one could think of and brands have explored this platform with a plethora of DIY, unboxing, review and fiction videos. Some highly popular brand categories that you find here would be tech, gaming, food, and music. Also, obviously the entertainment industry.
The platform offers a great mix of urban and small-town population skewed in both directions. One example where marketers have succeeded excellently would be app downloads.
How does one choose an influencer?
Great! Now that we know which platform to choose, let’s look at the kind of influencers available in these platforms. If you want to know more about micro, macro, nano and mega influencers, you can read about them here. To simplify for better understanding, we can classify them into
Celebrities (Mega Influencers)
Celebrities have an extremely high reach, offer brand recall from the audience and are great for launching products. Do remember that this can turn out to on the more expensive side, but with excellent results.
Category A Influencers (Macro-influencers)
These influencers provide organic content and drive product authenticity. Their audience will be diverse which helps for a wide reach by the brand. Macro influencers are almost the best of both worlds – being approachable and an engagement star with their high-quality content. While some mega influencers don’t consider social media as their prime focus, macro influencers take them much more seriously thus producing quality content. No wonder all brands big to small want to work with them, but they also tend to exceed some marketer’s budget.
Category B Influencers (Micro and Nano influencers)
These category influencers are the topic experts. They are more successful than any other in driving social conversations. Due to the lesser following, brands have to spread one campaign amongst multiple influencers to see an impact. Some brands have also bundled them with Category A or celebrities for a single campaign to divide their funds.
One ideal example of a campaign with this category would be: product sampling and reviewing.
Do’s & Don’ts for Influencer Marketing
Apart from the basics, here are some do’s that is absolutely necessary for implementing a successful influencer marketing campaign.
Provide content creation freedom to influencers. Do remember that as much as it is your campaign, the personalized touch by influencers is what makes influencer marketing so successful. Content from influencers should be organic and reflect the voice of the influencers
Use influencers for content creation more than for content seeding
Campaigns involving challenges, contests and coupon codes do really well. (Affiliate Marketing)
Use influencers with higher engagement than higher followers
Relevant platform choice is the most primary thing to a good campaign
Pick long-standing themes/ hashtags. That helps build relevance to a brand
Follow the basic content theme the influencers use to create brand content; a starkly different content will have lesser engagement (eg. flat lays, selfies, etc)
Some faux-pas that have to be avoided by brands
Do not share brand content as a native Instagram post; It works best to use stories or FB/ Twitter
Using Facebook for high reach is a definite no-no
Twitter for sustenance campaigns do not work
Using multiple call-to-action instructions in a post and multiple campaign hashtags can confuse your audience. Focus on one and do it well. Other hashtags relevant to the category can be used to increase reach, but this is independent of the campaign hashtag
Conclusion
Did this end-to-end guide help your brand with your marketing goals? What else would you like to know? Let us know below in comments, or visit our website, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram pages to reach out to us.
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