Influencer marketing is a growing marketing method nowadays working in correlation with the popularity of social media and highly-active profiles. The way it works is very simple – the more followers you have and the more engagement your posts gain, the more popular and serious you are taken as an influencer.

What exactly is influencer marketing?

It’s far from a black-and-white concept, yet as simple as being “Instagram-famous.”

Social media influencers exist on primary social media platforms; Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest and more. It is a marketing method focused on key-leaders to drive your brands image and exposure to a larger audience through everyday people and their online profiles.

Someone popular, well-branded and liked whom is held to a high standard in a targeted industry through their social media account where they post intriguing content can be or is considered an influencer.  However, the more followers and appealing the social accounts with high impressions and interactions in a specific market, the more valuable the influencer becomes to brands with the same target audience and demographic they are engaging with.

Imagine “that” popular person or group in your school or workplace is using a product or even mentioned how great it worked for them – now you immediately think you need that specific product to improve your lifestyle. Now you as the audience believe that you can be just like the influencer by using the product and it must be a great product if they’re posting about it, right? You are probably familiar with this feeling in respect to celebrities endorsing a product through their sponsorship.

When an influencer has a personal brand, their target audience or followers are already defined.  Say you are from MAC Cosmetics and you want to reach a targeted audience.  You can contact beauty influencers and send them new lipsticks from a recent product launch and ask them to review it on their profile or create content on their personal pages endorsing the lipstick. Beauty influencers already have their thousands of followers engaged and interacting with them, while simultaneously engaging with a demographic MAC Cosmetics wants to target. MAC Cosmetics and the beauty influencer are already contextually aligned and your brand is being driven by someone doing the human aspect of social media marketing for you while in return they receive free cosmetics and payments. If MAC Cosmetics reaches out to five beauty influencers, that’s five-people pushing the MAC product and brand to their hundreds or thousands of followers and making an actionable effect amongst their social media reach with the aligned contextuality.

Real Life Influencers

When she’s not creating & implementing social strategies for our clients or testing out new Whisky’s on an episode of Whisky Website Wednesdays, our Social Media Manager, Meira is running social profiles in the beauty industry under @LashBosses. Initiated in 2015, she has utilized influencer marketing to grow her social audience within the beauty community, with a current following of 24.6K rapidly growing Instagram followers, with a widespread reach on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat & Pinterest as well.

“I started off very slow, taking clients initially, then realized I enjoyed writing blogs and being creative more,” she says. “I transitioned into creating videos and that’s how I started to get noticed. I’ve worked with brands like Indeed Labs, Briogeo, Eva NYC, Pixi Beauty, Elf Cosmetics, Inglot Canada, Skinfix, TruSelf Organics, Walgreens, Double Dare Spa and more. Creating content has helped me gain many opportunities and has allowed me to network and create relationships with different companies.”

Three very main and important factors for a marketing influencer include but are not limited to context, reach and actionability.

Context

Influencers will differentiate for every brand, demographic and market, of course an automotive specialist with a following of mainly males between 17-35 wouldn’t market cosmetics as it is not their niche industry or demographic of followers. A beauty expert or specialist would market cosmetics to their followers and audience if they meet the brands targeted audience. The context of what the brand is selling and what the influencer is marketing and known for needs to align with the audience’s interests in order to reach the maximum exposure possible. This can even be broken down further, a hair stylist would be better promoting hair products than to be promoting a medicated foot cream.

Reach

A social media influencer with over 20K followers in the same industry as a social media user with 300 followers will be more beneficial and attractive. (People on the fence fall where the majority falls in most cases.) You as the product or service provider will get a better result with someone whose profile reaches more people in a specific industry or specific demographic. Though higher numbers means more reach, someone with a following of 40K profiles might be better than a profile with 13M followers, due to the nurtured human relationships built by the influencer.

Actionability

The influencer’s ability to create an action by their audience is desired.  This will come naturally if their content and audience is aligned with the brand. The influencers audience is already engaged in the content the social media influencer is posting and by the relationships nurtured with their audience. If an influencer is a beauty expert and posts a promo code for a beauty convention, more than likely a large number of people will be engaged and utilize the promo code in favour of themselves receiving a discounted ticket and the convention organizers will have more attendees.

“Another interesting stat is that 47% of online consumers use ad blockers, giving brands and businesses even more reason to put their dollars behind influencers instead. Influencers are the ones holding everyone’s attention.” – Forbes, Why Influencer Marketing Will Explode in 2017.

Social Media Influencers are becoming increasingly preferred over Ads due to the human relationships built and being more cost-effective in most cases.  Utilizing influencer marketing does not seem to be a marketing method disappearing anytime soon. 

Would you consider Influencer Marketing for your business?