April 20, 2023
Over 4.74 billion people around the world use social media, and that number increased by more than 4% in 2022. An estimated 93% of people on the internet also use social media. If you’re not taking advantage of social media to boost your brand, you’re missing out.
How much time are people spending on social media? About 2.5 hours! With social media marketing, you could capture the attention of billions. Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to do this as it boosts your brand by tapping into another person’s popularity on social media.
When it comes to social media platforms, which are the most popular?
- Facebook – 2.93 billion users
- Instagram – More than 1 billion users
- LinkedIn – Over 875 million users
- Pinterest – 445 million monthly users
- Snapchat – 363 million daily users
- TikTok – 755 million users
- Twitter – 238 million users
- YouTube – 66 billion visits per month
Influencer marketing taps into the popularity of social media. Shopify reports that 38% of consumers trust social media content. But, if you add an influencer, the trust increases to 61%. That’s almost double.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencers are people with a large social media presence. Often, they have a large number of followers, but they also remain engaged and post frequently. Influencers can be celebrities, but they don’t have to be, and they can be found on different platforms. Some of the biggest influencers include:
- Facebook – Cristiano Ronaldo with 161 million followers
- Instagram – Cristiano Ronaldo with 509 million followers
- LinkedIn – Bill Gates with 36 million followers
- Pinterest – Joy Cho with 15.2 million followers
- TikTok – Khabane Lame with 156.5 million followers
- Twitter – Elon Musk with 135.6 million followers
- YouTube – MrBeast with 146 million subscribers
Influencer marketing involves a partnership between an influencer and a brand to help promote that brand’s product, service, or message. These partnerships help increase conversions, raise a brand’s awareness, boost engagement, and instill a level of trust. If someone you trust recommends a product or brand, you’re going to trust that person’s recommendation.
An idea that captures attention and builds trust and engagement is what’s most important. You could create an influencer marketing partnership using any of these types of influencer marketing campaigns.
- Account Takeovers
With an account takeover, the influencer you partner with takes over your social media accounts for a day, a few days, or a week.
- Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing, which is common with bloggers, the social media influencer joins an affiliate marketing program with your brand and directs product sales through their website or blog using a special discount code. They get a commission for sales that originate on their site.
- Brand Ambassadorships
A brand ambassadorship creates a partnership where the influencer becomes your spokesperson. Think about certain brands and see if you can think of a celebrity or influencer that’s tied to that product.For example,
- Collaborations
With collaboration marketing, the influencer works with you on a product and then it becomes a joint project you’ve worked on together.
- Contests/Giveaways
A contest or giveaway provides some swag or other products that influencers can give away to their followers. In addition to getting publicity with the influencer’s popularity, this is a good way to get your brand’s information shared with friends and family of the influencer’s followers.
- Events
Events can be virtual or in-person and give followers a chance to meet and greet the influencer you’re partnering with.
- Pre-Release Content
Sometimes, products are not available. This is especially true of things like new music and books. Pre-release content helps build hype for these products before they’re officially released.
- Sponsored Posts
Sponsored posts involve getting the influencer to create a blog post or other social media content that they post. They will state this is a paid promotion or include tags or other labels to ensure that consumers connect the post to your brand.
- Unboxings or Reviews
You often see unboxings on YouTube and sometimes TikTok. The influencer gets a package from your company and unpacks it in a video that’s shared with their followers. The influencer will review the items within future videos or at the same time.
Examples of Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Have you seen the ads featuring Neil Patrick Harris and his husband David Burtka where they get a HelloFresh box full of meal kits? You get to see some of the items in the box and then watch NPH cook the meals for his family. That’s a take on an unboxing and review video. But, as some of the recipes available through HelloFresh are straight out of Chef Burtka’s new cookbook, it was also a collaboration project.
McDonald’s has been doing many collaborations with celebrity influencers with custom meals you order through the McDonald’s app. Valentine’s Day’s “Saweetie” meal featured the couple Cardi B and Offset and included a cheeseburger with BBQ sauce, a quarter pounder with cheese, large Coke, a large Hi-C, a large order of fries, and an apple pie for sharing.
Dunkin partnered with TikTok influencer Charli D’Amelio where she posed with her favorite Dunkin drinks, including the new “The Charli.” She also created content on her TikTok channel for Dunkin. On the launch day of the drink Dunkin created for her, app downloads increased by 57%, and cold brew sales also increased.
You don’t have to have a macro influencer to get your message across. Micro-influencers have no more than 100,000 followers, but they can be just as helpful in spreading the word about your brand. Tom’s of Maine didn’t have a large marketing budget, so the company turned to its biggest fans and offered discounts and freebies in order to gain the social media advocates they needed to build trust and boost engagement.
Google also found value from social media micro-influencers when they teamed up with DIY micro influencers The Sorry Girls and gave them a laptop for a giveaway. This giveaway gained close to 20,000 likes and comments and ended with an engagement rate nearing 60%, which is almost unheard of.
How Do You Get Started?
Those are just a handful of examples highlighting how you can create an influencer marketing campaign. Before you do anything, you need to determine what you hope to achieve and how you will measure the success of the campaign. Next, establish your budget. Your budget is important when it comes to determining the level of influencer you can afford.
Start looking into the different influencers who match your budget and market. If you own a restaurant, you want an influencer with expertise in food. Narrow down your options and reach out to the influencer to check availability and interest. You might find that the influencer you want to work with doesn’t have the time available to help you. It’s not personal, so don’t get disappointed if the answer is no.
Influencer marketing isn’t the easiest thing to plan and schedule, especially if you have little experience. That’s okay. Asking for help getting started is something we’ve all had to do at some point in our careers.
Factory 360 is an expert in influencer marketing campaigns. We’ll help you brainstorm the best type of marketing campaign and the level of influencer that fits your budget. Talk to our team to discuss your goals and your budget, and let us help you establish a campaign that delivers everything you hoped to achieve.
