Unveiling the Magic of Influencer Marketing: Boosting Your Reach

Whether you love them or hate them, influencers can be a powerful apparatus to help your brand engage audiences and even reach its goals.

Here’s everything you need to know about what influencer marketing is and how to start loving this creative way of promoting products and services.

The Evolution of Influencers

Influencers are individuals who’ve built an online following on one or more platforms (usually social media) by creating a specific type of content.

There are several types of influencers, based on the type of content they create (beauty, travel, tech), their platform of choice (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube), or even the size of their audience.

What started as a way of connecting with people online just to provide some form of entertainment quickly became a powerhouse marketing method that many brands just can’t get enough of. Today, an influencer can be one of the key players in your marketing strategy if you know how to approach this method.

The Art of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is now an industry worth an impressive $21.1 billion, and these numbers help explain this massive growth:

1. 83% of marketers believe influencer marketing is highly effective, and 63% even plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets.
2. Almost a third of marketers spend 40% of their entire budgets on influencer marketing.
3. The average ROI is around $5.20 for every dollar spent on these types of campaigns.
4. The most common goals of influencer marketing are increasing brand awareness, reaching new audiences, promoting brands, and generating sales.
5. 61% of consumers trust the recommendations made by influencers.

Influencer marketing essentially works on the power of transference: followers transfer their positive emotions (trust, loyalty, etc.) from the influencer they follow onto your business through association.

This enables several powerful avenues to leverage influencer collaborations that benefit all parties involved.

Becoming an Influencer

Becoming an influencer is easier than you think; however, having success in this field can depend on several factors, from the amount of time you invest in your content to your niche and even the platform you choose.

There are three main areas you should focus your attention on if you want to become an influencer:

1. Niche: Your niche is like the unique selling point of a product. It’s important to choose it based on something close to home, such as your professional expertise or personal experience (such as being a mom). This will give you legitimacy as an influencer and help you create content with ease.
2. Content quality: Influencers must create professional-looking content, so it’s important to invest in the right equipment and editing software no matter what type of content you create. Moreover, ensure your content is relevant to your audience and can engage them to increase your success.
3. Audience engagement: The difference between influencers and celebrities is that the former have a stronger bond with their fans. Influencers need to engage with followers directly in the comments and DMs and even allow them to suggest content ideas to nurture a stronger relationship.

Collaborating with Influencers

The key to successful influencer marketing campaigns is the same as with any relationship: honest communication.

Both the influencer and brand must communicate their goals and expectations from the first interactions and keep the line open between them through the course of the partnership. Clarifying these key details ensures everyone involved will have a positive experience out of it.

Some other tips on collaborating with influencers include:

1. Creating a detailed brief is especially important if you plan on working with multiple influencers.
2. Not removing the influencer’s unique voice; after all, you’re not just working with them for their following but also their style and content approach.
3. Setting clear terms of the partnership, from the level of commitment (such as the number of posts) to payment methods.

Crafting an Influencer Marketing Strategy

Creating an influencer marketing strategy isn’t all that different from other types of strategies your brand may have. The difference is that now you have other people helping you promote your products and services on brand-new platforms.

The process always starts with defining a clear campaign objective, such as increasing sales and using that objective to then build the individual stages of the campaign.

Then, you can create a campaign message and calibrate it to the unique needs and expectations of your target audience, create the content, and hit publish.

The process is similar to influencer marketing, except here the influencer can provide valuable insights on how to craft more effective campaigns. They are often much more knowledgeable of the unique wants of their followers and can help enhance the level of personalization.

Mandala AI’s Toolbox for Influencer Marketing

To help you create a better influencer marketing campaign with less effort, Mandala AI has created several powerful tools that can assist you through the entire process:

1. Mandala Analytics: A tool for both market analysis and campaign performance tracking.
2. Top Channels: A way to see what the best-performing platforms are for your brand in terms of engagement or even mentions;
3. Top Mentions: A way to automatically learn about your brand’s top mentions based on campaign keywords and engagements;
4. Mandala Alchemy is your one-stop shop for managing social media communication across all platforms.

Together, these tools provide a powerful ecosystem that can support your influencer marketing needs and help you create campaigns at the level of top brands like:

1. Nord VPN’s sponsored post campaign, which gathered over 2 billion views in total
2. Google’s giveaway with micro-influencers @thesorrygirls had an engagement rate of over 50%
3. Calvin Klein’s #MyCalvins campaign, where they encouraged user-generated content and even featured it on a dedicated landing page, The hashtag has over 870,000 posts on Instagram

Wrapping Up

Influencer marketing is not just here to stay, but it will play an even bigger role in the future. Expect to see more nano- and micro-influencer marketing campaigns, long-term partnerships, and even more reliance on AI technologies to facilitate these types of efforts.

Right now, you can use a powerful AI system to get started with influencer marketing on the right foot. Discover Mandala AI now and learn more about its potential role in your future marketing efforts.