Influencer marketing

What's influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is type of marketing which is focused on using key leaders to drive your business. Key leaders help send your product message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead inspire / hire / pay influencers to get out the word for you. Influencer marketing goes often hand in hand with two other forms of marketing such as social media marketing and content marketing. Most influencer campaigns have some sort of social-media component, whereby influencers are expected to spread the word through their personal social channels. Many influencer campaigns also carry a content element in which either you create content for the influencers, or they create the content themselves.1

What are the Key Components of Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is discipline on its own and it has specific rules itself.2

1. Identify key brand or product influencers, either manually or through a platform like TapInfluence
2. Create a marketing campaign directed at those influencers
3. Create a secondary marketing campaign for the influencers to drive greater awareness to a larger set of target consumers
4. Track key metrics relating to reach, sales and brand awareness

 Moms and millenials are two biggest demographic groups where influencer marketing has seen success but every demographic target group could be influence by influencer type of marketing. Influencer marketing is not something very new in history. If we throw back we can see the phenomen "word of mouth" which has been long time seen as a key how to reach customers and influence their decisions to buy the product or service.

Micro vs Macro influencers

In the terms of social media, a micro-influencer can have somewhere between 1,000–100,000 engaging fans where a macro-influencer should have somewhere around 250,000, into the millions.3 

Influencers comes in any shapes and sizes. It's encreasing trend nowadays on the market which means digital environment are many and many potential and active influencers from the smallest ones with thousends of followers to the biggest with millions subscribers. Influence marketing is variable for B2B and B2C businesses as well. You can imagine B2B bloggers such as blogging proffesors, students, actors or vine stars. Influencers are not as inaccessible as you’d think.

Micro influencers

Micro-influencers tend to have intimate followings. Their fans are often more loyal and engaging (ratio-wise) than that of bigger names. Micro-influencers are especially great with niche markets and unique communities (i.e. paleo brands, baby gear, dog sweaters…). 4
We can see in practice that micro influencers are more effective than bigger ones. Why? Because they have more closer relationships with their followers and in followers eyes are more personal.It's easier to target the right target group. For the smaller companies is this cooperation better option in case of budget. It's better for them to ask small influencers to reduce their budget.

Macro influencers

Influencers with more than 250 000 fans lost the advantage of very personal contact with followers but on the other hand they can reach bigger target group and influence more people in the same time. It's better to use these kind of influencers when you want to reach bigger audience with products which are based on global base or targeting not so much spacific type of customers. (i.e. mobile phones, financial service...) The next question is question of price. It costs more many to ask big influencef to work for you. 

Which type of influencers is better?

It's hard to say if it's better to pay more for one macro influencer or divided the bunchet to smaller influncers. It always depends on type of product and size of target group. Advantage of smaller influencers are authentic followers who believes in 100% in brand of influencer and feel the personal touch in every single post. These people feel closer and believe that things you do you are doing in honest way. You are like friend of them. Trustworthy is the main key in this kind of business. Follower has to feel that the product is really useful for him/her and it's mark of quality. If try to propagate product which doesn't work is even worse for you because stories between people are the best marketing.
With macro influencers you can reach your potentional customers faster but  results are not guaranteed. Bigger influencer is loosing advantages of the smaller ones such as deep personal touch and trustworthy. It's better to use these kind of influencers when you're promoting products such as cars, mobile phones or financial products. Your can easily control the message to customers and streamline the information flow about your product.

Conclusion

As I mentioned above it's hard to say which type of influencer marketing is better, it always depends on type of product you want to promote via influencer marketing. In my opinion is better to ask bigger amount of smaller influencers because followers feel more personal touch and trustworthy from them. The problem is that you have to be aware about subject of every message because every view of influencer is different and it's not possible to share totaly same content with differencial type of influencers.