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Partnering with influencers isn’t a novel marketing strategy. Well-liked people with an extensive reach have been promoting brands for centuries, though it didn’t look quite like it does today. For example, royal families have been issuing Royal Warrants of Appointment to individual craftspeople, companies, and “brands” for centuries.
This essentially means that the royal families of countries, including the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Japan, give “stamps of approval” to certain suppliers and businesses. Much like a promotion by a popular YouTuber or Instagram content creator, Royal Warrants give companies a boost in visibility and increase the public’s confidence in their products or services.
The influencer industry has evolved tremendously in the past several years (not to mention the past several decades or centuries!), and it’s not stopping any time soon. Therefore, it’s important to know what you’re getting into before formulating your own influencer marketing strategy.
This article will cover the current state of influencer marketing, including some modern influencer marketing strategies and some of the benefits of reaching a niche audience through long-term influencer/brand partnerships.
Modern-Day Influencer Marketing Strategies
Members of the younger generations may immediately think of TikTok stars and popular YouTubers when they think of the term “influencer”, but the landscape extends beyond social media. Famous athletes, actors, and even politicians can fit the bill, especially when they are promoting a particular product, company, or cause.
This means that brands’ influencer strategies can vary greatly depending on their end goal and budget. For example, large companies like Nike and Apple have multi-layered influencer strategies that include advertising campaigns with big names like Colin Kapernick (Nike) and unboxing videos by popular YouTubers (Apple).
Small to mid-size businesses likely have to worry more about their budget when formulating an influencer marketing strategy, and social media is a great place to start. Similar to “regular” marketing and advertising strategies, influencer marketing has two primary components: promoting general brand awareness and directly asking people to buy from you.
Suppose you’re in the process of promoting a specific product. In that case, you might employ some affiliate marketing strategies in which the influencer encourages people to buy products through a unique link or code you provide, and they take a portion of the profits.
If you’re trying to increase brand awareness on a larger scale, your strategy might be slightly different. For example, if you are a skincare brand, you could partner with a beauty YouTuber and have them genuinely review your products and talk about your brand’s mission.
Here are things to keep in mind when creating your influencer strategy in this landscape:
Balance Cost With Reach
Micro-influencers have decently sized audiences but aren’t as well-known as macro-influencers or celebrities. The point of working with a micro-influencer is to reach a more interactive, localized audience. Micro-influencers can be beneficial to work with when you’re trying to market to people in a specific geographic area or people with niche interests.
Macro-influencers and celebrities have a bigger reach, which means more visibility for your brand and potentially more successful promotion of your products. In the end, your strategy needs to be cemented with research as, of course, the end goal is to bring in higher quality leads, get more traffic, and make more sales while staying within your budget. The way that influencers price themselves is just as important as their engagement ratio, and thorough research into both is vital for any brand that wants to optimize its influencer marketing strategy.
The Importance of Finding the Right Fit
Consumers are looking more deeply into the goings-on of businesses than ever before, including the kind of messages and people associated with them.
There are countless examples of brands ending influencer partnerships for various reasons, including Morphe cutting ties with beauty influencer Jeffree Star after controversies, and the dozens of athlete sponsorships that have been pulled due to differences in values and the exposure of crimes, unsatisfactory behavior, etc.
Brands are putting an ever-larger emphasis on finding influencers that “fit” with their identity. An influencer should be aligned with your brand’s values and mission for optimal results. While it’s not possible to account for any and all circumstances or predict what an individual will do, some additional research into an influencer’s values, any past controversies, and the tone of their content is a must.
Making Long-Terms Partnerships
Working with influencers that your brand aligns with also makes it easier to create long-term partnerships, potentially turning them into brand ambassadors. Building long-term, “slow burn”, relationships with influencers helps you convert their audience into loyal customers and allows your brand to grow as the influencer does.
Long-term relationships also encourage the organic and genuine promotion of your brand and your products, whereas one-time partnerships can sometimes come off as transactional or “sales-y” to their followers.
This isn’t to say that one-and-done advertising campaigns don’t have any value. On the contrary, even a single video or post promoting your brand from a big content creator can make your brand go viral and lead to rapid growth.
Keep an Eye on FTC Regulations
Since the social media boom about a decade and a half ago, regulations surrounding influencer marketing have changed a great deal. FTC guidelines and compliance are monitored more closely, especially regarding an influencer’s disclosure of their relationship with a brand. This must be done in clear and simple terms, which can have different meanings depending on the platform used for promotion. Disregarding guidelines or–to put it bluntly–trying to be sneaky or misleading in any way can lead to legal trouble or fines for both the influencer and the brand.
Take the 2014 Sony debacle as an example. An advertising agency’s employees were encouraged to promote Sony’s Playstation Vita console on their personal social media accounts without disclosing their relationship to the company. In addition, several “misleading ads” were published regarding the product’s capabilities, causing the FTC to step in.
The bottom line: become familiar with the FTC guidelines, and make sure your influencer partners are as well.
