What is influence marketing?

Influencer marketing in your marketing strategy is a strategy that uses influencers to promote your product or service. This takes place in the form of a paid collaboration (most of the time) depending on the influence and thus the community of the latter. While in the past, influencers were usually a famous actor or sportsperson, the situation has changed a bit in recent years. Influencers are also content creators on social networks such as Instagram, YouTube, Snapshat, Twitch,...

Used wisely, integrating influencer marketing into your strategy allows you to promote your product or service by relying on the reputation of experts and personalities recognised in their field, influencers or opinion leaders. They then distribute your brand's content to their community.

Promoting your product or service can be done in different ways such as having the influencer test a product or invite them to an event.

Using opinion leaders who talk about your product or service can be a good way to increase your visibility on social networks (and digital more generally) and develop your reputation online. The great strength of considering influencer marketing in your strategy is related to the strength of recommendation or prescription made by influencers.

At Lead Agency, we make the difference between an influencer and an ambassador. The latter has more weight than an influencer due to his authenticity and affinity with the brand he collaborates with (often for free). He is a loyal advocate of the brand and therefore does not work for competitors in the same sector.

To create an influencer marketing strategy in your strategy and make it impactful, it is important to put in place a multi-channel communication and therefore to take into account other digital levers than the one used by the influencer or ambassador who promotes your product or service.

Integrating influencer marketing into your strategy therefore requires global digital thinking that encompasses all the tools you use and/or could use to increase the reach of your campaign.

How to integrate influencers into your communication?

Define the objectives of your influencer campaign

Before you start looking for influencers to work with for your product or service, it is important to define your goals.
These define your budgetwhat type of content you will share (commercial approach), what digital platform to communicate, and what to use to influencer choose.

For a successful influence campaign, you need to have defined at least these 3 points:

• Global communication strategy with an analysis of your market
• Choice of your target audience with its geographical location
• Clear and impactful message to be disseminated

Using influencer marketing in your strategy automatically involves choosing the right influencer for your influencer campaign. It is important to take into account a few criteria in order to select the best profiles adapted to your product or service as well as to the tone you want to convey.

The influencer must be in consistency with your DNA and brand image. Its community must also be close to your target. These two important aspects will maximise your chances of being known by potential future customers and improve efficiency of your influence campaign.

For example, you won't choose the same influencer if you are targeting online or local sales, or if you are targeting entrepreneurs or individuals. Working with influencers also carries risks. Indeed, you are, from the moment you work together, associated with its image and its behaviour. So take the time to analyse his recent publications and his history before making your decision.

There are different types of influencers. They are usually sorted by the size of the community or the quality of their audience:

• Mega-influencers or celebrities offer greater visibility and awareness :
  • Large community (over 500k subscribers)
  • Huge reach
  • Low engagement rate
  • High tariffs

• Macro-influencers provide relevance and coherence linked to several audiences:
  • Large community (100k - 500k subscribers)
  • Large scope
  • Average engagement rate
  • Average rates

• Micro-influencers bring authenticity and proximity :
  • Small community (10k - 100k subscribers)
  • Medium range
  • High rate of engagement
  • Low fees

• Nano Influencers are the niche specifiers:
  • Small community (less than 10k subscribers)
  • Limited scope
  • Very high engagement rate
  • Low prices

There are also different platforms such as Kolsquare that facilitate influencer research and analyse different parameters for agencies to choose the most suitable profiles to your product or service. These tools become indispensable if you integrate influencer marketing into your strategy on a long-term basis.

Define your influencer campaign budgets and impact

Don't start implementing influencer marketing into your strategy without assessing a budget and defining clear KPI's.

Defining your strategy in a comprehensive and precise way makes it easier to calculate your real ROI (Return On Investment) and thus define whether you continue to develop this strategy or whether it should be reviewed or even stopped.
Having this data will therefore help you to move forward in an agile manner and help you make the right decisions to generate the best results.

The results of an online campaign with an influencer can be expressed in many ways:

• For an influence campaign with the objective of visibility and acquisition :
  • Growth in the number of subscribers
  • Commitment rate
  • Evolution of the number of visits to the website or to the shop
  • Growth in the number of e-mails in the database
  • Number of messages received
  • Number of leads generated

• For an influence campaign with the objective of conversion :
  • Number of content downloads
  • Number of sales made
  • Turnover generated

4 benefits of integrating influencer marketing into your strategy

1. Renew your content strategy

For a brand, influencer marketing can be an effective way to get in front of new targetsand generate interest and conversion.

So, as seen above, there can be different objectives such as increasing sales, improving visibility, brand image and online reputation.

Working with influencers also allows you to working differently with content marketing. 

The influencer federates his community around his lifestyle, his passion... He establishes a bond of "proximity" and trust with his followers. He therefore has a real power of recommendation which works all the better when the promotion of your product or service is in phase with his everyday life and corresponds to his editorial calendar. The influencer creates his own content and spreads it to his community with his own style. Obviously, you must give him a framework but don't go too far in order to avoid confining the influencer in your ideas when he can actually bring new ones. Moreover, the influencer knows what his own community likes and knows the type of content to be published to create maximum interaction.

The content distributed by the influencer can be reused according to the agreements made before the campaign was launched. Don't limit yourself to reuse broadcast content on the digital network used by the influencer but understand this in a multi-channel campaign using the other digital media you are present on.

Integrating influencer marketing into your strategy therefore allows you to generate new and different content that is disseminated through other means than your own communication channels.

2. Build trust and loyalty with influencers

People are more likely to buy They are more likely to trust other people's opinions than advertisements or information about products from companies. They can also ask questions directly about their experiences with the product, which immediately removes many doubts.

Plus the collaboration between a brand and the influencer will seem obvious and naturalthe better the campaign will perform. Followers don't like misleading, disguised and irrelevant advertising. The consequence? The influencer's follower count drops and your campaign won't work as you expect. You lose money and credibility.

It is therefore necessary to analyse the editorial line of the targeted influencer in order to determine whether the collaboration would be in line with the consistent with the brand image of your company: beyond the important visibility that this influencer could bring, would current consumers identify with this influencer, will the promotion of the brand make sense for the influencer's community? Also determine if the tone of the influencer (humorous, personal, educational), the content they offer, the formats they use, the values they promote are in line with the brand and will allow the offer to be properly promoted.

Integrating influencer marketing into your strategy allows you (if the chosen influencer and their community is adapted to your product or service) to increase the trust that your target has in your brand by the simple recommendation made by someone other than your company. Using the same influencer several times or diluting the campaign over the long term also builds loyalty and can give an impression of regular use of your products or services by the influencer.

3. Increasing public engagement with influencer campaigns

71 % of people feel that the traffic quality and customers generated by influencers are higher than with other sources.

It's not enough to look at the size of an influencer's community, you have to go much further than that.
To measure the Influencer awarenessIn order to achieve this, several criteria must be taken into account: the size of the community, of course, but also the number of publications, the rate of impressions and the rate of engagement.

The most complicated thing for an influencer is to grow his community while keeping the same proximity with his followers. This closeness is the key to maintaining a high level of community engagement. Do you want to reach a specific target group but you don't have specific ways to reach them? Then a nano or micro-influencer may be the solution.

The engagement rate and its highly targeted audience are the huge advantages of the nano or micro-influencer.

Integrating influencer marketing into your strategy can improve engagement simply because the traffic interacting with your brand is more qualified than if it was sourced through another channel.

4. Improve natural referencing

Influencer marketing must also take into account your natural referencing and therefore your visibility on search engines. When you run a campaign with an influencer on a specific communication channel, you can also recycle your content to share it in your blog page of your website for example.

Working on different channels will only increase your performance, even if, obviously, it is on the communication network used by the influencer that the results should be the most striking.

There are many different influencers including influencers creating blog content which have a very positive impact on potential buyers, with the following figure: "Blogs have 63 % more impact than magazines on purchasing decisions.

Working with such influencers allows you toincrease your brand awareness or to generate more traffic to your website. They communicate about your product or service through their blog which is followed by a very specific target community.

This type of strategy requires a SEO expertise in order to guarantee a better impact on the notoriety but also on the visibility of your website.

Choosing a good blogging influencer depends on a few criteria that must be taken into account:

• The world of the site
• Blog traffic
• The positioning of the blog on search engines
• The quality of the content
• The quality of backlinks to other sites
• The amount of backlinks

In a campaign of this type, it is important not to rely solely on the netlinking generated by the mention of your website in the influencer's blog.
You should also update your own website and regularly publish new content to improve your visibility on Google and attract new customers. Quality content is content that takes into account all SEO standards (relevant title, keyword, tag hierarchy, image optimisation, etc.).

Integrating influencer marketing into your strategy increases your visibility on search engines. Just because you don't use an influencer who specialises in creating blog content doesn't mean you should put content creation on your website on hold. Think of doing multi-channel whenever possible by recycling your content as much as possible.