4 reasons to include influencer marketing in your communication strategy

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing in your marketing strategy is a strategy that uses influencers to promote your product or service. This takes the form of a paid collaboration (most of the time) based on the influencer's influence and therefore community. Whereas in the past, influencers were generally famous actors or sportsmen, the situation has changed somewhat in recent years. Influencers are also content creators on social networks such as Instagram, YouTube, Snapshat, Twitch,...

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

Promoting your product or service can take many forms, such as product testing or inviting the influencer to an event.

Using opinion leaders to 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 taking influencer marketing into account in your strategy lies in the strength of recommendation or prescription made by influencers.

At Lead Agency, we make a distinction between an influencer and an ambassador. Ambassadors carry more weight than influencers, partly because of their authenticity and affinity with the brand with which they collaborate (often free of charge). They are loyal brand advocates, and don't work for competitors in the same sector.

To make influencer marketing an integral part of your strategy, and to ensure that it has an impact, it's important to set up a multi-channel communication and therefore take into account digital levers other than the one used by the influencer or ambassador promoting your product or service.

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

How can you integrate influencers into your communications?

Define the objectives of your influencer campaign

Before you start looking for influencers to work with for your product or service, it's vital to define your objectives.
These define your budgetwhat type of content you're going to share (sales approach), what digital platform to communicate, and which influencer choose.

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

• Global communication strategy with market analysis
• Choosing your target audience and its geographical location
• Clear, high-impact message

Using influencer marketing as part of your strategy automatically involves choosing the right influencer for your influencer campaign. It's important to take a few criteria into account to select the best profiles suited to your product or service and the tone you want to convey.

The influencer must be consistency with your DNA and brand image. Its community must also be close to your target. These two important aspects will maximize your chances of making yourself known to potential future customers and clients. improve efficiency of your influencer campaign.

For example, you won't choose the same influencer if you're targeting online sales or local sales, or if you're targeting entrepreneurs or private individuals. Working with influencers also entails risks. After all, the moment you start working together, you're on your own, associated with its image and behavior. So take the time to analyze his recent publications and history before making your decision.

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

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

• Macro-influencers bring relevance and consistency to several audiences:
  • Large community (100k - 500k subscribers)
  • Wide range
  • Average commitment rate
  • Average rates

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

• Nano-influencers are niche specifiers:
  • Small community (less than 10k subscribers)
  • Limited range
  • Very high engagement rate
  • Low rates

There are also various platforms such as Kolsquare that facilitate influencer research and analyze various parameters for agencies in order to select the most suitable profiles to your product or service. These tools become indispensable if you integrate influencer marketing into your strategy over the long term.

Define your influencer campaign budgets and benefits

Above all, don't start implementing influencer marketing into your strategy without first estimating a budget and defining clear KPI's.

Defining your strategy in a global and precise way makes it easier to calculate your real costs. ROI (Return On Investment) and thus define whether you should continue to develop this strategy or whether it should be reviewed or even discontinued.
This data will help you to move forward agilely 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, including the following:

• For an influence campaign with the objective of visibility and acquisition :
  • Subscriber growth
  • Commitment rate
  • Growth in the number of visits to the website or in-store
  • 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
  • Sales 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 of making itself known to new targetsto generate interest and conversion.

So, as we saw earlier, 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. 

Influencers unite their community around their lifestyle habits, their passion... They establish a bond of "proximity" and trust with their followers. They therefore have a real power of recommendation, which works all the better when the promotion of your product or service is in phase with their everyday life and corresponds to their editorial calendar. Influencers create their own own content and distributes it to his community in his own style. Of course, you need to give them a framework, but don't go too far to avoid confining the influencer to your ideas, when they can actually come up with new ones. What's more, the influencer knows what appeals to his own community 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 on which you are present.

By integrating influencer marketing into your strategy, you can generate new and different content that is disseminated through channels other than your own.

2. Building trust and loyalty with influencers

People are more inclined to buy They trust other people's opinions more than advertising or product information provided by companies. They can also ask questions directly about their experiences with the product, which immediately dispels many doubts.

Plus the collaboration between a brand and an influencer will seem obvious and naturalthe better the campaign will perform. Followers don't like misleading, disguised or irrelevant advertising. The result? The influencer's follower count plummets, and your campaign won't perform as well as you'd hoped. You lose money and credibility.

It's important to analyze the target influencer's editorial line to determine whether the collaboration would be in line with his or her values. consistent with brand image your company: beyond the significant visibility this influencer could bring, would current consumers identify with this influencer, would promoting the brand make sense to the influencer's community? Also determine whether the influencer's tone (humorous, personal, educational), the content he or she proposes, the formats he or she uses, the values he or she promotes are in line with the brand and will enable the offer to be properly promoted.

Integrating influencer marketing into your strategy can therefore (if the chosen influencer and his or her community are suited to your product or service) increase your target's trust in your brand through the simple recommendation made by someone other than your company. Using the same influencer several times over, or diluting your campaign over the long term, also builds loyalty and can give the impression that the influencer uses your products or services on a regular basis.

3. Increase public engagement with influencer campaigns

71 % of people believe that the la 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 addition to the size of the community, you need to take into account 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 maintaining the same closeness to his followers. This proximity is the key to maintaining a high level of community involvement. Do you want to reach a specific target group but don't have the means to do so? Then a nano- or micro-influencer could be the solution.

Nano- and micro-influencers offer huge advantages in terms of engagement rates and a highly targeted audience.

Integrating influencer marketing into your strategy improves engagement by the simple fact that traffic interacting with your brand is more qualified than if it had been sourced via 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 on your website's blog page, for example.

Working on different channels is bound to increase your performance, even if it's clear that the results should be most noticeable on the communication network used by the influencer.

There are lots of different influencers, including those who create blog content which have a very positive impact on potential buyers, with figures to back this up: "Blogs have 63 % more impact than magazines on purchasing decisions."

Working with such influencers allows you toincrease brand awareness or 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 SEO expertise to guarantee the best possible impact on your website's reputation and visibility.

Choosing a good blogging influencer depends on a few key criteria:

• The site universe
• Blog traffic
• Blog positioning on search engines
• Content quality
• Quality of backlinks to other sites
• Quantity of backlinks

In a campaign of this type, it's important not to rely solely on the netlinking generated by the mention of your website in the influencer's blog.
You must also update your own website and regularly distribute 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 optimization, etc.).

Integrating influencer marketing into your strategy increases your visibility on search engines. Just because you don't use an influencer who specializes in creating blog-style content doesn't mean you should put content creation on your website on the back burner. Think multi-channel whenever possible, and recycle your content as much as possible.