So, you’ve grown your business, and it’s time to reach out to a new audience. Good for you. Naturally, you already have one all-inspiring SEO, PPC, and SMM strategy, and you are looking to expand your communication channels. That’s a great idea as you will be able not only to reach new audiences but also to improve your social proof and authority.

In recent years, one of the hits among marketers has been using influencers. Ever since Social Media became the place people spend their free time, people have created content and attracted the audience’s attention. These people, for better or worse, have become the modern-day leaders and influencers. Whether they review a product, advertise a service, or give their opinion on a topic, they influence their audience’s choices. Naturally, marketers were quick to capitalize on their success, so now influencer marketing is one of the pillars of a successful digital marketing strategy.

Still, since its inception, Influencer marketing has gone through significant changes. So, let’s give you the latest updates on how to find the right influencer for your business in 2023.

What is influencer marketing all about?

Influencer marketing is rooted in human social instincts. In human society, there are leaders and followers. Leaders are often outspoken, ready to try and test the new and mysterious and let the flowers know whether it’s worth adopting in their lives. This has been the case since the dawn of humanity. Living in the digital era, it’s no different. The only thing that has changed is who we are following. In the earliest stages of civilization, we followed the strongest. We needed protection. Then, we followed the wisest since we were seeking wisdom. Next came the smart as we sought enlightenment.

Today, we seek entertainment, and there’s really no wonder that we often follow the most entertaining people out there. Whether they are actors, content creators, or journalists, we often base our decisions on their opinions. In Social Media, where entertainment is above all else, those who manage to provide infotainment or edutainment are considered the pinnacle of entertainment.

A brief history of influencer marketing

Naturally, marketing followed these trends closely. Influencer marketing is nothing new. Celebrities endorsed products on TV and billboards way before the Internet came along. That’s the earliest form of influencer marketing. However, the pinnacle of this trend came in the early 2010s after Social Media became a standard. No longer just local celebrities and A-listers were considered influencers, but ordinary people who managed to show their expertise in a field in an entertaining way. During this period, platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and later TikTok allowed individuals to share their lives, experiences, and preferences. Naturally, marketers quickly recognized the immense potential, and the fashion industry was the first to hop on the bandwagon. Daniel Wellington, a watch brand, was among the first to build a partnership with various fashion bloggers and Instagram models, kicking off a trend that would soon become the norm.

Why use influencers

Some marketers often ignore influencers since they are a third party and the company has little control over their content and how they will advertise the product. Moreover, they are not a marketing tool you should prioritize. So, naturally, they will always play second fiddle to other digital marketing tools like SEO, PPC, and SMM. Regardless, there comes a time when introducing influencers to your marketing strategy will immensely increase your outreach and, subsequently, your conversions and sales.

In 2022, influencer marketing grew to 16.4 billion dollars. This shows that the interest in involving influencers in advertisements is only increasing. Moreover, the number of marketers that involve influencers in their strategy has risen to over 25%. More importantly, 89% of them are determined to increase their influencer marketing budget in the following years.

If you don’t trust other marketers, you can at least trust the results. 50% of millennials follow product recommendations of influencers, while 33% of Gen Z-ers bought a product after an influencer’s review.

Probably the most persuasive reason, however, is the ROI. Each dollar invested in an influencer will bring you 6.5 dollars in revenue on average. A 550% ROI sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

Still, don’t rush to reach out to the first influencer you can think of. You still need to understand some things about influencer marketing before you are ready to build your effective influencer marketing strategy. Probably the most important lesson of all is that not all influencers are the same.

Types of Influencers

Jumping straight to the influencer with the most followers might sound logical, but it’s definitely not the most optimal solution to your needs. It all depends on your goals, your product, and, of course, the influencer’s audience type. For example, a girl who shows off her beautiful body on Instagram will have a ton of followers. Still, if you are offering woodwork tools, most of this influencer’s audience won’t be interested in your product. Moreover, the model will draw attention away from your product, rendering the audience ad-blind. So, audience size is not everything when it comes to influencers. You need to know what type of influencer to get depending on your product, budget, goal, and preferred audience.

In general, there are four types of influencers:

Mega influencer

Mega-influencers are among the most followed on any given Social media. Often, they are celebrities in their own right. For example, Leonel Messi, LeBron James, Taylor Swift, and other stars who’ve become pop-culture icons outside of Social media naturally gather huge audiences everywhere they dwell. Still, some social media influencers managed to gather immense following only through their content. PewDiePie is a highly prominent example, as he had more than 100 million followers in his heyday. How many of those were economically active is another question, but still, PewDiePie has become one of the first influencers to capitalize massively on his social media fame.

Mega-influencers can offer you unparalleled exposure. However, partnering with them may prove extremely difficult, as big corporations often compete for their audiences. Thus, a partnership with a YouTube influencer costed at least 2500 dollars in 2021. With the rise of influencer marketing, these prices went and will go higher in the future.

This doesn’t mean you should disregard this type of influencer altogether. On the contrary, if you are a large enterprise or have a significant budget for influencer marketing, partnering up with a mega-influencer will bring you immense benefits. Moreover, if you are offering luxury and high-end products with higher added value, such a partnership may prove extremely cost-effective. Just make sure to budget accordingly and closely follow your KPIs, as such an investment is highly risky, especially if you haven’t done your research on the influencer’s audience.

Macro-influencers

These are the influencers who have between 100,000 and 1 million subscribers. Usually, these are well-established leaders in their respective niches. For example, Vacuum Wars is a tightly-niched YouTube channel with 284,000 subscribers. The creator behind it has built a reputation as an expert on vacuums, and many people who are looking for a vacuum will consult his videos to find the right one for their needs.

Obviously, macro influencers offer a much more targeted approach. They often represent a smaller group with common interests and/or needs. This will allow your brand to target a specific audience that will certainly be interested in your product. For example, if you are offering a vacuum cleaner, collaborating with Vacuum Wars will give you precious exposure to a tightly targeted hot audience.

Macro-influencers are perfect for startups seeking fast exposure and growth. Non-profit organizations that strive to raise awareness of problems and brands in the tourist industry are also among the companies that will benefit most from macro-influencers.

Micro-influencers

Micro-influencers are often macro-influencers in the making. They typically have a strong presence on at least one social media platform and a devoted follower base of between 10 and 100 thousand subscribers, steadily growing. Some micro-influencers have already reached their peak, but those are typically tightly-niched content creators.

Micro-influencers are an excellent choice for small businesses that have smaller marketing budgets. However, the relatively lower prices of micro-influencers are not their best quality. On average, micro-influencers have about 60% more engagements than macro-influencers and bring about 20% more conversions. No wonder about 56% of all marketers who invest in influencer marketing work with micro-influencers.

Nano-influencers

Nano-influencers are often disregarded as way too insignificant, as they often have less than 10,000 followers. However, nano-influencers often have a tight connection with their followers due to their genuine audience engagement and personalized content. This type of influencer wields strong power over their followers’ decision-making. This makes them great for businesses targeting specific communities or demographics within a tight budget. The nano-influencer is perfect for local businesses, targeting specific communities within larger cities, small businesses with limited budgets that are just starting their influencer marketing journey, and artisan businesses that typically have a much smaller and extremely tight-niched customer base.

How to choose the right influencer

Now that you know the type of influencers, benefits, and downsides, it’s time to choose the right influencer for your business. This can be done in 7 easy steps:

1. Determine your goals

Just like with anything else, your first order of business is to determine what your goals are. Typically, influencer marketing is used to discover new audiences and target new customers. About 35% of marketers use influencers precisely in this sense. 31% will go after increasing product consideration, and 26% will try to increase their sales.

You can go for any goal you want, but influencer marketing is generally excellent at finding warm or hot audiences and spreading the word about your brand. Naturally, depending on your goal, you would want to consider different types of audiences. For driving sales, you must consider micro or nano influencers, as they have much better conversion rates than macro and mega influencers. On the other hand, if you want to invest in brand awareness, mega influencers are the best choice, as they will add immense value to your brand. Still, macro influencers can significantly impact a narrow audience, which may eventually lead to sales.

2. Know who you are influencing

After determining your goal, it’s time to consider your target audience. Each influencer has an audience with specific interests. For example, suppose you strike a deal with GCN, one of the biggest cycling YouTube channels. In that case, you can be sure that advertising motorbike components won’t go as smoothly as it will if you partner with Chaos Causes despite GCN having a 10 times bigger audience.

Knowing your audience will lead you to the correct influencers and will weed out those that sound good on paper but won’t help you achieve your goals.

Moreover, you must consider how much of the influencer’s audience overlaps yours. You don’t want to pay for messaging customers you can already reach on your own. Make sure your choice of influencer will expand your reach. So consider whether you want to hit a different demographic, new geo-location or just spread the word to an entirely new audience.

3. Make your shortlist

After deciding on your target audience, it’s time to make your shortlist. Start weeding out potential influencers based on how much of your audiences overlap, how much your audience respects the influencer, how niched the influencer is, and various other factors. The most important factor is the trust the influencer inspires. It will be pointless to pay someone if they can’t convey a trustworthy message to their audience, let alone new audiences. The influencer’s credibility is best seen by their engagements. If they have a lot of negative comments, dislikes or lack thereof, you would want to skip this influencer.

Engagements will also confirm the follower count, as some influencers will boost their numbers through bots and fake accounts.

Finally, consider the tone. Find someone who has a similar voice to your brand voice. This will blend the influencer’s content into your channels seamlessly, giving you extra value for your money.

4. Research the three Rs

Once your shortlist is done, you can narrow it further by thoroughly researching the three Rs of influence – Relevance, Reach and Resonance.

A relevant influencer will create content relevant to your business niche or industry. If you want to spread your reach, you would want to find someone whose work is not entirely based in your own niche.

Moreover, the influencer must have a significant reach. This means they must have a significant subscriber number and relatively consistent viewing numbers. You don’t want an influencer with one viral video while all their other work has significantly lower views.

Finally, there’s the resonance. A huge follower and viewer count is meaningless without engagement and connections with the audience. So follow closely the influencer’s engagements – comments, likes and shares.

5. Know the influencer’s workflow before you reach out

By now, you probably have up to five candidates for your influencer marketing campaign. It’s time to dive a bit deeper into their work. Research their workflow and how often they publish new content. This is essential to your scheduling, as you won’t see results immediately. Moreover, if the influencer posts thoroughly researched videos only once a month but is in the middle of promoting a new product, you can’t wait another month or two for their next video. The same goes for seasonal products. So, learn how often they publish, how long it takes them to create new content, and any specifics to their work. For example, do they do product reviews, make advertising in the middle of their video as part of their content, or add a product placement in their content?

6. Reach out personally and privately

There are two ways to go about buying a partnership. The first is strictly business, where you extend a direct offer. Still, if you have the time, starting slow is a good idea. Like their content, comment when appropriate and show interest in their posts. You can even share some of their work on your own page if it’s relevant to your industry. When you are ready to enter into a relationship, a DM is the perfect place to start. Make the DM personal and not business-like. This will show you are serious about your partnership. Moreover, influencers also choose the businesses they will work with, as they also have a brand to protect. So, sharing some of their content and acting like a genuine fan of their work will bring you closer to a partnership.

In your initial message, be blunt about your intentions. Provide as much information about your business and yourself as possible, and make clear how the influencer will benefit from your partnership beyond the payment.

7. Clarify your goals and terms

During your conversation, you must clarify your KPIs, expectations, and in what cases you will pull out your support. For example, when Kanye West went on an anti-Semitic rant, many of his sponsors dropped him. If they hadn’t placed such clauses in a contract, Kanye would have had the chance to go to court and most probably win. So, make sure to clarify that you won’t tolerate behavior that will antagonize your core customer base. After all, the point is to enlarge your audience, not shrink it.

Most importantly, do not try to micromanage or dictate their work. You are partnering up with a content creator, and they are fanatic about their work and creative freedom. Any input should be delivered as a suggestion, not a demand. This is the biggest problem with influencer marketing. You have little to no control over how your brand will be represented.

Moreover, many influencers will refuse to work with you if you insist on them making fabricated reviews. This goes double for reviewer influencers, who build their audience precisely by giving honest opinions. So either play their game or just don’t waste your time trying to sway them otherwise.

What influencers to avoid

While searching for the right influencers, you might stumble on some content creators that seem perfectly fine at first glance, but they might be harmful to your brand. These toxic influencers will hinder your marketing goals and may even destroy your reputation. A common red flag is when an influencer predominantly uses their body as an advertising tool. If you are a fashion or a make-up brand, you can definitely take advantage of such influencers, but be sure that their audience predominantly consists of people interested only in the influencer’s body.

Another red flag would be extreme political views. As a brand, you should avoid any political affiliation, but even if you do support a political party openly, avoid going to the extreme. This will alienate a huge chunk of your potential customers. So, you should also avoid influencers with radical political views.

Moreover, avoid influencers who are not assertive. For example, if an influencer uses mostly “should”, “may,” or “could” instead of the more assertive “will” and “must”, this shows they are uncertain of what they speak of, hindering their credibility.

Finally, avoid influencers that plagiarize other people’s work without adding an extra value of their own. This is a clear sign that they can’t create anything good about your product, so don’t waste your money on them.

What else do you need

So, when you finally have your influencer and your partnership is up and running, you can sit back, relax and wait for the results to come. Naturally, you need to keep track of how your campaign is performing and how many people from the affiliate link are coming in. Needless to say, you can expect an influx of visits, so you might want to consider upgrading your HostArmada plan. Our lightning-fast, secure and reliable hosting will give you the opportunity to meet all your new customers and reduce your bounce levels significantly. So, check out our plans, and if you need any assistance in choosing the one most suited for your business expansion, contact our team, and we will be happy to help.