We’ve discussed on this blog before about the perks of influencer marketing and examples of how brands have made this work in their favour. In the past few months we’ve been working with some bloggers and Instagram influencers on a number of projects, and wanted to return to the topic. Not only letting you know what we’ve learnt, but how some brands have got it spot on.
The number 1 tip of influencer marketing? Get your influencer right.
It’s easy to look at some of the bigger influencers, having millions of followers, and want to use them to promote your brand. This is where two factors come into play and you have two questions to ask yourself:
- Are they right for my brand? Do they have the right tone? Would images of (for example) the hoover you’re selling fit in with an influencers feed which heavily features food? If it would look random, if it would look too out of place for that user to post it on their feed and therefore a blatant ad, it’s not a good collaboration. The trick is to find an influencer who would have already wanted to purchase or use your product – or already have done so. To be able to give a good – and above all honest – review which will seem to blend into their feed as if it wasn’t an advert – is the golden ticket.
- Whilst it’s easy to get swept up in numbers of followers, it’s important to take a step back and think about what you’re wanting from this collaboration. The influencer, depending on their number of followers, may ask for a fee for promoting your product – beware this could be quite a steep price! If they don’t ask for a monetary payment, smaller accounts will just ask for the product or experience for free. This will all be dependent on their level of success on the platform so bare that in mind when you’re wanting an account to promote your product. Anything 100k+ followers attract the higher levels of payment, however any accounts over a few thousand are still expecting payment. But that’s what they’ll be getting from it – what are you looking for? Followers? Likes? Promoting a competition or a new launch of a product? Make sure the influencer is aware of that so they can promote it in their posts. Some brands insist on giving Instagram stars a caption that needs to be written under the post, but we’d stray away from this – your tone of voice won’t match the influencers normal caption and will lower engagement as it comes off as inauthentic. Make sure they know the bullet points you want mentioning and then leave them to do what they do best – social media!
Daniel Wellington
Daniel Wellington has a great social strategy which uses a range of both male and female influencers in many niches. Travel Instagram posts promote the highest level of engagement, captions often asking the user to guess the location. Whilst they mainly use travel photography influencers, they always repost their images which give an incredible feed for the brand – they don’t have to put the work in to their posts in terms of visiting locations around the world to give themselves content, as these Instagram users create content for them!
The brand pays larger influencers and celebrities to be seen in and photograph their watches, and with smaller influencers, they gift them the jewellery. They promote not just a product but also a life style through their posts. Beginning as a small start up to now amassing 3.3 million followers, it’s an impressive online promotional strategy.
Revolve
53% of women admit to making purchases due to influencers posts, so it’s easy to see why clothing retailer Revolve switched from using models in their posts to top influencers. The girls are well known on the internet and so add a cool ‘it girl’ vibe to the brand – especially since all the photos are taken in well known locations. Throwing parties in unbelievable backgrounds with luxury touches, it holds a tone that many users scrolling their feeds will aspire to. The photography, coming from these high level influencers, is all high quality and heavily features the brand and therefore can be reposted on the Revolve account. Whilst the products are always featured and tagged, it’s becoming more lifestyle led and jumping on social trends, is becoming more of an ‘it’ brand.
Nespresso
A coffee brand with an incredible amount of buzz online, just the hashtag #nespresso brings up 1.1 million posts of users tagging the brand. Whilst many are just fans of the brand, in this tag we can find many posts with a ‘#sp’ or ‘#spon’ which is a requirement of an influencer when they’re being paid to post so they have a transparency with their audience.
Whilst it’s true that calculating the ROI on paying an influencer is difficult to judge, its important to look at influencer marketing as a long term venture. Perhaps if its an expensive item, the user won’t rush out and buy it this month – but see a product enough times and see it being loved by a wide set of people enough times, for most of us, it’s enough to generate a purchase at some point. You need to invest with a view it might not result in sales straight away, but will increase brand awareness and that in itself is worth a lot. In an often saturated market, being seen is sometimes a struggle.
For us, influencer marketing has so many benefits for clients. Working with influencers gives another tone of voice to your brand and helps give new imagery for you to regram. The main things to make sure you’re doing when looking for influencers is to make sure they’re a good fit for your brand and ensure you know what you want from the collaboration. If you keep these two things in mind, it’s then fun to sit and watch online engagement with your brand grow!
