Influence marketing
For many businesses, influence marketing has become an efficient way of advertising and promotion today. Advertising among bloggers is no longer seen by brands as just a curious experiment. If this area is still new to you, it’s time to find out who influencers are, how to test their honesty, how a business can make money on bloggers, and what products are best suited to their audience. A useful tool for fast and effective promotion of your blog will help BigBangram.
Who are influencers?
An influencer is a social network user with a large loyal audience. His or her publications and statements have a certain impact on the life choices and views of his/her subscribers. Hence the closest synonym for an influencer is an opinion leader.
Now let’s add some statistics. About one billion monthly active users are registered on Instagram. Among ordinary users of the social network, there are several categories of influencers:
- Nano influencers (1-5 thousand subscribers) – 15.9%. They are active users with a passion for blogging. They are ready to promote brands, but so far have little influence on the audience.
- Micro (5-20 thousand subscribers) – 53.9%. Microinfluencers can be found in every business area. Their advantages are the high-quality content and close communication with subscribers.
- Medium (20-100 thousand subscribers) – 25.9%. They feature a narrow niche audience, great engagement, and close communication with the audience.
- Macro (100 thousand – 1 million subscribers) – 4.2%. Those are mini-celebrities in their respective fields. They provide high-quality content dedicated to the development of a specific topic.
- Mega- (over 1 million subscribers) – 0.18%. Featuring mixed audience with varied interests, little intimacy with subscribers. Extensive coverage, but low credibility.
And a few more numbers:
- Of all American influencers, 64.5% are women. Of these, 53.6% are 18-24 years old girls, and 34.5% are young women of 25-35 years.
- Accordingly, there are 35.5% of popular male bloggers. Of these, 24.4% are young men of 18-24 years, 51.2% are young men of 25-35 years.
Influence marketing in action
What are the top niches for bloggers to advertise?
The high degree of popularity and payback of influencer marketing is primarily because it is a new type of word of mouth. A favorite blogger becomes almost a close friend for a subscriber – a person sometimes completely relies on the opinion of an influencer. However, not every product, and not every service fits in this area of marketing. But the most top niches can be clearly identified.
Cosmetics
Advertising of both popular brands and novice manufacturers pays off excellently. The competition among beauty bloggers is just fierce – and every day there are more and more of them. The best thing, of course, is the advertising by macro and mega influencers. As soon as a favorite star names a brand of lipstick, millions of fans will want exactly the same for themselves.
Advertising is effective not only for decorative but also for care cosmetics. From one ad from a celebrity, you can get up to 6,000 sales, and microbloggers bring about 600 sales per mention of the product.
The cosmetics niche is one of the most popular in influence marketing.
Clothing, jewelry and household goods
Everything chosen according to its looks – beautiful, aesthetic, bright, stylish, unusual – is excellently sold on Instagram. The niche is also good because bloggers agree to cooperate with brands on barter terms. That is, you give the influencer a product, and he or she publishes an honest review on it, notifying your store in the publication and offering a discount to the audience using his or her promotional code.
In this niche, in addition to clothing and accessories, the following products are popular:
- textile goods;
- electronics;
- kitchen utensils;
- appliances.
This niche follows a clear rule: the lower the cost of the product, the more sales. The most popular products cost up to $39, with a worldwide delivery option.
Restaurants, cafes, food delivery
Beautiful, mouth-watering, delicious photos of restaurant dishes and gourmet products will never go unnoticed. With the help of influencers, you can quickly promote a new venue or attract a fresh audience to a well-known restaurant.
The same can be said about the delivery of groceries and ready meals. A blogger makes several enticing stories and “tasty” posts, offers a personalized promotional code – and new customers are guaranteed. But the main thing in this segment is to study the influencer’s target audience to choose the right geolocation.
Online learning
The most proven option is: invite a blogger to take your courses for free, listen to a webinar, and at the end share your opinion with the audience.
The topics can be very diverse – from drawing lessons for children to teaching competent investment. The main thing is that the direction of a blog and the interests of the target audience should correlate with the direction of your product.
How can influencers cheat?
Statistics inexorably testifies that about 70% of American bloggers do not hesitate to use unscrupulous methods.
This is especially true for novice influencers with a small number of subscribers so far.
Newbie bloggers understand that the ability to collaborate with brands depends on high engagement rates and subscriber growth. The largest number of scammers is found among nano- and micro-bloggers – 78%. As for celebrities, about 10% of mega-influencers are engaged in illegal ways to promote their blog.
Among the most popular fraudulent methods employed by American influencers are:
- Buying an audience. According to statistics, up to 43% of nano-influencers and up to 52% of microbloggers regularly buy “phantom users”. They are bots, empty accounts without any activity.
- Buying comments and likes. This scam is more common for mega bloggers and celebrities – 60% of them are buyers of such stuff.
- Mass following. That is, mass subscription to social network users in order to achieve a reciprocal subscription. In order not to waste time, bloggers resort to special services that like, comment, subscribe, and unsubscribe for them. This trick is resorted to by up to 30% of bloggers, among which medium and macro-influencers are in the lead. However, today Instagram is actively fighting against mass following and this method has become less popular.
- Participation in activity chats. In the US, such a trick is not entirely popular – no more than 5% of bloggers turn to it. By mutual agreement, chat participants like each other, subscribe and comment.
How to check the integrity of an influencer?
No expert will offer a 100% guarantee that the blog you have chosen for advertising is exceptionally honest. But you can verify the honesty of a blogger yourself:
- Compare the number of subscribers with the number of comments and likes. If a person has an audience of 10 thousand followers, and there are less than 100 likes under their posts, there is reason to doubt their honesty.
- The number of subscribers is as large as the number of people the blogger is following.
- The number of likes on advertising publications is much higher than on regular posts.
- To publications feature the same type of comments, consisting only of emoticons and interjections.
- Browse through several posts by an influencer, not just the most recent ones. You should be alerted by sudden bursts of activity.
- Request screenshots of statistics on the latest posts. Remember, bloggers often fake more attractive numbers using Photoshop or similar software.
- Feel free to write to other brands with whom this influencer has already worked, asking their opinion on the effectiveness of advertising.
