With Influencer Marketing growing as an effective marketing strategy, it’s important to assess whether this could be the right move for your business. According to a HubSpot report 'Influencer marketing yields the highest ROI, along with blogging and social media shopping tools.'
With the potential to transform the way you deliver your marketing, Innovation Visual’s Marketing Manager, Lauren Waterfall recently interviewed Digital Marketing Lead, Vogue Phelps, to gain further insights into this marketing tactic.
Want to watch or listen instead? Watch the full interview, by clicking on the YouTube video below.
Q: We’ve seen a surge in interest in Influencer Marketing, with Universities even offering degrees in this. Can you tell us what is Influencer marketing and why is it beneficial to businesses?
A: Influencer marketing is a powerful marketing tool that many different businesses use. Our clients use them across B2C and B2B and it's just a way of building brand awareness, reaching more people, new audiences and ultimately getting a higher return on your investment - which is what every business wants!
Q: Why do you think Influencer Marketing works so well?
A: If you do it correctly and you work with the right people who are passionate about your brand, know exactly what you do, know what products or services you sell, they're essentially doing the marketing for you!
Influencers build a following of people who are essentially like them. Followers are interested in what they do and so when an influencer is promoting your brand and engaging with it with their followers, they naturally want to copy what they're doing. A bit like a ‘mob mentality’ kind of thing.
You're basically working with this person to spread your message to their followers and then that's how you're growing your reach. So, it can work well for businesses, however if you're not working with the right people, it can have adverse effects, so you do have to be careful about it to work well.
Q: There's a lot of trust building within Influencer Marketing, can you tell us more about this?
A: Trust is the social proof that people buy into. So, for example if an influencer loves your face cream and they're your perfect ideal customer profile (ICP), they're using your face cream, they're loving it, they're seeing the benefits of it, their followers then see the social proof and are encouraged to purchase the product.
I was listening to a talk during a marketing conference we went to in Lithuania, and they were saying how Gen-Z just want to see how things actually work.
Anyone can say we're the best at ‘whatever’, but until you actually see it in action, see a product or service working for someone else who you look up to, you're going to be like ‘oh I want to buy that', or 'I want to try it’. Then you've had another sale and, as a business, you've essentially done nothing!
Q: Great, that sounds interesting actually and, in terms of Influencer Marketing, are there channels that influencers use more over others?
A: Well, there's the main social channels such as Instagram, and TikTok is a massive one and growing with the State of Influencer report stating that 'TikTok was the fastest growing social media platform in 2023'.
Depending on where your audience are and where your customers are, that's where you want to be. You want to meet your customers where they're at and it just depends.
You must test things, in marketing everything's about testing, seeing where people react the most and respond.
Most importantly with Influencer Marketing, the engagement piece is key because you want people to engage. It's all very well promoting things but if no one's actually looking at it and taking interest, it's useless.
Q: So, would you say Influencer Marketing is a targeted approach because you're finding different influencers to promote products or businesses to a specific audience?
A: Absolutely! There are many ways you can find the right influencer for your business. For example, if you go on TikTok, you can search a hashtag and then you can see who's trending and who's promoting, who's big on there and then you can get in touch that way.
You could also go on some software platforms, or work with agencies who know where to look and who have the right contacts.
It's going into Instagram or TikTok or Facebook potentially, different platforms and going into the niche. You might find that when you search for trends, you see these macro influencers, these big influencers with thousands of followers. But sometimes you get more engagement going to the influencers / content creators with less followers because sometimes, but not always, they are able to generate more engagement.
When you first go into Influencer Marketing, don't approach it as we're just going to go for everyone and anyone, you've got to be selective from the get-go! Think about your brand as your baby. Whoever's promoting your brand for you, you want them to treat it with respect and you want them to have the right audience and you don't want your brand image to be ruined or tarnished.
You’re giving them the reins because, essentially, you're saying here's my product tell everyone what you think about it and let's hope that you say the right thing! If you're working with the right people, you'll know that they're invested and they're not going to lie.
That’s why I always say work with people who have done this tactic before. I mean we've got so much experience at Innovation Visual with this kind of thing and we've learned the ropes with B2C businesses as well as B2B.
Q: Can you explain more about the importance of engagement and how this can differ between Macro and Micro Influencers?
A: Understanding how much engagement a channel or a person is getting is an important aspect of your research. Find out how much do they engage with their audience. You also must be cautious with larger Influencers as there is the ability to buy followers, meaning these vanity metrics can be false and misleading going against the trust building which I mentioned earlier.
People with big followings as I say, doesn't mean they don't have the engagement but it's not easy to get that that many followers and if they do have lots of followers with a lot of engagement there will be competition for other brands to get that person to work with them.
If you go to someone who's much more a realist, who is posting the every-day, day-to-day stuff and posting things that are relatable and they’re engaging with their followers and are messaging them, commenting back and have high volume of comments, large amount of likes you’ll find their followers will be much more inclined. But again, you can’t assume that smaller influencers will always have higher engagement.
But as I say it's not easy to judge the engagement and you do have to do a lot of research which can be time intensive which is where working with someone like a marketing agency does come into play to help to understand how to liaise with Influencers and understand their intentions.
Q: If someone is considering implementing Influencer Marketing, are there particular industries where it works better?
A: When you talk about the right industries, it's not right or wrong, it's just trial and error. I think the key thing is finding the right people who your brand can build a personal relationship with and a long-term relationship.
If someone's just going to promote your brand once, personally I don't think it's worth it because they haven't bought into your brand. Act as if they're working for you and you're collaborating to build your brand.
So therefore, if you just say 'oh can you just do one post and publish that and I'll pay you this much and you can get the commission', I just don't see that working from a long-term perspective.
Q: That sounds interesting and so when we're working with influencers and developing campaigns is there a measure for success that we can investigate?
A: Engagement is key and the reason why I emphasise engagement is because usually engagement brings the money. When people are engaged, and they are invested in someone and they're keen to try what they're trying and listening and trusting what they're saying, they will often buy into that and so there's the money. So, your return on investment is the thing to measure.
You've got to think about the strategy which, for example, what we do with our clients at Innovation Visual, is we think about the strategy, we respond before we react. So, we think about it, we plan it all out, we know exactly what we want to achieve from the influencer relationship and the goals from the campaign. We map it out, speak to the influencer to make sure that they are on the same wavelength. It's okay to say no when they're not because it's better than wasting time.
Q: In terms of the actual content, so the influencers develop this on social media, but can it go further than these platforms?
A: Absolutely, so for example with a client recently, we've taken the videos that an influencer we were working with has produced and we've taken what they've said in the videos and embedded that across the content on the business’s website. You can watch our Digital Marketing episode about The Importance of Video in Digital Marketing.
This really helps build the SEO strategy and content strategy, and we've seen organic keyword ranking uplifts because Google really favours the content that follows the EEAT principle, so that's Experience and Expertise that shows Authority and Trust. It essentially is saying this content is from someone who's really going through what the audience is going through, so readers can identify with them and see how your solution (a product or a service) has helped that influencer.
Using influencer content in this way also makes your content unique against competitors, so that's a key thing!
Q: To conclude, can you share your top three takeaways if someone wants to go and get started with Influencer Marketing and put it in their strategy?
A: Okay so there's loads of things you can do but…
Number one: define your target personas to make sure you know exactly who you and your brand is speaking and selling to.
Number two: find the right platforms and the relevant influencers who will speak in your brand's tone of voice and promote to the right audience. The influencers you select should be invested in your brand and should do the right thing for your brand to get the relevant audiences onto your business's website.
Number three: work with an agency and with someone who knows what they're doing and have experience in Influencer Marketing. Trust me, this kind of thing can go wrong, and it can have long-term negative effects on your brand if you work with the wrong people. Whatever goes online stays online forever and it can take a long time to recover. Go straight to an expert, speak to them and see what they say, form the strategy that will then ultimately lead to success, awareness (engagement) and money (return on your investment).
So, should your business consider Influencer Marketing?
From exploring the different ways that Influencer Marketing can help your business, to how to decide which content creators to approach, to the metrics to measure for success, we hope this blog interview has helped to provide you with some prompts to get started when considering an Influencer Marketing approach.
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, contact us today to find out how our team of experts can help your business develop Influencer Marketing tactics to achieve your goals.
