In the modern world, social media is a breeding ground for engagement. Plenty of seemingly average people have unexpectedly shot into the public eye after their online content has picked up traction. This was earliest seen on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (now X), but in recent years, Instagram and TikTok have risen to the front line for social media influence.
It’s becoming increasingly common for users to treat social media as a search engine, so if your target consumers are present on social media, you should be too. However, running your own social media pages isn’t the only way to utilise the various platforms available. Those aforementioned people who have garnered a large social following present a great opportunity for your brand to reach a wider audience.
The definition of influencer marketing
The definition of ‘influencer’ is a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media. This usually refers to a person with a large social media following.
Influencers are categorised by the number of followers they have:
- Nano influencer: fewer than 1,000
- Micro influencer: 1,000 – 100,000
- Macro influencer: 100,000 – 1 million
- Mega influencer: 1 million +
The definition of ‘influencer marketing’ is a collaboration between social media influencers and brands to promote its products or services. A collaboration between a brand and another entity is nothing new in the marketing and PR world, but influencers have a unique reach and perception that can be beneficial to a variety of brands.
The most common method of influencer marketing is when the influencer posts content about your brand on their page for their audience, but they may also create content to be posted to your brand’s own social media channels.
Influencer marketing advantages
One in four (25%) of marketers use influencer marketing, and for good reason. Over two-thirds (69%) of consumers claim that they trust influencer recommendations for new products or services, with 60% of marketers reporting that influencer-generated content consistently outperforms branded posts.
You can create the most engaging and valuable content for your brand in-house, but the truth is that consumers become immune to overly branded content. Influencer content that’s created for your brand often reflects the influencer’s content style and personality, which is what their followers are there to see.
Not many brands have a single face or personality leading their social media content, making it harder for consumers to properly relate to the brand, whereas influencers create communities in their little corners of the internet, building relationships and trust with their followers.
How to choose the right influencer for your brand
You can technically partner with any influencer who’s willing to promote your brand, but there’s little strategy in throwing money around willy-nilly. Don’t get me wrong, partnering with a vast number of influencers who cater to different niches can be a good way to increase brand awareness, but when it comes to capturing new, valuable consumers or increasing conversions, this isn’t a cost-effective way to go about it.
How to choose the right influencer for your brand: three things to consider
- What are the goals of your campaign?
Just like any marketing campaign, different goals require different strategies. As mentioned above, if your goal is brand awareness, you’ll benefit most from partnering with lots of different influencers that garner a larger combined reach, or influencers with a large following (mega influencers).
Mega influencers can also be useful for campaigns where increasing your brand’s followers on a certain platform is the main goal. However, you can’t just have an influencer put out a video discussing your product and expect a large influx of followers – this can happen, but there’s no guarantee! Instead, think about ways to attract these new followers within the content. A great strategy for this is having the influencer offer a giveaway of your product, where the rules include following your brand on social media.
If your goal is to increase sales, your focus should be less on how many followers an influencer has, and more on who these followers are. The influencer’s content should fit into the same, or very similar, niche as your brand – targeting is key for increasing sales.
- What type of people are in the influencer’s audience?
Who are you trying to reach with this campaign? Where in the world do they live? How old are they, and what gender are they? What are their main interests and passions? What social media platforms are they present on? Influencer marketing isn’t cheap, so it’s important you’re reaching the right audience.
- What other factors are important to your campaign?
There are plenty of influencers to choose from across the mainstream social media platforms, and each one will have their own personality and content style. What sort of tone of voice are you looking for? Do the influencer’s values align with your brand and messaging? What sort of audience perception do you want the influencer to have? Not all public figures are seen by their audience with the same levels of trust and authenticity, and this is important to consider before you enlist them to endorse your brand.
It’s also important to look past the follower count. Yes, this can be a good indicator of their audience size, but how engaged is the audience? Select 10 of an influencer’s branded posts and total up the number of reactions and comments, divide this by their total number of followers, and then multiply by 100. This will give you an average engagement rate for their sponsored posts. Smaller influencers often charge less for branded content than macro and mega influencers, so you may find that working with a larger number of smaller influencers with higher average engagement rates can result in much more bang for your buck than working with one or two mega influencers who receive proportionately less engagement per post.
An example of creative influencer marketing
Choosing the right influencer for your brand may seem relatively simple considering the clear niches found across social media content creation. If you sell beauty products, find beauty and makeup influencers. If your brand creates products designed for children, look for parenting influencers. Clothing brands can look for fashion influencers, and if you sell home furnishings or accessories, find lifestyle influencers.
However, choosing the right influencers for your campaign shouldn’t always be this black and white – there are benefits to thinking outside the box.
Logan Moffitt is a TikTok mega influencer, who began posting cucumber salad recipes on the platform at the start of July 2024. He already had 3 million followers under his belt, but as of the end of August 2024, his cucumber salad videos have doubled his follower count to 6 million. Within 30 days, his recipe videos amassed over 300 million views. Over 350,000 videos have been posted under the hashtag #CucumberSalad, with over 1.3 billion combined views.
Brands were quick to notice the popularity of Moffitt’s videos, jumping at the opportunity to get involved. Of course, food-related brands were an easy fit, with big names like Chipotle, DoorDash, and Bloom Nutrition splashing the cash to feature in his videos. But it isn’t exclusively ‘relevant’ brands that have shown their faces on Moffitt’s page – beauty brands like Sephora, NYX Professional Makeup, K18 Hair, and Flamingo have found creative segues to work their products into his cucumber salad recipes.
Women’s shaving brand, Flamingo, provided Moffitt with one of its dermaplane razors and requested that he use it to substitute his usual mandolin when chopping a cucumber in a video. This was a clever way to insert the product placement as seamlessly as possible into his usual organic content while adding a comedic and memorable element. Flamingo reported a 1,000% jump in its own TikTok profile views after the video went live, referring to the partnership as one of its top-performing of the year.
K18 Hair found a less organic link to Moffitt’s videos – not through the cucumber salad itself, but through his bleached platinum blonde hair. The sponsored video shows Moffitt take a pause midway through the recipe to apply K18’s hair mask, before continuing the content as usual. Amassing over 10 million impressions, 5 million views, and 245,000 likes, Michelle Miller, K18’s Chief Marketing Officer, referred to the successful sponsorship as an “unexpected partnership that also makes sense”.
At the end of the day, Moffitt’s intriguing cucumber recipes may have drawn a large number of new followers to his page, but the majority of them have stuck around for his engaging personality, which is what brands truly want to tap into.
Social media is a toolbox in the marketing world; it holds plenty of the tools you need to get your brand out there. If you think influencer marketing could work for your brand, give it a try! Do your research, find the right influencers for the job and don’t be scared to get creative!
