Influencer Marketing For Dummies

Kristy Sammis, Cat Lincoln, Stefania Pomponi, Jenny Ng, Edita Gassmann Rodriguez, Judy Zhou

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119113928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

The easy way to get 'in' with influencer marketing

Are you a marketing guru looking to stay at the top of your game? Then you need to be in the know on influencer marketing. A hybrid of content marketing and native advertising, influencer marketing is an established trend in marketing that identifies and targets individuals with influence over potential buyers. Although this has usually meant focusing on popular celebrities and Internet personalities, there is a new wave of 'everyday consumers' that can have a large impact. In Influencer Marketing For Dummies, you'll find out how to market to those who rock social media—and, subsequently, grow your brand.

Influencer marketing relies on building strong relationships with customers. With the help of this hands-on, friendly guide, you'll discover how to build superior customer service and experience, make strong interactions with customers, and encourage organic and authentic sharing about your brand. Measure the most impact that content has on your overall marketing strategy

• Find influencers: it's not just a numbers game or a 'who's who' of social media
• Engage with influencers once you've found them
• Recognize the best practices of influencer marketing and outreach

If you're a marketer, media agency professional, business owner, or anyone else who works hard to bring brands, products, and services to the largest audience possible, Influencer Marketing For Dummies is the go-to guide you don't want to be without.

Part I

Getting Started with Influencer Marketing

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part …

Learn the origins of influencer marketing and how it evolved.

Get acquainted with the six primary influencer platforms.

Discover how to make influencer marketing work for you and your brand.

Chapter 1

Influencer Marketing 101

In This Chapter

Getting the lay of the land

Approaching social media platforms like a pro

Redefining “influence”

Knowing what your business needs to launch successful programs

Congratulations! You’ve arrived at the era of influencer marketing: an exciting, interesting, fresh, ever-changing, and seriously fun time to be a marketer! You’re gonna love it here.

What makes influencer marketing so compelling? For one thing, it simply couldn’t have existed before now. Influencer marketing brings together age-old concepts but gives them a modern, social media twist, and then distributes them across platforms that change almost daily. And the results are stunning.

We believe that influencer marketing is unprecedented and truly differentiates itself from the old marketing practices. In fact, it challenges most of them. This new medium pushes traditional boundaries — and that’s a good thing! Consumers (the folks we’re marketing to) are savvier than ever. It’s our job to keep up.

In this chapter, we give you an overview of what influencer marketing is and why it matters to you — whether you know it or not!

Defining Influencer Marketing

So, what is influencer marketing exactly, and why are we so darn excited about it? Influencer marketing is the art and science of engaging people who are influential online to share brand messaging with their audiences in the form of sponsored content.

Advertisers have always used celebrity endorsements as a way to increase awareness and improve perception of a brand, because people tend to trust celebrities they admire, and sometimes aspire to be like them. Influencer marketing is similar in concept, but it has ushered in a new way to define celebrity. In addition to TV and movie stars, pro athletes, and musicians, celebrities of the social media world exist now, too. People can build big, engaged audiences on social media, such as blogs or Instagram. And those social media influencers wield influence over their audiences, akin to celebrity influence. Brands then work with these social media influencers to create a new kind of celebrity endorsement.

For example, maybe a new energy drink has just come out, and they want to market themselves as a “perfect boost for busy women.” They decide that — in addition to email blasts, online display ads, and in-person events — they’re going to reach out to influential female bloggers who write about their busy lives (and include information about the new energy drink). To engage these influencers, the energy drink’s marketing team will

• Find bloggers who meet their target demographic.
• Reach out to the bloggers in an effective and professional way so that both parties are happy with and clear about their upcoming partnership.
• Send the bloggers samples of the drink.
• Enjoy the results of a fantastic social media campaign! The bloggers’ readers are thrilled to have learned about their favorite online friend’s good experiences with this energy drink, and they comment that they’re going to try it themselves.

Of course, influencer marketing is not quite that simple, and these are actually quite time-consuming and involved (which is why we’ve written a whole book about them!), but the idea is sound.

So why a whole book about influencer marketing? What makes it so impossible to have done before and so hot right now?

• Social media today gives access to anyone to become an influencer; anyone who builds an audience can influence that audience. This means there’s a huge pool of influencers available for brands to work with.
• There are more tools than ever before to help brands find and engage with influencers. There are resources for turnkey influencer programs now that simply didn’t exist a year ago.
• Influencers exist on any channel or platform; they aren’t limited to one format or another.
• Consumers have little trust in advertising. No one clicks banner ads anymore! But consumers do trust their friends and family when it comes to product recommendations and purchasing decisions — and consumers consider social media acquaintances to be friends.
• When executed well, influencer marketing programs have proven to be one of the most cost-effective and powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal.

Identifying the Primary Influencer Platforms

There are a slew of social media platforms out there, but in this book, we focus on the six big ones. The ones we’ve selected are

• The most established: Programs on these platforms are replicable and scalable based on years of data and case studies.
• The most marketing-friendly: Marketers know they can expect good results from programs on these platforms. The Snapchats of the world are fun, but they haven’t yet proven to yield demonstrable results for most businesses.

Regardless of how many new tools emerge, when you’ve mastered the basics of these six platforms, you can manage influencers anywhere.

Blogs

Blogs were arguably the first form of user-generated content that attracted advertisers. When the web evolved from top-down editorial content (content that was published on websites, much like magazines and newspapers were published, without any way for audiences to interact or respond to that content), bloggers were the first people to attract true, measurable, engaged audiences. Blogs allowed for commenters, which meant bloggers (publishers) were interacting with their audiences. This two-way communication was revolutionary, and entire communities formed around blogs. Advertisers followed.

Over the last 15 years, blogs have evolved from being primarily text-heavy outlets for sharing opinion and personal stories, to a dizzying world of highly visual, readily shared content.

Blogs are still a mainstay of influencer programs. Here’s why:

• There are popular blogs for every topic under the sun.
• Traffic and activity from blogs (page views, visits, time on site, and so on) are easy to measure.
• Influential bloggers can create gorgeous content and tell beautiful, true stories in a way that brands simply can’t.
• The “evergreen” nature of blog content means sponsored posts will be discovered long after programs have been completed.

Instagram

No other social media tool has enjoyed Instagram’s meteoric rise to prominence. People of all ages (especially under the age of 34) love perusing and sharing snapshots of people’s lives, whether they know them IRL (in real life) or not. Instagram is fun and easy to use, and though marketers were once hesitant to believe that fleeting photos on Instagram could do much for brands, nearly 95 percent of retailers are now on Instagram!

Working with influencers on Instagram is fabulous because

• Users want visual content that’s easy to digest, which is why Instagram is so popular. Engaging Instagram influencers to ensure that brand content is prominent on Instagram is a no-brainer!
• Simple photos are a great way to bring your product to life, for others to see it in action. A picture really is worth a thousand words.
• Many tools are available to track Instagram programs simply by using a unique hashtag, so measuring program success is easy (and some of these tools are even free!).
• Instagram’s audience is broad, and often different from the audiences who are reading story-based blogs. Instagram offers a fantastic additional channel to get sponsored content in front of as many people as possible.

Twitter

Twitter has changed the news cycle, and the way social media-savvy users consume news. Any event will be discussed and shared as it unfolds in real-time on Twitter. Twitter is the platform for the world’s social commentary, whether it’s serving as a political megaphone for citizens reporting live from the trenches, or a humorous collection of ongoing reactions to this season’s Bachelor finale.

Facebook is where social media users check in and check up on family and friends (mostly people they know in real life). Twitter is where users go to find out — or share — what’s happening in the world at large with thousands of users they (mostly) don’t know. Therefore, Twitter is great for

• Hosting chats or “parties” with a wide cross-section of people who have a common interest.
• Disseminating information about a new product launch or anything newsworthy.
• Brands that are interested in actively engaging with users. Facebook is more passive — comments may go unanswered for long periods of time, for example. Twitter users expect responses quickly. As a brand, if you can’t engage in near real-time conversations with followers, working with influencers who can do it on your behalf is a fantastic option.

Facebook

Although Facebook isn’t quite as popular as it once was among the under-25 crowd, millions of Americans check Facebook daily. Marketers have to be there! But being there can be tricky. Facebook changes its algorithms, policies, and ad serving regularly — what worked today may not work tomorrow. It’s tough — but critical — to keep up.

For that reason, when it comes to Facebook, working with influencers is fantastic. Here’s why:

• People who are popular on Facebook know how to navigate the tool to ensure that their posts are seen as widely as possible. Working with influencers means working with experts.
• If you’ve already created branded content and you just want to disseminate it, engaging Facebook influencers is your perfect solution. Faceboo...