Did you know that the practice of influencer marketing has been around even in ancient Rome? Turns out gladiators used to endorse products. Despite that, the term influencer has become part of our lexicon just recently. This is mostly thanks to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others.

As of 2021, influencer marketing has become an industry worth $13.8 billion globally. The size of the market has multiplied by 8 times, considering that it was only $1.7 billion in 2016. These numbers should be enough to show you how big of a deal this industry has become. That being said, it is key for any business, small or big, to have a good understanding of it. For that reason, we are here to give you a definitive guide to influencer marketing. It should help you make the best choices when it comes to matching your business with the right influencers.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2021 - Influencer showing products in front of her camera

To put it simply, influencers are people who have dedicated followers on social media platforms and are experts in a specific niche. In the meantime, influencer marketing is a social media marketing variation where influencers endorse and make mentions of products. In recent years, influencers have managed to gain a lot of trust from their followers. For most people, recommendations from someone who is trustworthy and in some cases even a role model are taken for a fact.

That is why this type of marketing is so effective. In a recent survey, more than 90% of marketers said that influencer marketing is effective and they plan on investing more money in it. Not to make it sound so nice and easy, marketers and businesses always have to make a very thorough influencer analysis. In other words, it is key to make sure that the influencer you work with fits your product and brand well enough. Then, with influencer audience analysis they have to make sure that their audience matches their target market. You can find out more details about these processes later in this article.

The expectations that businesses and marketers have from influencer marketing are various: from raising brand awareness to reassuring current customers in their choices to increasing your company’s sales. After all, influencers are the people who have an audience that trusts them. These people are also authority and role models for their followers. In other words, what they have to say can mean a lot to their audience.

How Can Influencer Marketing Help Your Brand?

These days, businesses of all sizes work with influencers for marketing purposes, from Pepsi to Nike and Adidas to the small business in your neighborhood that is just getting started. Many of these businesses view influencer marketing as a tool for increasing their brand awareness, and rightly so. Factually speaking, 86% of marketers invest in influencer marketing specifically for boosting brand awareness. 69% of marketers invest in it to improve brand advocacy.

Nowadays, many businesses also reach out to influencers to keep up with public relations trends. Considering how much of the influencer marketing is based on storytelling and other PR trends, they can be very helpful in that aspect as well. Finally, for increasing brand awareness, what is more important, than having consistent, interesting, and engaging content creation? That is exactly what influencers are good at doing.

1. Promote your brand among new audiences

If you are doubting whether you should work with influencers or not, first of all, you should go over your priorities and look into your strategic roadmap. In all cases, scaling is always a big thing for businesses of any size. To scale, businesses need to reach new audiences that match their target market. If you want to scale through promotions that are trustworthy and effective then influencer marketing is the way to go.

Just think about it... Are you more likely to trust and buy from a brand that a person you admire recommends to you or a brand you saw in a random ad? Plus, you should aim to work with an influencer with an ongoing partnership. If you manage to come to terms with them so that they promote you and your brand with multiple posts, then that’s a big win. What’s even better than being recommended by a trusted person, is being continuously recommended by a trusted person!

2. Start a conversation about your brand

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2021 - Branded converse shoes

A recent survey shows 59% of influencers have successfully met the brand reach that the companies set in front of them. The methods for the reach that the influencers use may vary vastly. An online podcast that casually mentions your brand for the listeners you want as customers, from unboxing therapy to a simple Instagram story featuring your brand. All of these can spark interest among a large number of people who have a high potential for becoming your buyers. But it is very important to remember that sparking interest and starting a conversation is not always enough for transforming your target audience into buyers. It is very important to show that you are credible too.

3. Build brand credibility

Customer video testimonials have proven to be one of the most effective types of content with an 89% effectiveness rating. When this is done by an influencer who has a large audience the effectiveness is even higher. This is a great way of building and increasing brand credibility. When an influencer shares their authentic story with your brand in a testimonial, people who have similar needs and interests are much more likely to trust and buy from your brand. Part of the credibility comes from the fact that the best influencers usually do not promote products that are not good enough. This is the case even if businesses offer them big budgets. This makes the testimonials that they do even more reliable and credible for followers.

4. Improve your social following

Considering that businesses do not have an infinite budget for marketing expenses it is important for you to correctly use influencer marketing to also improve your social following. The thing is, nowadays, nearly on all social media platforms, the algorithms value consistent content. Simply put, you need to work with influencers in a way that they do not only share information about your product but also refer to your social accounts and encourage their followers to follow your business page. Another important thing to remember when choosing a similar strategy is to keep up with the customer engagement in order not to quickly lose the increased following. If the influencer you're working with has a website or a personal blog, you can leverage that as well. Meanwhile, consider various bot types to connect and communicate with potential customers and lead them to your social media pages.

5. Add a personal touch to your brand

An essential factor for staying in follower’s minds is adding a personal touch to your brand. It is very important to keep social media approaches different across platforms. For example, if you are planning on using LinkedIn for sales, your content ought to vary from your Instagram posts with the tone, mood, and even language style. With that being said, you should also avoid being unrecognizable across platforms. You should always be consistent with your brand book, and what your company stands for.

6. Improve engagement

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2021 - Engagement on social media

After improving your social following, another useful tactic you should consider is adding a personal touch to your brand. Make sure to frequently organize question & answer sessions for your followers. This will help people better understand your brand and smooth out all the misperceptions they might have had about it. Plus, it is a fun and interactive content session for most followers. And you’ll also get a chance to receive constructive feedback and get a glimpse of how they see your brand.

To keep your engagement growing you should also be on top of the trends across social media platforms. Be it a TikTok or Instagram trend or a challenge on LinkedIn and Twitter, make sure to be involved and interactive as long as it is relevant to your brand.

7. Boost sales

If you are successful in all of the above-mentioned steps and stages then you are very likely to see increased sales. Brands that have previously worked with influencers have tracked at least 44% direct sales and 32% indirect sales driven by influencers. Make sure that the boost in your sales is consistent and is not always dependent on paid partnerships with influencers. You should highly consider building a strong social following yourself to eventually take over the wheel. But things should not be limited to social media. You also have to constantly improve your product. And, of course, make sure to follow your competitors to keep up with them as well.

As part of boosting sales, you will also need a great email marketing approach. Sending out proper SaaS marketing email templates with engaging visuals will add to your influencer marketing results.

Influencer Marketing vs. Affiliate Marketing vs. Brand Ambassadors

To drive the right marketing strategy, it is key to understand the main differences between at least some of the most popular ones. For that reason, we will try to show you the differences between influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and brand ambassadors. Generally speaking, all three have similar end goals-increasing the reach and eventually sales for brands and businesses. However, these three vary in their implementations and processes. For instance, in the scopes of affiliate programs, marketers of brands work with a group of people who market your products or services. In exchange for that, they receive a commission from your sales. If you choose to work with his strategy then you do not have to pay any up-front fees as the payment logic is fully based on conversion rates.

Influencer marketing and brand ambassadors are often mistakenly used interchangeably. Both are very important to consider if you plan to continuously generate leads. However, these two things are not the same. To put it simply, brand ambassadors’ main channel for promotions is word-of-mouth. Oftentimes, it is current customers who love your product so much that they start advocating for it. In contrast to that, influencer marketing is mostly based on the ‘show it by example’ approach as they show their followers how they use the product they are promoting.

By now, you should have a pretty clear idea about influencer marketing. Now, let’s dive in a bit deeper to better understand affiliate marketing and brand ambassadors.

Affiliate marketing

As already mentioned, affiliate marketing does not require prepayments as it is mostly commission-based. This is a big advantage as you pay only for results. If you have an eCommerce platform you should highly consider affiliate marketing for your business. It has proven to be an effective approach for similar business models . One of the best examples of such success stories is Amazon. Being the giant eCommerce platform that it is, even Amazon generates 40% of its revenue through affiliate marketing.

However, affiliate marketing may have some drawbacks too. For instance, the quality of the leads you get is not necessarily guaranteed and this can create some problems for your brand. For example, if the reach is not limited to your target market and the sales come from people who are not fitting your buyer personas you might end up with unhappy customers. These people may leave negative reviews as they had different expectations while purchasing your product. Because 92% of the buyers read reviews before buying a product, negative reviews may have a high toll on your sales.

Therefore, remember to always thoroughly research the businesses and people you want to work with on affiliate marketing. Make sure you understand their business model and that their target market matches yours. This is the only way you can benefit from this great marketing model.

Brand ambassadors

Brand ambassadors are arguably one of the most effective channels for helping your brand to grow. These people put a face on your brand and make the bond between your business and potential buyers stronger. Usually, the people who become your buyers with the guidance of brand ambassadors end up being more loyal customers.

You may wonder how do I find brand ambassadors or where do brand ambassadors come from? The secret is that oftentimes if your product is a great solution to a problem people struggle with, you do not even have to spend money on hiring brand ambassadors. Impress your customers with your product or service and they will become a brand ambassador for you, for free. Some of these people may have a wide circle of people who would fit your buyer persona some others would have fewer people who would. But the key is that the people who do come usually stick with you. This is a big win for any business’s customer retention strategy.

You might think this sounds too good to be true. Well, the answer to that is yes and no. Yes, brand ambassadors are a wonderful way of taking your product out there, making it more competitive as well as helping you convert leads into loyal customers. They have a large following on social platforms, or, if these ambassadors have their website, they also probably have an email list of loyal readers and can use different email marketing services to promote your brand.

However, you should be very careful with making associations of your brand too strong with a brand ambassador. Otherwise, if the brand ambassador gets into a scandal your brand is going to suffer big time due to the associations people have with your brand and the given person.

Getting Started with Influencer Marketing

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2021 - Writing down notes and goals

Now that you have an understanding of both influencer marketing and its alternatives, let’s see how you should get started if you choose to go with influencer marketing. To get the most out of influencer marketing, you should highly consider using a framework like Scrum. This will help you to always stay on top of the goals and objectives you want to achieve through influencer marketing and never deviate from them while breaking those down into smaller actions and tasks. People always associate the scrum framework with agile product development, but it can be applied to different businesses and teams, including for marketing purposes.

Now, let’s break down the steps that you should take or at least consider doing to achieve as much value through influencer marketing as possible.

Understand your goals

Why do you want to work with influencers? What do you expect to get out of it? These among many others are some very essential questions you should ask yourself before initiating anything.

Define your goals on a very granular level. This will be a huge step towards understanding if influencer marketing is the way to go for your case or if you should look into alternative options. You should not only try to align and justify it per your marketing goals but company goals too. You should do that to avoid contradicting company objectives through marketing decisions. Finally, if your goal is to improve your social following and social media presence, are you ready to keep up with the rising number of potential customers? Is your business ready to have instant communication with customers at any point? To reach your goals in the long run, these things are big things to consider as well.

Define your niche and target audience

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2021 - Target audience

Once you understand your goals, the next step should be defining your niche and target audience. Who is the perfect buyer for you? Define them with every possible detail. What is their age, gender, education level, income, interest, and so on? If you are selling tech products , the ideal buyer is probably an early adopter who is enthusiastic about devices, college education, and above-average income.

Just create an imaginary person who would have all the qualities that you think your buyers should have. Do they prefer email promotions over social media ads? Can you reach out to them through a mass texting strategy? Then, once you come up with your buyer persona, it will be much easier to find people like that. If you do not do this, your marketing plan is very likely to fail because it will not be targeted whatsoever. As a result, you will spend lots of money on reaching lots of people but the majority will not fit or be interested in your business.

Find the best influencer type for your brand

Defining your niche and target audience is also a huge step towards finding the best influencer type for your brand. That is to say, if you are selling electric skateboards you most probably should not work with an influencer who is mostly making content about cooking. Is there a probability that people who like cooking also like electric skateboards? Sure, there is, but it is very low. People who follow influencers that are cooks do not necessarily expect to learn about sports gear or devices from them. They are more likely to be interested in buying devices for kitchen or food products. Once you define these things, finding the best influencer will be a piece of cake for you!

SARAL gives you the ability to find any influencer on the planet, in just a few clicks, you can find and save 100s of best-fit influencers. It comes with a free Chrome companion that allows you to see influencer’s stats, predict a fair fee to pay, and save them directly to your list without any copy-pasting.

Types of Influencers

Influencer marketing has become such a big and fast-growing industry that there are seven types of influencers. You should be aware of these to make your marketing campaigns more effective and budget-friendly. There are five main types of influencers that you should know about.

Mega influencers - These are people who have more than one million followers on social media platforms. Usually, these people are celebrities who have gained fame for their talent or work outside social media. For example, singers, actors, athletes and other well-known people. Considering that these people usually have large audiences and being an influencer is not their primary job so to speak, these people can charge a lot of money for promoting a product or service. Similar folks are usually too expensive for small businesses to afford and are mostly working with large corporations and well-known brands.

Macro-influencers - These are the people who are well-known influencers with more than one million followers. You may wonder what is the difference between mega and macro-influencers. The big difference is that macro-influencers are usually people who are not recognized for their work outside social media platforms. These types of influencers have come about very recently but keep getting larger and larger audiences. Such influencers might be easier to reach for partnerships than mega influencers. But considering the size of their audience, they too may want some big bucks for partnerships.

Mid-tier influencers - people who have 50,000 to 500,000 followers. These may be the perfect people if you want to reach a large audience but do not have enough budget to afford to work with macro or mega influencers. Before working with similar influencers, you should spend more time analyzing their follower base and make sure it matches your target audience. In other words, if mega and macro-influencers have an audience so big that even a small percentage of their followers can drive a big revenue for you it is not always the case with mid-tier influencers.

Micro-influencers - These are influencers who have a larger following than a regular person on social media would. These influencers are usually open to promote products in exchange for money. However, you can also find many micro-influencers who promote a business for free, simply because they like it. More like a brand ambassador.

Nano-influencers - These are people who are not famous on social media or outside but are active users of such platforms. Usually, these people have anywhere from 1000 to 10,000 people following them. Normally, these people post frequently on social media platforms but usually post about their personal lives, friends, family, life moments, and so on. This type of influencer can be a great resource for you if you are a small business and are looking for a small promotion. If you think that a nano-influencer is your buyer persona and their audience fits your target market you should also consider sending them free samples of your product to try and promote.

Steps to Find the Right Influencer

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2021 - Interview with a potential influencer

The more time you spend on social media, the more and more influencers you will see. With the rising popularity of social media platforms, the number of influencers is increasing too. Travelers, comedians, dancers, doctors, cooks, sportspeople, contractors... You name it! Arguably, no matter what kind of a business you have you are going to find someone who will be great at promoting it one way or another. You are going to find many and for that reason, there are several factors you should consider to shortlist them smartly.

1. Understand who are the people you want to reach out to
The importance of doing a big research on the followers of the influencer you want to work with cannot be stressed enough. If you implement everything perfectly but fail to find the influencer with the right audience, there is a 99% chance that the campaign will not be successful. First of all, decide who are the people you want to reach out to. Are they people who are interested in fashion or outdoor activities? Are they teenagers or adults? The longer the list of filtrating questions, the better is your targeting.

Then once you have the answers, find the influencers whose audience and content go with those criteria. Keep in mind that many influencers have their businesses and promote their products along with others. Many influencers have already built online marketplace where they might promote your service or product. Understanding what the target market is for the given influencer may be a big help for matching it with yours.

2. Look for the right influencer

Understanding who the people are you want to reach out to is a big step towards finding the right influencer. Then for the shortcuts, you should look for influencers who have worked with brands like yours or even those who have previously worked with your competitors. Such influencers are more likely to have the right audience and trust among their followers.

In reality, the influencers who promoted businesses from your industry are more likely to successfully promote you as well. If you do not know any similar influencers you can find such people by browsing through hashtags on social media. The hashtags you should look for need to have keywords that are typical for your industry. Under such hashtags, you will find influencers who frequently post content about your competitors or industry. For example, if you are a business selling gear for campers, look for keywords such as camping, outdoors, hiking, and so on. Through this method, you can even find Facebook influencers along with all other social media platforms.

The right influencers are also very involved with industry trends. Find influencers who follow those and get involved with them actively. Usually, such posts have very high engagement, which will also have the potential of converting into customers later on. Social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram have shown how trends can make influencers and businesses go viral. Isn’t that what you are looking for?

If you still struggle with finding influencers who can promote your business, you should consider influencer marketing platforms. These are normally software solutions that aim to assist brands and businesses with their influencer marketing campaigns. Similar platforms give businesses information and tools to discover influencers that will fit their brands. Some of these tools also offer huge searchable databases. This way you can find influencers that match you through some smart algorithms.

If you already have a specific marketing campaign that you are determined to run, that too can be an indicator for finding the right influencers to work with. You need to decide if you want to give discount codes or do a guest post, sponsored content or just give your product, as a gift, to an influencer in exchange for mentions and posts.

3. Evaluate the influencers

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2021 - Two people evaluating an influencer

There are too many influencers out there for you to easily decide which one you need to work with. Plus, to make a better decision you should come with a solid evaluation criterion to at least shortlist out of many. Here are some tips and recommendations you should consider and involve in your evaluation system.

First of all, you need to understand the authority of the influencer you want to deal with. Often, the numbers speak for everything else. You should check their social media following number. You also need to find out how high their engagement rates are. Unfortunately, nowadays, many people buy fake followers. However, this can be detected if you look at the number of likes and comments under their posts. If you have a chance, make sure to find out how many people view their content, how often people send them direct messages and save the posted content.

Check how deep of a niche coverage they have, which should also give you an idea about how much their audience cares about the given niche and how good is the influencer at covering it. Most influencers come with a good understanding of social media platforms. They know when is the best time to post on Instagram or other platforms and what is the right type of content for the best outreach.

Another very significant factor you have to consider is the personality of the influencer. Unfortunately, this is a very subjective criterion because no measurement shows if the influencer’s personality fits your brand or not. In any case, you should think well if you are okay with your brand being associated with an influencer with a specific type of personality. This is important because if you are a small business, many people will hear about your brand for the first time. This way the first impression they get from you is about the person who introduced you to them, aka the given influencer.

If the influencers you are interested in have their website, you should also use a website ranking checker to find out their website rankings and traffic. See what kind of content they post and how good the quality of the posts are. If you go through this evaluation process and end up with several, equally good influencers, then the budget can be another evaluation criteria you can use to make your final decision.

Make sure to track the results you get from collaborations, to understand whether working with the same influencer is worth it. Such data will also help you make better choices when it comes to finding good influencers later on.

Consider your budget

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2021 - A woman calculating her budget

Influencer marketing, like any other form of marketing, requires a budget. From signing up to influencer platforms to paying the influencers, you’ll need to allocate some resources to carry out the influencer marketing campaign.

To start the budgeting process, there are several questions that you need to ask.

Do you have a budget that is enough for you to work with mega influencers?
If you do have that much of a budget, do you want to spend all of it?
Or do you prefer to work with macro or micro-influencers who will charge much less?

Answering these questions will give you a clear insight into what actions you should take during your campaign, and what results you should expect. You’d like to maximize the outcome of your campaign. However, if you don’t have enough budget for mega influencers, it’s better to figure this out early on and look for more suitable options. This way, instead of spending all your budget on a single story on a mega influencer’s Instagram profile, you can work with a micro-influencer and get posts about your business several times.

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. It all depends on your business, your goals, and your ambitions. Remember that your marketing money is most likely limited and your need to use it smartly. You ought to make objective decisions. Keep track of your ongoing marketing expenses to always know where you are standing with your expenses to avoid situations when you go over the board with your marketing budget, or, let’s say, spend the outdoor advertising ad budget on influencer marketing.

When making budgeting decisions, you also need to consider the payment options. With the rise of digital technologies, more and more digital payment and money transfer options have become available. While this abundance of choice may seem nice, it’s also increased the possibility of data breach or fraud, and it’s become increasingly harder to make sure payments take place safely. This is especially the case for recurring payments when your credit card details are stored on another platform for a long time.

Many businesses have been switching to cryptocurrencies recently mainly to solve these safety issues, as well as for faster transactions. Litecoin currency has been one of the more popular choices, alongside Ethereum. If you decide to incorporate cryptocurrencies as your payment methods, consider using a crypto wallet to always be on track with the cost of your crypto assets.

When working with influencers, remember that payments may not always be in the form of cash. For example, some influencers, especially those building their portfolios, often cooperate as an exchange for your products, be it shoes or product subscription. Another popular way of brand-influencer collaboration is when brands send the influencer some amount of money with the condition that the influencers themselves will use it to buy brand products they like. So, you can add a fixed number of products for a giveaway or the allocated money to your influencer marketing budget.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a great marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes, industries, and niche markets. It is great as long as you implement it correctly and do your homework of good research and analysis. First on your own goals and objectives, then on finding influencers who match those. Always remember to keep track of your partnerships to be able to improve your next collaborations more effectively and efficiently. Do not forget to follow the trends and enjoy the ride!

Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing for 2023

Table of contents

What is Influencer Marketing?

How Can Influencer Marketing Help Your Brand?