What is Influencer Marketing?

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing that sees brands collaborate with influencers to sell products. As influencer marketing has grown in popularity the industry has matured and evolved too.

Now, influencers aren’t just celebrities with millions of followers, they come in all shapes and sizes. Some influencers with a small number of followers, sometimes known as micro-influencers, can have such an influence over a very niche audience that they’re a better fit for certain brands over those with a bigger and more varied follower base.

How influencer marketing works

Influencers have dedicated themselves to building up a trusted audience around a field that they are experts in. Or they have adoring fans as a result of their careers. Influencers can be athletes, TV stars, artists, coaches, businesspeople, models, and anything in between.

Importantly, brands need to recognise that the audience is the influencer’s, not theirs. They pay to get in front of the influencer’s audience, but to get the most out of it and to work with the most successful influencers, brands shouldn’t dictate every aspect of a campaign. The influencer knows their audience best, what yields results, and they will want to protect their audience and provide solid recommendations – not spam their audience just for profit.

What does influencer marketing cost?

Influencer’s are running businesses, and like any business, pricing is dependant on numerous factors. What platform the influencer uses, the campaign, the type of content they put out, the industry, the amount of work on the influencer’s part, the influencer’s following and engagement metrics, and the brand’s budget will all play a part in determining the cost.

Looking at estimated costs very broadly, influencers with over 100,000 followers on Instagram could charge in the region of $10,000 per post. While some celebrities with hundreds of millions of followers have been known to charge in excess of $1million. At the smaller end of the scale, those with 10,000-50,000 followers may charge up to $500 per post.

These are rough figures and as we’ve mentioned will vary based on a range of factors.

Would influencer marketing work for you?

As with implementing all forms of new marketing approaches you would need to develop an influencer marketing strategy and it would need to fit into your existing overarching marketing strategy. Influencer marketing may prove to be very successful for you for certain products but you still need to support it with traditional, direct marketing.

Depending on your business and your niche, a big question to ask it where do your potential customers spend their time? Are they on social media? Or is traditional marketing the best way to target them? Maybe it’s both.

At i-4business we can provide you with all the data you need to reach your audience directly which can complement social media marketing and influencer marketing perfectly.

You can use data to get in front of your target audience immediately. Then you can use social media and other indirect channels to put out content that will appeal to your audience. This allows you to use both inbound and outbound marketing techniques to reach, engage and influence your audience.

Data

If you don’t have a social media strategy, an influencer marketing strategy, a paid ads budget for online marketing, or if you want a more direct approach to market, data will be crucial to your success.

You need to make sure you have access to your defined audience rather than just hoping that your message will find them on social platforms.

That’s where i-4business comes in and our data platform.

We have over 225,000 contacts in our B2B database for technology vendors.

With us, you will have access to a huge breadth of choice and the platform then allows you to be incredibly precise in your campaigns.

What’s more, we’re now offering free accounts for 30 days so you can see the difference high quality, compliant, and effective data can make to your marketing success.

Sign up for a free account

Sign up today for your free account and get access to:

·       300 verticals

·       100+ job roles

·       Enterprise and public sector organisations

·       Data guarantees for accuracy/completeness/recency

Plug the hole in your marketing strategy by getting access to exactly the type of contacts that you want to promote your offering to.

To find out more, call our expert team on 01252 367400 or contact us here.