The meteoric rise of influencers illustrates the growing interest of brands in influencer marketing to increase their visibility. Influencer marketing encompasses all tactics that harness the power of recommendation. In this article, we’ll explore the basics of influencer marketing, its benefits and how to effectively integrate it into your communications strategy.
Defining influencer marketing
Influencer marketing involves promoting your brand to a network of influencers and influencers. In its early days, influencer marketing focused on active community members and bloggers, long before social networks became dominant in digital communications. Today, digital marketing and 360° communication rely on this dynamic of influence and virality.
To begin with, it’s essential to understand how influencers are categorized. The two main indicators are their number of subscribers and the engagement rate of their followers on social networks:
Nano-influencers: niche experts with an audience of fewer than 10,000 subscribers and a relatively low rate of engagement.
Micro-influencers: close to their audience, they have between 10,000 and 100,000 subscribers. Their audience is highly targeted and their engagement rate is high.
Macro-influencers: they have several audiences totalling between 100,000 and 500,000 subscribers. They can give your brand great visibility.
Mega-influencers: these are generally celebrities, artists and sportspeople with over 500,000 subscribers. Their influence is considerable.
It goes without saying that the budget associated with each influencer varies according to the size of their community and the objective being pursued, increasing substantially with the size of the influencer’s community.
When we talk about influencers, we often think of people from outside the company, neutral and unbiased. However, every company has its own internal influencers: its employees. Your team members play an essential role in your influencer marketing strategy. Every employee can be active on social networks and act as an ambassador for your brand.
A channel that is often neglected, but which has a real power of attraction, is the e-mail sent by your employees. E-mail is a company’s number-one communication channel. On average, 35 e-mails are sent per employee per day. For a company of 100 people, a campaign using employee e-mails is 99% delivered and seen an average of 3,500 times a day!
The e-mail signature is gaining in popularity in the field of influencer marketing, as it has less of an advertising connotation. It is conveyed by a trusted ambassador, an employee of your company. What’s more, it’s a cost-effective way of promoting your brand.
Harmony between your brand’s audience and your influencers
Authenticity is the key to a successful influencer marketing campaign. Today’s consumers are increasingly enlightened, and there’s a real crisis of confidence in brands that offer overly commercial content. The more coherent, spontaneous and natural the collaboration between your brand and the influencer, the more effective the campaign will be.
It’s crucial to define an editorial line and narrative that correspond to your audience. In short, you need to precisely define your brand’s positioning, the way you want to talk about your brand and remain consistent throughout your publications. The same goes for choosing the influencers who will talk about your brand. Your brand’s visual identity and editorial line constitute the body and spirit of your brand.
Once you’ve identified the influencers most relevant to your brand, good preparation of your approach to the influencer is essential to persuade them to collaborate with your brand. It’s also important to know the influencer well, and to determine the arguments that will lead to a collaboration.
The best way to co-create campaigns is to formalize them in a collaboration contract. Beforehand, you will have defined with the influencer the formats to be used, the publication platforms, the duration of the campaigns, the number of publications planned and the frequency of publication.
In addition, it will be necessary to define: What messages need to be conveyed? Which products should be promoted? Which hashtags to use? What performance indicators should be tracked to analyze campaign effectiveness?
Conclusion
When used properly, influencer marketing can be a powerful tool for boosting your brand’s visibility and building trust with your audience. By integrating your company’s employees as brand ambassadors and working with influencers who match your target audience, you can create authentic, engaging campaigns that resonate with your audience and increase your brand awareness.
The important thing is to remain true to your brand identity while being open to collaboration and innovation. With careful planning and a well-defined strategy, influencer marketing can give your communications strategy a significant boost.
