Influencer Marketing Is The Most Affordable Online Ad

So you’re looking for influencer marketing but don’t have Coca-Cola’s budget to splurge on someone like Selena Gomez and her 140 million followers? I have good news for you.

There’s affordable influencer marketing out there that can return 7x your ad spend. But we’ll cover that later.

If you want to achieve meaningful growth for your business with your next marketing campaign, there are probably two major concerns on your mind: maximizing your campaign’s effectiveness and minimizing its cost.

As the marketing landscape is augmented by the rise of alternative media platforms and changing consumer behavior, building marketing campaigns that promote growth and are easy to measure can be more challenging and murky than ever before.

Social media marketing has developed a reputation among many for being hard to measure. And while making tons of cash with social media marketing is absolutely possible, this reputation isn’t entirely unearned.

Using social media effectively requires many skills. To do it right, you need comprehensive media literacy. Deep insight into consumer behavior and your sales cycle. And knowing which metrics are the most important to focus on.

For many marketing professionals, they simply don’t have all the knowledge required. (That’s why your daughter or the office intern can’t produce real results.) And mismanaged social media marketing efforts can lead to thousands of hours and dollars in wasted effort.

Enter the influencer.

Influencer Marketing

Even mentioned in our best social media marketing books, the concept of influencer marketing is when someone with a social media following works with a brand, and promotes that brand’s message to its followers. By paying the influencer to post the picture or video, the influencer shares the trust and attention they’ve earned to the brand.

Despite some criticism from skeptics, influencer marketing is not only one of the fastest growing kinds of marketing. It’s also one of the most affordable.

In the age of social media, influencer marketing has taken on an entirely new role for marketers as an integral part of any contemporary marketing strategy.

Essentially, inexpensive strategic investment in even relatively small social media personalities can have powerful results, transforming your brand’s relationship with consumers and naturally inserting your product in an existing network of trust.

With a little finesse, influencer marketing can be one of the most affordable and effective ways to grow your brand.

Does Influencer Marketing Work, Why?

If you’ve never integrated influencer marketing into your campaign strategy before, you might be wondering if it works at all.

It’s not as simple as yes or no. As with any marketing solution, there are no guarantees.

But strategic, calculated influencer marketing can generate tons of revenue — in fact, in 2017, influencer marketing provided $7.65 in value on average for every dollar spent.

So what separates effective, high value influencer marketing campaigns from ineffective, low value ones?

There are a number of factors, but the most pivotal is consumer trust.

Influencer marketing leader MARKERLY found that 74% of consumers use social media to make purchasing decisions. It also discovered that 92% trust recommendations from other people, including ones they don’t personally know.

This data, coupled with the fact that consumers are becoming skeptical of traditional marketing methods, means that influencers have the unique ability to communicate your brand’s message in an atmosphere of trust and mutual interest.

Think of it this way. Receiving a personalized, authentic product recommendation from someone who posts content you love on a regular basis will almost always be more persuasive than seeing a more general, wide-sweeping advertisement.

What Makes Influencer Marketing So Affordable?

So if influencer marketing is so effective, how is it one of the most affordable marketing solutions out there?

This time, there is a simple answer. You don’t need to work with the most popular, most expensive influencers online to get outstanding ROI.

In fact, in some cases, opting for more popular and more expensive influencers can actually limit your overall ROI.

“Micro-influencers”, who pursue a smaller, more specialized audience, can actually have even stronger relationships with consumers than more widely known ones. A stronger relationship means more engagement: up to 60% more on average, according to recent data.

It’s often a mistake to blow your budget on one big-name influencer. Instead you can coordinate relationships with multiple microinfluencers and get more sales for a cheaper cost.

There are other significant benefits to working with influencers in this fashion. For example, your team won’t have to add any new members or create any new content in-house for influencers to start to work with your brand.

Once you’ve set the terms of the promotion and potentially provided your influencer with sample product to show off, they’ll create the kind of content their viewers love independently. If your deal is based on commission rather than a one-off payment, you could potentially start an influencer marketing campaign with close to zero initial cost.

Now that’s affordable marketing.

How To Maximize Influencer Marketing ROI

If all of this has you excited to start up an influencer marketing campaign, that’s great! However, not all influencer campaigns are created equal. Keep these best practices in mind to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign.

Make Sure Influencer Marketing Fits Your Product Or Service

Unfortunately, not every kind of company is a perfect fit for affordable influencer marketing. A good rule of thumb to consider is this. If a consumer saw your influencer’s promotion, how much work would it take for them to make a purchase?

The less work conversion takes, the better your business fits influencer marketing.

If you’re a t-shirt brand, for example, consumers persuaded by seeing their favorite influencer wear your product can place their order within minutes via a simple link. If you’re a dentist’s office, persuading someone to leave their current dentist, make an appointment, and pay hundreds for an in-person service is going to be much, much harder.

Have Clear, Measurable Outcomes In Mind

As I mentioned earlier in this article, social media marketing can too often be challenging to effectively track.

If you’re advocating to keep or expand your influencer marketing budget, or just want to keep track of which of your micro-influencers are the most effective at converting users, you’ll need to know how to use data effectively.

Your campaign should have a clear, measurable goal, and a simple method for obtaining regular measurements on your way to that goal.

For example, if I was running an influencer marketing campaign for an ecommerce company, I’d have each influencer offer a unique discount code. This would give us a strong sense of who converted based on that influencer’s platform.

If you can’t track conversions explicitly, try to get as close as you reasonably can. Remember, engagement (people interacting with a post) is far better than impressions (people just seeing your post), for example.

Respect Your Influencers Do And Their Audiences

An easy way to frustrate your influencers and hurt your campaign is to not respect them and their value.

Too often, influencers are seen as simple celebrities or overgrown kids who spend all their time online. But cultivating an engaged network of fans in an overwhelming information ecosystem is challenging labor with real value.

So be cautious of micromanaging how they interact with their followers. If you do, you’re undermining their expertise and the authenticity they can infuse into your campaign.

And if the audience doesn’t trust an influencer, everything falls apart.

Value Authenticity Above All Else

What makes influencers so effective? It’s the trust they’ve developed with their audiences. And people who engage with an influencer’s content can see PPC ads as breaking their trust if it’s poorly executed.

Valuing the authenticity of the relationship between influencers and their audience means not having them sell out. Instead, give them plenty of creative and editorial control so that their promotion comes across as a mutual partnership.

You can have some guidelines, of course, but try to take control only when it’s absolutely necessary.

If you can embrace audience-driven marketing that fits your influencer’s personal style, the results will be drastically better.