By Lital Castel, Community Leader
Everything you need to know about Influencer Marketing in 2021.
As consumers, we are often driven by a product’s reviews to know if it’s worth making a purchase. But what if you could see a product being used or modeled by a real person instead of trusting brands’ advertisements and listings online?
Well, this is where influencer marketing comes in.
We’ve all scrolled through our Instagram feed and swiped through the stories section to see our favorite influencers using the ever-so-popular #AD in their content. They’ll usually be wearing their ‘favorite dress’ or talking about drinking their ‘favorite detox tea’ that helped them lose over 20 pounds in one week.
If you’re a brand owner, bookmark this one to your favorites. This article will cover the basics of Influencer Marketing and go through the industry’s biggest trends you should be using to grow your brand in 2021.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Let’s start by breaking down the basics of Influencer Marketing.
Influencer Marketing is a form of online marketing, aimed to collaborate with influencers to reach their audiences. With the campaign’s success, the brand will benefit by increasing awareness, customer reach, and revenue.
Using nano, micro, and large-scale influencers, brands can show potential and existing customers how their product works in various ways, and why they should buy it.
Unlike celebrities, influencers have a direct connection to their audience by engaging with them online and offline. This unique connection encourages their audience to trust in their reviews of products, which is a key element for making Influencer Marketing successful.
In 2021, Influencer Marketing has become an integral element of many brands’ marketing strategies. Most brand owners are well aware that Influencer Marketing is one of the best ways to promote their business.
Many case studies have shown that leveraging this type of marketing significantly increased customer engagement for different types of brands and services.
Influencer Marketing in 2021 – Breaking Down the Top Trends to Look Out For
Since Influencer marketing has become very popular in recent years, many brands and influencers are utilizing it in their marketing strategies. As a result, both brands and influencers must get more creative and keep up with the current trends of influencer marketing to get ahead of their competition.
An integral part of understanding Influencer Marketing is to follow and understand the biggest trends of the industry.
Let’s go over some of the trends you should be watching out for in 2021:
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Understanding your Specialized Niche
Regardless of if you’re using Influencer Marketing in your marketing strategy, you should figure out what niche your brand falls into. For example, let’s say you own a vegan skincare brand. Your niche is specializing in high-quality vegan ingredients and sustainable packaging. Then, a good approach to Influencer Marketing for your brand would be approaching a beauty influencer who advocates for Veganism and environmentalism.
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Numbers are not Everything
In 2021, there is a rise in the use of nano and micro-influencers. Nano-influencers are regular social media users, with a following of 100-10,000. Their content usually consists of non-sponsored posts about their everyday life. Micro-influencers are people with a social media following that’s larger than a normal person’s but smaller than a celebrity’s.
Brands are utilizing these types of influencers more than ever because they provide the brand with unique qualities that large influencers often do not have. They excel by having a high engagement rate with a small to medium audience size, which brands can leverage to promote their product or service.
The Authenticity Factor
Nano and micro-influencers have what is known as the authenticity factor. They acquire their audience’s trust by building a relationship through meaningful engagements.
These days consumers are smarter than ever, and they are tired of seeing the same products and services promoted by celebrities who haven’t even tried them. They want to see real, down-to-earth people using a product and endorsing it, before they add it to their cart.
Who’s review of our vegan skincare brand would you trust more as a consumer? One posted by Ariana Grande, a famous vegan celebrity? Or one posted by a micro-influencer, who regularly posts about incorporating Veganism into their everyday life?
The answer is obvious, and it is exactly why nano and micro-influencing have become so popular over the past few years.
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Realistic Content
Advertisements and sponsored content are becoming incredibly creative nowadays. As a brand owner, you must stay on top of the current trends of your industry. As a general rule, realistic content always succeeds better than traditional advertisements.
So, instead of advertising a simple review of your vegan skincare line, try asking influencers to use your products in an Instagram Reel showing their morning routine.
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Spreading Content Throughout Different Platforms
Different influencers have a different following across their social media assets. When choosing influencers to work with for promoting your brand, you first need to be aware of which type of platforms best suit your brand’s niche. Do your research and analyze how sponsored posts including products similar to yours perform on different social platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.
After choosing which platforms you will focus on, seek out influencers who have high engagement rates on those platforms, and ask them to promote your brand in creative ways.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, getting creative with sponsored content is one of the best ways to put your business out there. In 2021, that’s simply not enough. To get ahead of the competition, you must spread content throughout different platforms to increase its reach to potential customers.
Putting it All Together – Creating a Flawless Influencer Marketing Strategy for Your Business
So, you’ve found your brand niche and understood the importance of working with nano and micro-influencers that specialize in that niche. You’re also looking for influencers that have the authenticity factor by posting realistic content that will promote your brand in the most creative way possible.
But how do you incorporate these trends when compiling an influencer marketing strategy?
Taking our vegan and sustainable skincare brand as an example, here is a simple marketing strategy that incorporates what we’ve learned so far:
Step 1: Define marketing campaign objectives and audience
Some campaign objectives for our brand could be generating leads that will turn into customers as well as increasing brand awareness amongst the vegan skincare community. The audience we could aim for should include women between the ages of 18-35 that live in the United States, assuming that shipping allows it.
Step 2: Choosing the influencers type and setting a budget
Every marketing campaign should have a budget, and an influencer marketing campaign is no different. We’ll leave that part for you to decide based on your brand’s budget and goals.
The next thing is deciding which types of influencers the brand should target and work with. For our example, we would look for nano and micro vegan beauty influencers who care about protecting our environment. Luckily, our brand’s eco-friendly packaging is a great selling point for both influencers and potential customers.
Step 3: Contacting selected influencers and optimizing campaign guidelines
We’ve found the right influencer type, and we’ve researched to locate the best influencers across different social media platforms that would fit our brand’s vision.
Now is the time to contact these influencers and provide them with clear campaign guidelines before posting the sponsored content. When composing these, consider the messaging behind the product or service you are trying to sell. For our vegan skincare brand, we are advocating for Veganism while promoting environmentalism using eco-friendly packaging. This is a key message that should come across in the influencer’s sponsored content.
Step 4: Measuring Success and the importance of communication
Measuring the success of an influencer marketing campaign should be continuously throughout the campaign. If the campaign’s message has not come across in the way that we intended it to, we will most likely need to change the way it is presented. It is also important to keep in touch with the influencers we’re working with throughout the campaign’s runtime to make sure both sides are on the same page.
The last step of our campaign would be to measure its success. There are plenty of ways to examine whether an influencer marketing campaign is providing good results. Choose one that works best for your goals and KPIs and stick to it.
We hope you use this guide to develop your next Influencer Marketing campaign strategy. If you’ve used any of our tips, make sure to share this article on social media by clicking the social icons below this post. Good luck!