Influencer marketing is a powerful tool that can be used for getting your project and products in front of more people and establishing connections with a new audience.
However, the hardest part of any influencer marketing campaign is finding the right individuals to become ambassadors for your brand.
The Role of Influencer Marketing in Spreading Your Message
- Leverage the existing trust of influencers
- Get people to actually take notice of your product and spend time learning about your offerings
- Promote the lifestyle appeal of your product through content that features your product being used by your influencer
- Promote your brand across more channels
- Tap into niche demographics with specific interests
- Influencers may be able to support other initiatives like your crowdfunding corporate video production, used to attract new users on multiple channels
What Does a Good Influencer Look Like?
The best influencers are not merely one-time-only channels that you can use to send out promotional content to vast audiences. A good influencer for your project is someone who is willing to form a strategic partnership with you, based on shared values.
An influencer is someone who has the power to affect people’s purchasing decisions, but the reason they can do this is that they have the admiration and respect of their followers.
Simply choosing someone with the most amount of followers within your budget isn’t going to actually help you build a community, especially when this individual’s personal branding doesn’t match up with your own, or if they currently publish large volumes of sponsored content on their platforms from other brands.
Ultimately, you must find people whose influence is related to your product. A few things you can consider when determining someone’s suitability for your brand include:
- Relevance – does their audience match with your target profile?
- Alignment – do their principles and core values align with your brands?
- Reach – does their reach offer you good potential returns?
- Resonance – how engaged is their audience and how likely are they to interact with their messaging?
Types of Influencer by Audience Size
When thinking about influencers, remember that bigger is not necessarily better. Large audiences with low engagement are pretty useless when you think about it. Many of us follow social media celebrities with huge audiences but don’t actually give them much notice when we see their sponsored or promotional posts pop up on our feeds.
There are four main types of influencers to consider:
- Mega influencers – These are people who are often celebrities of some kind, with followings of more than a million people. However, they tend to have lower engagement with their posts. They can also be very expensive to work with.
- Macro influencers – These influencers may have between 100,000 and 1 million followers and have usually built their popularity based on specific activities or themes, such as fitness, travel, food or other common interests.
- Micro-influencers – With between 10,000-100,000 followers, most influencers fall in this category, which is the most popular type for brands seeking partnerships and ambassadorships. One major reason for this is the audience size offers good amplification while engagement is still high. They tend to bring decent returns when carefully chosen for your project or brand.
- Nano influencers – There’s nothing wrong with an influencer with under 10,000 followers if they have strong engagement from their audience and interests that align with your brand values. They are more likely to be free agents and open to collaborations, as well as more selective in their promotion of certain brands. As such, they’ll have strong trust and loyalty from followers and can be the most impactful influencers to work with.
Tips for Finding Influencers
- Search social media platforms for relevant terms and hashtags to find people who are posting interesting content in your field and to communities that you want to target.
- Consider all platforms, including those you may not be that familiar with. Channels like TikTok may be able to offer you a lower entry cost with higher engagement, especially if you’re targeting younger demographics
- Grow your LinkedIn network in your field to discover people who are influential in your sector. You may find people already posting related content.
- Check the kind of influencers that competitors are using for a better idea about the content that performs well.
- Keep in mind that an influencer can also be a blog or news source dedicated to your field, rather than a person.
Need Help?
If you’re looking for ways to reach new audiences we might be able to help. We offer a range of crowdfunding marketing services, including crowdfunding corporate video production.