If you’re not already working with influencers, then this is the year to begin! The influencer marketing industry is expected to be worth $15 million by 2024, a substantial rise from $8 billion in 2019, with Instagram being the primary social media platform for influencers. There are many reasons why influencers can help your brand, through increased brand awareness and sales, but let’s take a look at why they might just be more effective than celebrities.
Celebrity influence on the decline
In previous years, the marketing sector saw a huge importance placed upon celebrity endorsement, through many channels like television and social media. Now, celebrity endorsement is still pretty popular, but is more commonly used by big brands with a large marketing budget. Whereas, influencer marketing seems to be used by all sorts of companies, from small to big.
The thing is, marketers believed that consumers wanted to see products promoted by their favourite celebrities, because these are the people that they idolize and look up to. But, over the years, we have seen that consumers actually prefer to see promotional content and receive recommendations from people that they trust. This could be friends, family, or social media influencers, however – celebrity endorsement can nowadays be deemed ingenuine.
Working with celebrities means that you’ll be expecting to spend the big bucks on campaigns. And yes, these campaigns can achieve great results but, influencer marketing has become so popular due to the success achieved on a far lesser investment.
The benefits of working with influencers
When we talk about influencers, this can be fairly broad. There are five different tiers of social media influencers, categorised based on follower count. Selecting which type of influencer you would like to work with is totally dependent on your goals. So, the first step is to sit down and define your campaign objectives, and what you would like to achieve from working with influencers. Additionally, you’ll want to establish your budget, as each influencer tier will fit in with different budget limits.
There are many benefits of working with influencers, with each being more prominent with different tiers. So, here is a quick overview by tier:
- Nano influencers: have 1k-5k followers, usually accept non-monetary incentives, boast high engagement rates, and connect with niche communities.
- Micro influencers: have 5k-50k followers, often accept non-monetary incentives or typically a low fee, high engagement rates, and can also connect with niche communities.
- Medium influencers: have 50k-100k followers, usually expect monetary incentive – although fairly low, average engagement rates, a bigger reach.
- Macro influencers: have 100k-1m followers, expect monetary incentive and tend to charge manager fees too, lower engagement rates, bigger reach and can access a wider variety of audiences.
- Mega influencers: are typically celebrities, are high cost, have low engagement, and the biggest reach.
So, the biggest benefit of working with influencers instead of celebrities is the return on investment. Particularly when working with nano or micro influencers, your incentive can be the product alone, or a fairly low monetary fee, but can result in a highly effective campaign.
Engagement rates are your next big benefit to look at. No matter what type of influencer you choose, their engagement rates are going to be higher than that of a celebrity, as there are a lot less followers to manage. So, high engagement rates mean that there is a lot of interaction between the influencer and their followers, which can equate to trust. When followers are keen to interact with influencer content, they are often highly interested in what is being posted and will see the influencer as authentic. This is why influencer recommendations can seem more trustworthy, encouraging followers to view these opinions as highly as that from family or friends. Influencers tend to promote brands that align with their own values and will not promote something that they genuinely do not like.
Finding influencers
Whatever type of influencer you choose to work with, you can find influencers easily with an influencer marketing platform like Heepsy. You can, of course, head directly to Instagram to search yourself, but this can be quite time consuming and not provide the detailed analytics that an influencer platform could give. Let’s take a look at how to search for Instagram influencers.
You can see here that there are many filters that can be selected in your influencer search. At the top, you could also choose to search for YouTube influencers from the dropdown box. Alternatively, check out this blog post about finding Twitter influencers with Heepsy, too. Whatever the social media channel, Heepsy enables you to define your search through follower count (so, for each influencer tier), engagement rate, location, age, gender, and so much more!
One of the greatest things about using an influencer marketing platform for your search, is the filters for the audience. Here, you can ensure that you are looking for influencers with followers that match your target audience. You will be able to see the audience demographics, interests, and also the audience authenticity to analyse any suspicious followers.
Conclusion
To sum up, there’s without a doubt many benefits to working with celebrities however, influencer marketing has been found to be just as, if not more effective!
Hopefully you will now be aware of the great advantages of working with each type of influencer, and which could be best suited for your brand. When you’re ready to get started, head over to Heepsy for help with your first campaign!