When to activate your influence marketing strategy?

You thought Kim Kardashian's Instagram account could be a good springboard for your new skincare line but are disheartened by the $858,000 she asked for just one post? 

You think that influence marketing is just an expensive strategy to appeal to social media addicts? You don’t want to take the plunge because you don’t get how it could benefit your brand? 

If you think so, let us prove you wrong. Influence marketing is no small matter. Today, we will learn how influence marketing could benefit your global social media strategy, how to tailor it to your funnel objectives, and when to activate this efficient strategy. 

You may already know why influence marketing is that important, but do you really know when to set it up? If you’re ready to take the plunge, keep reading!

The impact of influence marketing on your social media campaigns

Why is influence marketing on the rise?

Influence marketing-related companies grew by 26% last year. See how fast influence marketing shot up these last years.

Source

Influence marketing isn’t a niche market anymore! It generated more than $ 13.8B in 2021 (and is likely to keep growing). But why is this marketing strategy in vogue? 

Well, because: 

• Social media active users are more numerous every day. In 2021, they were 4.2 billion.
• According to MuseFind, 92% of consumers would trust an influence more than a paid advertisement.

Interesting isn’t it? Let’s see what it means for your business. 

The 3 main benefits of influence marketing to skyrocket your business 

Yes, we said “your business” and not only “your social media”. The indisputable benefits of influence marketing don’t only apply to your social media metrics.

1. Increase your brand awareness 

Brand awareness is critical to establish authority on social media or generate sales. Well, in 2022, micro-influencers played a significant role in increasing brand awareness. 79% of their audience searched for more information, and ⅓ of them talked about the brand to someone else.

2. Build trust and authenticity

By partnering with influencers, we can build strong relationships with them and their communities. You will benefit from their influence on customers and thus be able to make a name for your brand. Their community trusts them more than they trust you. With this partnership, you should gain their trust and engage with them directly.

Make sure that the influencer you partner with really embodies your brand values, for it to be the ambassador of your brand. Your audience should be able to trust them.

3. Generate sales

According to the Digital Marketing Institute, 49% of the customers rely on influencer recommendations when buying a product/service. They don’t want to read endless product reviews anymore. 

As we said, influence marketing isn’t only about reaching more people, it’s also about recruiting the right followers and targeting a precise audience that can convert into consumers.

At Better&Stronger, we think that social media is of little value if it’s not correlated with influence. That’s why we developed an influence marketing offer that takes center stage in our Storytelling Hub. 

Take a look at our experts' interview on the topic to find out how we implement influence marketing with our clients.

An influence strategy tailored to your funnel objectives

Many people get why influence marketing is important but don’t know how it would occur in their marketing strategy. Let’s take a close look at your conversion funnel.

Top-of-the-funnel

When your audience is at the awareness stage, you need to be seen. 

Your main objective isn’t to make sales but to make sure they know your brand. 

To build awareness and make a name for your brand, thanks to influence marketing, you should start partnering with very active and specialized influencers with a broad audience. 
They already have an established audience, and your potential customers are likely to consult their content. 

At this stage, you should monitor the following metrics: 

• Impressions 
• Likes and comments 
• Website traffic 
• Follower growth

Many people think that influence marketing stops there. That you can’t leverage this solution for something other than visibility, but that’s a mistake.

Middle-of-the-funnel

At this stage, your audience already knows your brand; but also knows many others. Consumers have documented the solutions offered on the market and are considering making a choice.

Influencers will help you create engagement. At this time, you should think about diversifying the influencers you partner with to make sure that you reach most of your audience. 

Prefer nano or micro-influencers with a more active audience, than macro-influencer - whose audience may be less engaged.

Check: 

• Follower growth 
• Direct messaging
• Traffic on your website and landing pages 
• Conversion rate: downloads, subscriptions…

Bottom-of-the-funnel

It’s the last stage of your prospects’ decision-making process. Now, you will need to convince them that your solution is the best one. 

71% of the customers are more likely to purchase a product if social media refers to it. Don’t miss this opportunity to generate sales! You will prefer micro or nano-influencers, as their public is much more engaged. 

Micro-influencers are very active on live streams, and often get a really high level of engagement. You should call on them for live shopping for instance. 

At this time, you should think about offering influencers unboxings, reviews, user guides to show your audience how the product works. They want evidence that your product is the one they need. 

It’s important to think about influence marketing in two ways: 

• the influencer can promote your products/services on his/her platforms 
• you can showcase the influencer review, unboxing, … on your platforms

To find out more about this topic, read the 5 reasons to use influence marketings to increase your conversions. 

At the Bottom-of-the-funnel, monitor the following metrics: 

• Cost per acquisition 
• ROI 
• Volume of sales 
• Growth of subscribers and sales 
• …

The flywheel, a new vision of your influence marketing impact

How does it work?

The flywheel is an alternative vision of your conversion funnel. At Better&Stronger, we prefer to see influence marketing as a circular flywheel because on social media, we like to offer content that attracts (mass media posts), engages (educational content), and delights customers (live shopping, shopping experience…) simultaneously.

Your audience is exposed to these three aspects at the same time. Thus, you’re more likely to convince more customers since you offer content that answers all their needs. 

The good influencer
at the right moment

If more and more brands are turning to influence marketing to reach their objectives, it’s because this strategy is very promising. 

Not only limited to visibility objectives, but it can also help you increase your engagement rate and amount of conversions and therefore, your sales.
Today, we’ve seen when to activate your influence marketing strategy, and how to implement it at each stage of your conversion funnel (or flywheel). If you want to know more about finding the perfect influencer, we suggest you read our Influence Marketing Ebook.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information!