If an influencer genuinely loves your brand, partnering with them is definitely worth the ROI! We partnered with celebrities who put our products on the radar of many who otherwise wouldn’t have known about us and said people also fell in love with our products. The key is finding influencers who understand and value your mission. If they believe you can better the lives of others, they’ll want to join you in making positive change in the world! Finding the right influencers who believe in your company is crucial if you want to have big impact!
Micro influencers can provide a ton of added value. The credibility and trust influencers have gained from their audiences is a unique strength that only they have. As a result if an influencer is willing to partner with your business, their audience immediately believes your brand could be right for them. Having worked with both micro and macro influencers, I'd place my bets on micro influencers because they fit the criteria that most businesses are looking for. They have a built-in niche audience, they themselves are an archetype or exude one of the brand's personas and from a cost perspective the ROI is far more rewarding. I like working with micro influencers because the are for more flexible. They want to ensure they understand your brand can deliver a message that aligns with you and their audience. It's more of a win-win situation for all parties.
Content Marketer at Fyle HQ
Answered 4 years ago
Things I looked at while choosing an influencer: - How they created content - presentation, video-making and editing skills - Engagement - how many followers do they have? Are they genuine or bots? Do their followers genuinely interact with their posts or do you see a regular group of people that repeat in the comments section. - The kind of brands or services they\'ve promoted in the past: look into if their pages have shown any kinds of improvement or spikes in traffic during that defined period of time - What niche does this person regularly promote brands or services in? Ensure that there\'s a spot on relevancy before you approach them. Do not go for folks who are seen to promote restaurants one day and then cough syrups the next With the right kind of research, if you\'re able to approach the right person, I personally noticed a significant increase in the folks who reached out to us through social channels.
Influencers are worth a lot, but you must know your objectives to choose the right metrics and ensure accurate measurement. It also helps in choosing the right influencers for the campaign you plan to run. This is where many brands fall short. For example, some influencers are strong at building brand awareness but don't know how to do lead gen well. If your campaign is about lead gen, you'll want to focus on the influencers who do that well and use the right metrics to measure their effectiveness. The same goes for building brand awareness. If you choose the wrong influencers, your campaign won't do well.
I’ve worked with influencers and in my experience, it’s crucial to set out very clearly at the beginning what the expectations of both sides are. It’s also important to let your influencer have creative freedom. After all, you chose to work with them because they are successful at knowing what their audience wants, and this will also help you decide if their messaging and style is a good fit for your brand. Influencers have the ability to reach a large audience and spark engagement with your product. In theory, this should lead to an increase in sales and ROI. However, there’s no guarantee that your influencer will be successful, and some brands have faced backlash for working with certain influencers (and vice versa – currently Drew Afualo is facing criticism for working with Shein). Ultimately, the decision of whether to work with an influencer depends on the goals of the brand and the potential risks involved.
We have worked with influencers from the micro to mega-scale, and we have received a positive ROI, once from over 100 campaigns, with an influencer in a hyper niche category who had an immensely engaged audience. Our overall campaigns were always net negative, and never created conversions at the rate we needed to justify the campaigns. Perhaps, a strong awareness channel, we certainly do not look for returns here. Overall we find other marketing channels to have much higher ROI and lower effort.
Brands work with influencers based on one key factor - their ability to influence consumer purchasing decisions and drive brand awareness. Influencers can generate significant traffic + purchases on your site, improve consumer recollection of a company (for when the time comes to purchase), AND provide you with high-quality user-generated content (UGC). Usually, all three benefits outweigh the cost. However, with the right campaign, purchases driven by an influencer will pay for the partnership cost itself.
Influencers are definitely worth it. The fact that they have such a strong bond with their followers makes them very powerful. We have collaborated with influencers in the past, and the return we got was just astonishing. Moreover, we saved so much money that would have gone into advertising. The thing with influencers is that you don't need to pay any advertising fees. Influencers have their own portals on YouTube, social media, and other places where they'll feature you depending on your contract. All you have to do is provide them with contact information and their fees. This needs much less effort and much less time to show results. One tip I'll need to give is to have them sign a contract before so that in the future, they don't say anything negative about your brand. Although influencers don't do that often. But sometimes, due to conflict, influencers like to bash brands. At that time, this contract will be your biggest help.
Interestingly, we dabbled with using influencers to market our invoice factoring services. Small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to have more working capital while waiting for invoices to be paid seemed like a great fit for influencers in the small business space. It went okay, but we have had much more success with User Generated Content (UGC). It is more cost effective and because UGC can be anything from a user video to an online testimonial, it helps build customer trust by showcasing real customers, instead of relying on an influencer's existing audience. It helps us niche down and cut costs, so a win win overall.
Yes, it's totally worth working with the influencers. But be clear about the strategy and its outcomes. In the early days, we worked with micro influencers who had influence in the WordPress communities and also have at least 3000 followers on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook combined. We knew that these WordPress enthusiasts like to share content about WordPress and also people love what they create. And most importantly they wanted to recognized. We created a strategy to interview them on our blog, and then asking them to share that interview on their social channels so we can reach their audience. We did 200+ interviews. Total 50,000 people visited our website. 500 signed up for a free trial. 100 converted WordPress Hosting (https://www.cloudways.com/en/wordpress-hosting.php) to customers. The influencers also became our customers and started promoting their experience with Cloudways.
Yes, influencers are worth it, but you have to have a solid plan of action to capitalize on the partnership. My experience working with influencers was quite fruitful and enlightening. I was quite impressed to see that they’re influencers out there who are quite business savvy, which made for a smooth experience. Myself and my team scoured various social platforms for influencers who’re passionate about fashion and apparel. Our targeted search led me to competent individuals who shared similar interests with our business. This allowed us to work together with a similar vision for success, which led to highly engaging and successful content. Our partnership with three budding influencers led to an exciting campaign, and a positive ROI as we released a new line of wholesale custom apparel. Influencers are worth it with a good strategy and a partnership with creators that share similar interests and perspectives.
B2C influencers are oversaturated, and prices are going up. Many find it difficult to quantify ROI. Whether it\'s multi-attribution, or small margins + the need for large purchases to justify the cost of the partnership. In B2B, however, it\'s just getting started. People want to buy from people they know and trust (which is where the influencer strategy originates). In B2B and the complex sales of software or professional solutions, it\'s challenging to know everything you need to know before purchasing or moving forward with a big sale. B2B influencers, or "top industry voices" help establish trust and direct viewers toward solutions they believe in and can vouch for. We see this in action every day. I host a channel on YouTube called "HubSpot Hacks" where we help people understand the marketing/sales platform HubSpot. And as a result, we\'ve seen brands benefit by partnering with our channel to establish credibility, build awareness, generate leads, and shorten their sales cycle.
The ROI by partnering with an influencer can bring revenue and exposure to your brand tenfold, but did you know you don't always have to pay an influencer? Sometimes, the influencer winds up paying you! This is especially for entertainers and vendors with whom the influencer could use their services. As an event DJ, I perform mostly corporate events. However, clever use of hashtags and has landed me DJ gigs with some of the most entertaining, beautiful, and wildest influencers as their wedding DJ. What happens is, during and after their event, I am tagged in stories and posts for weeks if not months. This boosts my exposure for not just their followers who may be getting married, but their corporate followers and brands as well! Even if I offer 10% off my minimum rate to DJ for an influencer, I am still profiting from the sale, plus new business that comes in from the influencer posting me. If you are a DJ, Band, or even a magician, you can literally get an influencer to pay you.
The influencers are worthy because my goals are aligned with them, and they helped me achieve the desired revenue. I recently created a YouTube channel with a business partner where our job is to upload music to sleep. For that, we thought it would be the best idea to accompany our strategy by creating an Instagram page. We did it and kept posting daily motivational quotes on our Instagram page. To get more exposure, I contacted an influencer and was surprised to know that her charges were meager but high quality. So, I sent her the video I wanted her to post, along with the hashtags and descriptions to use. Consequently, I obtained 70k more followers, and that post got 1-5k likes.
Working with a nano-influencer was worth it. When the influencer you are working with is aligned with your company vision, mission, and core values, their more intimate and fewer but genuine following delivers organic engagement to our brand more effectively. Not only did we receive a positive ROI within six months, but we also found a passionate individual with an excellent work ethic to promote our brand in the future and beyond. From our experience, nano-influencers are more inclined to stay true to their brand and genuinely express their commitment to your products and services. It's a great way to show their social media audiences how effective and outstanding your brand of products and services are, which translates to higher lead generation, conversion rate, and revenue.
Working with influencers is only worth it if you're okay with not hitting all marketing KPIs. This is because influencers use a real and genuine communication strategy so whatever they say or present is still up to the audience's interpretation. Most of them don't advertise the brands they're working with upfront, instead, they merely share their personal takes on the product. That leaves their followers to decide on their own whether or not to check out what brand their influence idols use. Since it is the influencer who holds authority over their audience by cultivating an emotional connection with their followers, it'll be them who is highlighted in their content instead of your brand or offers. Therefore, businesses' ROI will depend on how much the influencer's audience aspirest to resemble them and how common both parties' interests are.
Influencers are only worth it if you vet them properly. Use popular web-based tools that run analytics on influencer engagement. Be prepared to pay - avoid free tools, in my experience free tools are not very accurate at all. Focus on micro-influencers. I have tried both and what I have seen is that micro-influencers provide a much higher ROI than people who have more than 100k followers. The sweet spot for a small business or product based business with a limited marketing budget has got to be someone with between 20k to 50k followers. These people generally have a hyper targeted group of followers and are more negotiable on price. Once you go above 100k, I have seen that you are now competing with bigger brands that have much larger marketing budget.
The value of influencer marketing depends on the industry in question. Professional fields that sell a physical product, especially one that is photogenic or dependent on its visual or demonstration, should see huge boosts to traffic with influencer promotion. However, some fields don’t need the global reach of the internet for promotional purposes and instead need to focus on a local marketing effort. Generating a passionate, loyal following in the community should be a higher priority than digital attention. An influencer can help in these cases, too, but their primary advantage is the volume of their digital following.
Influencers can still be worth it in 2022. The key is to work with micro-influencers in sub-niches — those who have less than 50k followers and are super engaged in a specific niche. The benefit is that not only will the sponsorship deals be more affordable, but the audiences you'll tap into will be hyper-engaged. To help improve ROI, you also want to make sure that your CTA is something of low effort (i.e. just enter an email) and has an incentive attached to it (i.e. use code "example" for a chance to win). We've done this with small YouTubers and have found a great ROI.
Here’s the one concise answer to your queries: There is no easy answer when it comes to whether or not influencers are worth working with. It really depends on your brand, your budget, and your goals. That being said, if you do choose to work with influencers, it is important to choose the right ones. There are a few things you can keep in mind when choosing influencers to work with in order to maximize your ROI: - Make sure they have a large, engaged following that is relevant to your target audience. - Ensure they produce high-quality content that is on brand and aligns with your values. - vet them carefully to make sure they are a good fit for your brand before entering into any agreements. When done correctly, working with influencers can be a great way to reach new audiences and achieve your marketing goals. However, it is important to do your research upfront to ensure you are making the best decision for your brand. Regards, Syed Ali Abbas Founder and CEO @ Seoperks.co