How would you compare Influencer Marketing with digital advertising?
Influencer Marketing and digital advertising can be considered similar in 3 ways:
1. You are reaching a certain audience
2. It’s online.
3. You are using a social media platform to promote something.
When considering these similarities, influencer marketing is much more effective. When using influencer marketing, you can reach the exact audience you want within hours. If you have an agency doing detailed research into influencers statistics you can find the perfect audience for you and your brand. With digital advertising, you are limited. Most of the time you pay for 100 or even 10,000 clicks and sometimes it may not reach the right audience. When doing influencer marketing, you know exactly where you are investing your budget and a video can take off overnight leading to millions of views and clicks. If a person has followed an Influencer, it is normally because they take an interest in their content.
Which social platforms do you think will be the most used by influencer marketers in the next 5 years?
Instagram/YouTube/TikTok
How do you currently find relevant and high-quality influencers for your marketing campaigns?
Competitor analysis
How would you decide which influencers to work with?
Manual audit of their accounts
How should brands use Instagram influencers to grow their business? What is your personal experience with Instagram influencing?
Instagram Influencers are currently dominating the influencer marketing industry and I understand why. When it comes to Instagram, you can pay the influencers to promote a product/service in many different ways – the main ones being through feed posts, Instagram Reels, Instagram Stories and profile bio integrations. From my personal experience, you get value for your money if you choose the right Influencers. They do a lot of product exchanges which can work out to be cheaper for most companies than cash.
What are some common tools and strategies to help grow your presence on Instagram? Are you currently using any tools?
I don’t deal with any e-commerce brands at the moment.
Which content categories (i.e. verticals) are likely to become the most popular on Instagram for influencers?
In my opinion, Fitness currently gets the best traction from Instagram Influencers. The fitness hashtag has been used over 478 million times making it one of the most used hashtags in the world.
As influencer marketing grows and industries become bigger, I can see it shifting from Fitness to other categories quickly.
What advice would you give to a new business that wants to gain and grow its paid sponsorships?
My advice to new businesses entering the influencer marketing scene is to work with the right agency that will dedicate their time and effort to working with you. They can help you search for the right Influencers and help get value for your money. When entering this scene, you want the right faces to promote your brand and you also want to reach the right audience.
If you cannot afford to hire an agency or any high-profile influencers, I would recommend using the resources you have. Reach out to smaller creators who you want to work with on a long-term basis and let them become the main face of the brand. If you build a good relationship with them, the growth opportunities are endless.
How do you think Influencer Marketing will grow among small businesses in the near future?
Once smaller businesses realise that influencer marketing can be cheaper than your traditional paid digital advertisements, it will skyrocket. When they look at all the big brands paying high-profile influencers with millions of followers, they feel as if they can’t match that. Not all influencers want to do one-off advertisements. If a smaller business finds an influencer, big or small, that shares a passion for the product/service they are providing, the business can change overnight. Over lockdown, plenty of small businesses have taken to the online world and some have succeeded because they jumped on growing trends and invested their money into working with the right Influencers. You are never limited when it comes to influencer marketing.
How do you currently collaborate with and pay Instagram influencers? Name any tools and strategies that you use.
When reaching out to Influencers, I always use Email as my main source of contact. Once contact is established, I can add them to any management tools I use such as ClickUp. For payments, I tend to use PayPal or Stripe. It all depends on where the Influencer is based, same with the brand.
