Influencer Marketing 101: A Comprehensive Guide

As the new and powerful way of online marketing, influencer marketing, is continuing to grow, we are obliged to define what exactly it is and what it encompasses. That is why we are going to take you step by step through all the important and vital segments of influencer marketing and its benefits as well as its importance. We will explain how the relationship between influencers and brands works, and how it is established and facilitated through our tool designed specifically for that purpose. We simplify the process of finding the right influencers for brands, while also streamlining the creation and measurement of influencer marketing strategies. Here we will provide a comprehensive overview of all the elements involved in influencer marketing.

IN THIS ARTICLE

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy based on influencers and their connection with the audience, leveraging the impact they have in the online world to promote a brand, company, product, or service. The right question is why do we need influencer marketing, what are its benefits and what is the power of influencer endorsements? People prefer to follow influencers rather than brands. The audience is not as interested in your brand as they care about the influencer’s opinion of the product. This is how influencers influence the market, helping both buyers and brands. Therefore, influencer marketing shifts its focus from the market to a person who influences others.

The Benefits of Influencer Marketing

Increased brand awareness

The purpose of marketing is increasing popularity and brand awareness. When brand awareness is increased, the likelihood of consumers recognizing and considering that brand for purchase also increases. Influencer’s job is to make that happen.

Authenticity and trust

In the past, celebrities were the primary figures in influencer marketing. Now, individuals with no celebrity backgrounds have become influential figures that audience trust. The ultimate key to achieving this job is trust. Trust is something an influencer has to build over time and work to reach a level of trust that a brand can never do, and that is the secret to great marketing. With a friendly and authentic approach, they make perfect intermediaries between people and companies.

Targeted audience reach

Each influencer is an expert in a specific niche. Accordingly, they are chosen by the audience interested in that particular area. High diligence, omnipresence, and understanding of their audience help them expand their influence and remain active in the market. Following that, they can reach high numbers of followers.

Types of Influencers

While there is no universally accepted definition of influencers, we categorize them based on the number of followers. Therefore, they are categorized as mega, macro, micro and nano influencers. Each with their distinctiveness. Except considering the number of followers influencers have, it is also important to consider the quality of their interaction with the audience.

Mega influencers

Mega influencers are those who have more than a million followers on social media. Normally, this category is made out of celebrities who have gained their fame outside the online realm. They primarily collaborate with major brands. Their services come at a high cost, and they carefully choose which companies to work with. The thing about mega influencers is that they may have millions of followers, but the reason why people followed them is because of themselves, not because of sharing the same interests in some particular area, and does not have to mean they gained their trust. That is why it is hard to estimate how many people have actually influenced and inspired to make a purchase.

Macro influencers

Macro influencers are those who have around 100k to one million followers. Not exactly considered celebrities, but extremely popular, these people are usually very successful bloggers, youtubers, and other internet famous people. Naturally, their media and marketing growth is different from micro and mega influencers, but it does not mean that they are worse than mega and better influencers than micro. Why? Micro influencers have smaller audience and sometimes tend to be more diligent and dedicated. But of course, it all depends on numerous factors.

Micro influencers

Micro influencers typically have 10-100k followers. For working with clients, this type of influencer is most wanted. The type is made of people that gradually made their way influencing work from start. They are always experts for a particular area and have formed their specific audience through gaining a lot of trust and, naturally, their influence can make a great effect in a particular niche.

Nano influencers

Nano influencers have 1-10k followers on social media. They are usually reserved for highly specialized areas, which can be very beneficial for companies. They have a great effect on a small number of people. Nano influencers cost less than other types, followers give them a lot of trust, they often have a high level of authenticity and they made their way through, which usually means they are collaborative and have high engagement.

Finding the Right Influencers

Identifying your target audience

The most crucial part to a successful marketing campaign journey is finding your target audience. By identifying your target audience, you can focus on the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. It also ensures that your chosen communication is relevant, relatable, and more likely to capture the audience’s attention. Shortly, it helps you focus your efforts and connect with the people who are most likely to become loyal customers.

Evaluating influencer credibility

Before engaging the right influencer it is important to evaluate influencer credibility. It is a quality that indicates how reliable, serious, and trustworthy someone is for the job. For business collaboration and relationships, an influencer’s reliability is a crucial element. Every reputable influencer has a track record of successful collaborations that have contributed to their business success. However, to save your time, we have already conducted thorough research on influencers to keep up with the quality and credibility.

Tools for influencer discovery

Bearing all the advantages of hiring the influencer, we created a tool of easy and trustworthy influencer discovery. With detecting your target audience, its size and type we can easily find you the right influencer for your brand and campaign. And all the important instructions for the influencers are already generated as soon as you build your campaign, which helps with faster business performance.

Building an Influencer Marketing Strategy

Setting clear objectives

One of the most important marketing and business elements, setting clear objectives, makes a crucial start for your campaign. It is essential for providing direction, measuring progress, aligning efforts with the overall strategy, and ultimately achieving success. It also ensures working towards a clearly defined goal.

Creating engaging content

The fundamental thing of an influencer job is creating engaging content. Therefore, it is important to find a niche where you feel competent to be creative and convey your ideas. This is a crucial element of creating authentic, high-quality, relevant and valuable content. With both good quality and quantity of content, you can reach your audience. The combination of authenticity and creativity in content should be a primary focus.

Negotiating partnerships

To be a successful influencer, you need to form efficient partnerships and collaborations with brands. Influencer marketing strategy does not exist without partnerships and this is where tools can help you. By assessing your areas of interest and expertise, the tool can connect and pair you with partners who may need you in their campaigns. It also helps you in having a more direct and easier communication with the brand. Your job is to prove to the brand that your content is of a sufficient quality and effectiveness to influence the audience.

Measuring Success

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable metric data used to assess the effectiveness, success, and progress towards set goals in an organization, project, or marketing campaign. KPIs assist in monitoring important aspects of business and making informed data-driven decisions. In the context of influencers, we can define concrete KPIs that relate to their progress. KPIs that we measure in campaigns are reach, engagement, impressions, audience interest and conversion (in cases where possible). We also use Reach/EUR metrics that reflect how many people have been reached for every spent euro. Such measures provide better indicators about campaign effectiveness than engagement rate metrics (Engagement/EUR) and give us an advantage in evaluating success.

Analytics and tracking tools

Tracking tools and analytics provide insights and data-driven information about the performance and impact of influencer collaborations. They play a crucial role in optimizing influencer marketing campaigns. Analytics can include, for example, follower growth and audience demographics that can provide more detailed insight into an influencer’s audience which can help brands to estimate whether it matches with their target audience. They also include insight info influencer’s content performance through shares, likes or comments and give us information about its effectiveness and impact their content has on the audience. All the analytics are easily made through specified tracking and measuring tools for influencers, which helps both them and brands that are considering hiring them.

Budgeting for Influencer Marketing

Determining your budget

Every type of influencer has its price for the campaign. Our tool can greatly assist you and stands out from other tools because we provide you a list of influencers that fit within the given budget. This is how we solved the issue so that you don’t have to worry about budgeting and we have made that aspect of work easier for you.

Compensation models

Compensation models refer to the various ways in which individuals or organizations are compensated for their services or work. These models can vary depending on the industry, role, and the agreement between the parties involved. This encompasses different methods of payment, bonuses, profit-sharing, benefits, and other forms of compensation. Influencers help brands to reach a higher level of popularity and also motivate the audience to make a purchase.

Case Studies and Success Stories

Real-world examples of successful influencer campaigns

Our Hypefy team feels proud of numerous successful case studies that we produced.

Nivea – we have successfully provided a collaboration between NIVEA and particular influencers who have managed to provide NIVEA a relevant and well-known, but now expanded, reputation in the cosmetic industry for both male and female youth and adults. Because of partnership with influencers, NIVEA succeeded in expanding its reach and appeal to a wider audience.
City Center One – with a highly acceptable budget, we have achieved a great result in collaboration with CCO. With their partnership with influencers, they have managed to share and expand information about their new seasonal collection and showcase the best-selling items.
Alpstadt – as booking accommodations started to be mainly online and as online presence became crucial in travel business, Alpstadt hotel industry used Hypefy platform to reach audiences outside Austria. With influencer engagement, Alpstadt successfully reached their target audience – German families.
Amazinga – amusement park Amazinga decided to use the Hypefy platform to attract customers through authentic marketing. Influencer’s creative content and Hypefy’s engagement managed to reach a wider audience and increase traffic during Wednesdays, which was the primary marketing need.
BiteMe – the primary marketing need was to spread the brand’s popularity and introduce a new protein cookie to the target audience that included parents and people working in fields of fitness and business in Croatia and Slovenia. Hypefy’s algorithm and automation managed to connect BiteMe with the most relevant influencers which has been a great achievement. With our help they managed to launch their new product in the Croatian and Slovenian retail markets.
Arena Centar – the increase in the number of options and shopping locations has also increased competitiveness among retail chains. That is why Arena Centar decided for Hypefy platform as they had the marketing need to increase their popularity and prestige. With Hypefy collaboration, Arena Centar managed to differentiate compared to other brands and seamlessly collaborate with influencers that perfectly align with their brand’s values.
Eucerin – since influencer marketing plays a vital role in the cosmetics industry, Eucerin decided to step into collaboration with Hypefy in order to increase sales and enhance their influencer marketing expenditure. The result was a 50% increase in retail sales because of success in elevating brand familiarity and product presence.
Mozzart – MozzartBet decided to use the Hypefy platform to promote and raise awareness of the Dominazzija event. Through Hypefy’s cost-effective solutions and partnerships with influencers, Mozzart accomplished to reach a significant number of new audiences and successfully promoted their goal, the benefit of mobility of the Dominazzija competition.
Sancta Domenica – marketing need in Sancta Domenica was about promoting an engaging event that showcased the game God of War in partnership with Sony PS. Hypefy has managed to connect them with influencers that are efficient in the gaming industry and have influence on the same target audience, males between 15 and 30 years, and parents. This collaboration resulted with both increasing social media traffic and event traffic.
OTP bank – considering that marketing is crucial for banks to gain new customers and promote new loan products, OTP bank decided to have a try with influencer marketing. With influencer’s reliability and trust, OTP bank has managed to reach a wider audience and gain interest from their target audience. Their main objective, encouraging the audience to apply for an APN loan in their bank had three-fold increase.

Tips for Effective Collaboration

Building a strong relationship with influencers

In this specific kind of management, effective collaboration is mostly based on reliability, setting clear objectives, and finding the right partners. But also, building a strong relationship with influencers can put you on a higher level. It allows you to have a better insight into the influencer’s way of thinking and concept of his work, and also ensures that you have a better communication referred to the campaign. That is the key to aligning all ideas and ways in which you want your brand to progress and develop.

Communication and feedback

In order to have a successful campaign, partnership relationship and good development progress, you should keep good communication in order to get better feedback. If you ensure that you have all the required data from analytics and tracking tools and if you support that with good communication and feedback, you will have better control over your progress.

Measuring ROI

Calculating the return on investment

Tracking tools can also provide insights into the return on investment (ROI) of influencer campaigns. They can track conversions, sales, and other key performance indicators directly attributable to influencer-generated content. With calculating the return of your investment, you can more easily plan your next campaign, decide which influencer to collaborate with and decide where to better allocate your resources in your next campaigns. This is one of the final steps that gives you information whether your collaboration with influencers has paid off and what to pay attention to in the future.

Adjusting your strategy based on results

By calculating all the ROIs and KPIs through tracking tools and collecting all the required analytics of your campaign, you will have all the insights that can help you to progress in the future. Based on results that you collected, you can adjust your strategies in further business plans and make greater progress. You can as well develop a more comprehensive perspective of influencer marketing and obtain a clearer view of what you will need in future for specific campaigns.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing became one of the leading and game-changing ways of marketing. Individuals who gather a larger following through their actions have become an excellent link between the brand and the audience. Influencer marketing is a straightforward and beneficial way of reaching potential customers. Influencer marketing outperforms other channels, but due to the intensity and challenges of such work, we have developed the tool that is used to simplify and help with connecting brands and influencers for their potential partnership. Constant growth and building new and more effective business strategies is also possible with all the communication, feedback and measuring business success through KPIs, analytics and tracking tools. In conclusion, influencer marketing, with all its benefits, became one of the main ways of marketing, and with all the tools, it has never been easier to find and start collaboration with influencers and start a successful campaign.

FAQs

How do I find influencers in a niche market?

There are tools that, through their analysis and algorithm, find you the most relevant and suitable influencer that you can collaborate with. They also make your communication with them easier and faster.

Can small businesses benefit from influencer marketing?

Yes, there are 4 types of influencers, and nano influencers are usually the ones collaborating with small or highly specific businesses.

How do I track the performance of influencer posts?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable metric data used to assess the progress in an organization, project, or marketing campaign. KPIs that we measure are reach, engagement, impressions, audience interest, conversion (in cases where possible) and especially Reach/EUR metrics that reflect how many people (reach) have been reached for every spent euro.

What’s the average cost of partnering with an influencer?

Each influencer type, as well as the individual, has its own price. That is why tools can help you in researching influencers that fit in your budget.

Can influencers help with product launches?

Yes, influencer marketing is focused on promoting the product and enhancing brand awareness and product visibility. That is one of the best ways of helping with product launches.

How do I handle negative influencer experiences?

Successful tools that are responsible for connecting brands with specific and suitable influencers can assist you in making better influencer choices. They also help you in developing improved communication for more successful business collaborations.

Author

Stjepan holds degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering, specializing in the optimization of complex systems through artificial intelligence, particularly in logistical routing. With three years in influencer marketing, he has successfully applied his academic background to real-world challenges. As CEO of Hypefy, he has overseen more than 1,500 individual influencer collaborations and consistently outperformed industry benchmarks by 3-5x. His leadership has enabled the company to expand into seven countries and accumulate over 9 million data points in influencer marketing, establishing him as a data-backed authority in the industry.

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