The days of celebrity endorsements are quickly being replaced by younger generations’ love for social media. According to the Digital Marketing Institute, 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional celebrities. While teens might be one demographic among many, it is important to recognise that these youngsters will be tomorrow’s adult consumers. Social media influencers are not only shaping followers, but also the marketing industry as a whole. In fact, global ad spend on influencer marketing is expected to reach $5 – $10 billion by 2020.
As this trend grows, it’s important to know how to handle your influencer marketing budget to give you the most bang for your buck. In this article, we will look at three marketing hacks you can use to make your next influencer campaign as influential as possible.
YouTube vs Instagram: The right channel for the right audience
To successfully reach your target audience, you must find out where they are. For example, the vast majority of YouTubers range between 18 and 40 years old, making it an ideal channel to reach older audiences. Alternatively, Snapchat is great for the demographic aged 13 to 21, and Instagram’s demographic falls right in the middle of these two, ranging between 20-35.
Aside from demographics, the style of the platform is important to consider. For example, due to Instagram’s inherent visual nature, it’s the perfect platform for promoting products with eye-catching photos. YouTube, on the other hand, stands as an ideal channel for sharing video content with a longer duration in which a product’s functionality is explained or product reviews are shared.
Price is also an influential factor, as each channel is likely to result in a different ROI. To compare performances on each platform, At Stargazer, we gathered data from roughly 300 influencers to determine the average Cost per click (CPC) / cost per swipe of mobile apps across 3 social platforms. Our results found that YouTube came out the highest at $0.9 per CPC, Instagram at $0.5 and SnapChat the lowest at $0.45. With these values, you can understand what you may receive from each media channel, and how much it will cost to obtain the best performance.
Data makes the difference
As the old saying goes, knowledge is power, and that is definitely true for a successful influencer campaign. Followers can be faked, and as a result, it can be challenging to find influencers that exert real influence. But, in an age where data is ubiquitous and omniscient, we can see the genuine impact these influencers are producing.
For Poshmark, a social commerce platform where people can buy and sell new or used clothing, shoes, and accessories, the utilisation of data was essential to produce a wildly successful influencer campaign. For example, analyzing data made it possible to predict influencers performances, thus providing insight into how many impressions and clicks influencers would get.
In addition to this, algorithms were utilised to indicate the right price to pay to get a positive ROI. These methods allowed Poshmark to run one of its most successful influencer campaigns to date. The campaign produced 2,135,000 clicks & 347K installs of the Poshmark app in 2018.
We now have more data at our fingertips than ever before, and with this unprecedented access to incredible knowledge comes the potential to see and understand more than ever before, allowing businesses to truly see the true ROI of influence.
Identify campaign goals and desired metrics
Before starting a campaign, a company should know what they want to achieve as a result. Your business should also identify what it wants and pinpoint methods of tracking goals.
The visual impact of an influencer campaign can have a profound impact on sales, for example, studies show that after watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online and users have the ability to recall 65% of the visual content that they see almost three days later.
Therefore, leads and sales conversions through referral traffic stand as one of the best metrics for influencer campaigns. According to Search Engine Land, in 2017, social media accounted for 25.6% of referral traffic. Essentially, referral traffic statistics let you know which influencer content is driving traffic to your website or specific landing page. It provides meaningful, actionable insights into which campaigns are having an impact on their audiences and across which social media platforms. Trackable links and promo codes are also popular methods to track the effectiveness of influencers on a given campaign.
By utilising these three strategies, it is possible for any influencer campaign to reach the right audience, with the right influencers to produce the results they want to see.