Influencer Marketing is the Fastest-Growing Online Customer Acquisition Strategy

Google Trends shows how Influencer marketing has steadily climbed the charts to displace print advertising. Sneaking close to video advertising, influencer marketing industry is on a trailblazer mode, bringing together the various cogs of the social media and branded content within the ‘sales’ flywheel.

Influencers are ruling the roost for brands across online channels. Dwarfing the company’s owned social media campaigns, influencer marketing has moved at a phenomenal pace in garnering more engagements than the branded content. According to an eMarketer report published in 2015, 84% of global marketers were working on at least one influencer campaign and nearly 81% of them acknowledged influencer engagements were effective. In 2017, the content promotion activities have edged past content creation for most brands, demonstrating how influencer marketing help in maximized engagements. In their latest infographic report, Influencer Marketing Hub, the leading influencer marketing resource for marketers and agencies, says that over 230 new platforms and influencer marketing-focused agencies have arrived in the market since 2015.

Finding the Right Influencer with Personalized Vetting Process

With brands leveraging User Generated Content (UGC) for their marketing and advertising, marketers find identifying the right influencers as their biggest pain-point.

To identify, marketers zero onto an influencer’s social profiles and data to determine if the engagement would work. SEO ranking, Alexa ranking and verified traffic data remain the critical metric for selecting any influencer.

GroupHigh offers a range of influencer marketing solutions that include identification of new influencers based on their social presence, total reach and location. From vetting influencers based on content categories to delivering a report on earned media from influencer marketing, GroupHigh enables marketers to track, foster and expand influencer network with tailored communication.

Cision is another reliable platform to identify social media influencers that are making the most buzz. Last month, the company unveiled exclusive Influencer Identification, Monitoring and Measurement Capabilities and other enhancements to its Cision Communications Cloud™.

Leveraging Earned Media: The Power of Middle Influencers

Two years ago, influencer marketing was blamed for being too mono-directional and too narrow for brands to maximize their ROI. In 2017, the doubts have vanished, largely due to the rise of the “Power Middle Influencers”. According to a study by Collective Bias, the apt spot for reach and engagement is between 35k and 65k followers. However, influencer marketing automation solution provider – TapInfluence, identifies Power Middle Influencers with an audience size of 10K-35K.

Influencer-generated content is found to perform better than UGC, and leveraging power middle influencers make content an appreciable asset and deliver direct ROI in a shorter time.

It’s Still a Number’s Game: Influencer versus Print versus Video

In a highly customer-centric world, there is a tectonic shift in how consumers rely on word-of-mouth marketing and advertising. Purchasing decisions are largely driven by what the customer sees, hears and researches online.

According to McKinsey’s study, word of mouth is the most disruptive factor and therefore, resonance factor of influencer content is the key to achieve incremental ROI from such campaigns. The influencer marketing is the potent answer to the rising use of ad blockers by consumers.

Influencer marketing platforms like Blogmint provide visual reporting on how influencers and their content created brand awareness among the audience. Reporting metrics on blog performance, Blog Score, is the simplest way to determine if influencer strategy would make the cut against the global benchmarking.

Validate your Strategies using Influencer Relationship Management (IRM)

Influencers get influenced too. And, it is imperative to score their influencing factors to move beyond the status quo of merely relying on traffic analytics. IRM platforms like Traackr help marketers to cast an “influential net” and expand influencer network based on an intelligent scoring algorithm that individually and cumulatively measures results of content, events, and campaigns. Self-service influencer marketing platforms such as IZEA bring inventiveness to generating traffic using pre-existing and ongoing content campaigns. To make data-driven decisions, Influencity provides real-time multi-channel analytic and compares influencer performance of every member of the community.

Other influencer marketing platforms that caught my eyes are InfluencerDB, InsightsAtlas, Influmeter, and Ubermetrics.

The Special Mention

Influencer marketing and social media analytics run parallel to each other. For an industry that is pegged to grow by $1.7 billion in 2018, a lot depends on how accurately influencer marketing platforms gauge content analytics. Talkwalker, the social media analytics and monitoring platform, is slated to become the data intelligence hub for influencer campaigns. With automated report building and monitoring on your fingertips, Talkwalker adds intelligence to every piece of content that runs from the influencer factory.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter have their own set of influencer ‘superstars’. With increased brand awareness about influencer marketing, tightened by advertising transparency and data privacy policies, the industry is set to see unprecedented growth by 2020. Adding to it the magic of AI and “auto-vetting”, B2B brands would finally see their social selling efforts matching B2C and e-commerce influencers at scale.