Does Influencer Marketing Pay?
“Consumers want to hear from the people that they idolise and respect. They trust these recommendations more than advertising from brands.”- Jeff Bullas
(Digital Entrepreneur, Keynote Speaker, and Ranked #1 Global Business Blogger)
Ever since its introduction in the marketing arena, influencer marketing has proven to be a game-changer. Recreating the power of word-of-mouth, social media influencers have become an asset for brands. Influencers with their powerful word-of-mouth and quality content drive consistent engagement, and reach out to the brand’s target audience, in the most subtle way possible. As a creative influencer marketing agency, we at Confluencr are always on the lookout for efficient influencers and help them stand out in their respective niche. When backed with research, strategising and genuine efforts, influencer marketing pays off for both the influencers as well as the brands.
Here’s how you can leverage yourself as an influencer on various social media platforms and accelerate fruitful collaborations.
5 tips on how you can leverage your presence as an influencer on various social media platforms:
Provides Consistent Engagement
‘Consistency is imperative to being an influencer,’ says Ruchika Asatkar, who build a massive 15K fan following in just 7 months.
As much as it boosts your reach, posting regularly allows you to take a bigger bite of your audience’s social media presence. This intensifies your influence over followers and ranks you higher than the influencers with follower armies.
Similar to ghost followers that merely increase a user’s follower count, irregular influencers build up their ghost following. Users forget about them the minute they follow them and certainly don’t get influenced by their once-in-a-blue-moon appearance.
Ruchika has experienced a 1000-1200% rise in her cash payments per post within a span of 6 months, and she owes it all to her consistency.
If your content is just for the sake of getting followers, it can seem scripted, and people tend to ignore it. As a beginner or an existing YouTuber, all you need to remember is to have fun while speaking with the audience. Though youtube videos are one-way communication, speak in such a way that the audience can react to it and thus will want to know more, increasing their engagement.
Influencer marketing exactly assists you with building a rapport with your audience. The more they see people endorsing your products or services, the more they tend to look out for more and eventually decide to make a purchase.
Uniqueness sells
Influencer marketing is one of the most convenient professions of all and is duly gaining popularity with each sunset. So much so that there’s a 70% chance that you chose it over-engineering for the sake of convenience. After all, influencer marketing does pay you well in the long run!
It feels like an influencer stampede on social media platforms, and if you plan on surviving, you need to stand out. Uniqueness attracts followers and engagement and is a bare necessity to being an influencer in the first place. The more unique the influencer is, the more appealing is their opinion.
Further, brands filter and pick their influencers based on the uniqueness of their content. For example, a cafeteria is likely to collaborate with a 10K reach influencer who posts custom edited videos of how the dishes are made, rather than a 20K reach influencer who merely posts pictures of what’s going down his oesophagus.
“Sam’s distinctly vivid aesthetic and flair for photography make her an excellent ambassador for many brands, including Google, Haagen Das, Brooklinen, Dunkin Donuts, and Target,” says Mediakix Team about Sam Ushiro, a.k.a @aww.sam, one of the most creative & unique influencers of this era.
Uniqueness sells
Niche-Centralism Approach
Wear a monotonous personality on your feeds and let your audiences relate to you with a particular niche and hence, a feeling. Choose a character that revolves around your field of interest. You may trigger hunger in them, or adrenaline rushes, or chooses a combination of niches such that they send out a uniform vibe. Whatever you want to showcase, showcase just that.
Niche-centralism plays a significant role in making your influencer marketing strategies work. It reflects the expertise of the influencers in the respective field. It lures the audience into trusting your opinion. The greater the number of people depending on your opinion, the bigger the brands want you to share theirs. It’s as simple as a sports brand approaching a sports personality than a travel blogger, because hey, you can only trust a sportsperson for sports stuff.
This niche-centralism approach applies to your promotions as well. Only promote brands whose personality resonates with yours, or you’ll just become another ad wall. What matters is how well the brand aligns with your audience.
Kylie Jenner, the highest-paid influencer on Instagram (@kyliejenner), has kept her advertisements and feed beauty/fitness-centric. Kylie has grown to earn up to $ 1 mn per promotion.
Quality over quantity
You don’t want your feed to look like a newspaper half-filled with advertisements. So, follow the convention of quality over quantity. Do limited, niche-centric, and quality content promotions. The fewer collaborations you entertain, the intenser will they be, making each one of them monetarily superior.
This will allow you to filter the offers and choose only the best-suited ones, economically and personality-wise. Comprehend the fact that lesser collaborations don’t mean settling for less; it’s settling for the best and only the best. Above all, it will emphasize your portrayal as an influencer over a marketer, which is imperative because even marketers don’t trust marketers.
Quality over quantity
Marketing + Creativity
With the emergence of the internet, customers are more educated and aware than ever. Brands thus need to play smart when it comes to marketing their products and services. What sells today is not just the features of your products or service but the content. The more creative you get, the more are your chances of attracting prospects.
Influencer marketing is based on this core idea of subtly marketing products in the most creative ways and would only work if marketing and Creativity go hand in hand.
As an influencer, your initial collaborations are Opportunities for you to build your marketing resume. Produce innovative and creative advertisement campaigns and let the bigger brands know that you might’ve just got on the stage, but it’s already yours.
Being on the stage might expose your content to the masses, but you still need to be discovered by the brands. For example, a stage is crowded, and the brands usually settle for the giants unless the elf’s got a glowing hat.
Your first few advertisement campaigns will be your glowing hat, and it is your job to make sure it glows brighter than the spotlight on the giants. Refer to Michaela Petrofes’s take on making money as a social media influencer to learn how to make your hat glow brighter and stand out.
The numbers speak for themselves
The promising statistics regarding influencer marketing performance are all testimony to the fact that influencer marketing is a fruitful venture when entered into with solid strategy and dedication.
So for the question that you began this article with within a walnut shell, the answer is a firm Yes!
Influencer marketing pays, and it pays well. But, it only pays the patient, consistent, unique, and niche-centric influencers. Above all, the industry pays genuine influencers. So it’s better not to fake followers, likes, or content and put up anything and everything that showcases your hard work. Work hard and let it speak for itself.
Let us know how you got your first collaboration with an influencer marketing brand at [email protected] and help us learn more about the fastest evolving profession today.
