Over the years, social media has become the first and foremost medium for marketing. It is a medium through which you can create a sense of closeness with your target audience, communicate directly with them, engage with them, get acquainted with their likes and preferences, involve them in the process of decision making, thus making products and services that are market demand-based. A big percentage of the social media marketing pie falls to Influencer Marketing, something you must have heard of. If not, ask a millennial or centennial to break it down for you, or let us walk you through it.

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing where the so-called influencers, or people who have a high number of loyal fan base and the ability to influence the purchasing behavior of consumers, promote your product/service to their audience which has to be your target audience, for a certain amount of money or free products/services. So, don’t go around splurging your money on expensive, old school marketing campaigns and invest them in influencer marketing. 89% of marketers say ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels. And that’s the reason why 65% of influencer marketing budgets will increase in 2019, which is around 20% more when compared to 2018. 

Research shows that e-commerce companies and retail in general have the most benefits from influencer marketing, as 86% of women use social media for purchasing advice. Therefore, the smart and innovative companies that paid close attention to these stats have already considerably increased (or plan to increase) their budget spend for 2019. 19% of marketers plan on spending  $1,000 – $10,000 per year on influencer marketing, 18% spend  $100,000 – $500,000 per year and 7% of companies plan to invest over a million dollars in influencer marketing in 2019. Influencer Marketing grew to become a $5-10 billion dollar industry.

Types of Influencer Marketing

Brands that spotted early the potential of Influencer Marketing to skyrocket their sales, invested heavily in some of the types of Influencer Marketing or a mixture of them. There are 4 basic types of Influencer Marketing that brands could choose from depending on their budget and their goal – to create action, to generate sales, to increase brand awareness, to engage with the community, etc.

Host Giveaways

Host Giveaways are considered to be the most popular type of Influencer Marketing, especially if brand awareness and engagement with your target audience are your goals. Its beauty is in its simplicity and the fact that it brings a mutual benefit. Hosting Giveaways brings your social media activity on fire – it is the easiest way to organically increase the number of followers and activities such as likes, comments, follows, without having to spend a dime on it. You can be the host of the giveaway or you contact your favorite influencer for better exposure. He/She then creates a post on social media, usually Instagram, where he/she asks the audience for simple things such as to follow their account, like the picture, tag themselves in the picture, etc.

The give off in Host Giveaways is your product/service for social activity, brand awareness, and engagement. Hence, it is considered to be the cheapest type of Influencer marketing. It can be a one time deal or a continuous activity of your brand. It is highly recommended to do that every once in a while or even better on a monthly basis. Just sit and watch how your engagement explodes from this activity.

Brands that do an excellent job in hosting giveaways are Birch Box, Fabletics, Kali Rose, Forever 21 just to name a few.

Sponsored Social Media Content

An excellent type of Influencer Marketing if your goal is promotion. You have to partner up with an influencer (or a couple) that you have a common target audience with and pay him to promote your product/service to the world. It is a bit more expensive type of influencer marketing but it presents a great window of opportunity. It is very hard to get that loyal fan base of millions of people that influencers have, in any other way. With sponsored social media content type of influencer marketing, you don’t even have to create content, as that is the influencer’s job. You pay the influencer for the creation of the content and the promotion itself. You give them guidelines on the content they are expected to produce and promote, but then it is up to them to choose how they are going to promote it. 

There is a considerably big number of brands that are opting for this type of influencer marketing as it is not extremely expensive, yet so effective. Some that are particularly good at it are American Express, Kurt Geiger, YSL Beauty, L’Oreal, Puma.

Brand Ambassador Program

Brand Ambassadors are people who genuinely use and love your product/service and can give an honest review by promoting your brand on social media. They are fully embraced in your brand, so you don’t have to go around pursuing them of how good it is, they already know. 

This type of influencer marketing is not a one time job as the brand ambassador is expected to share any type of content – pictures, videos, articles, continuously. It has to appear as if they don’t even do it for the money – they just love your brand that much. All you have to do is create a list of the people you would love to market your product/services and reach out to them. The hard part of the brand ambassador program is choosing the influencer that has the highest percentage of your target audience and the ability to influence a purchasing decision. But if you are successful in it, be sure that your sale is about to skyrocket.

ProActive and FashionNova are brands that make millions and millions of off successful brand ambassador programs.

Influencer Marketing Platforms

If you think that Instagram is the number one platform that brands go to when it comes to influencer marketing, you are not wrong. However, there are a lot of others, less or more costly, less or more effective. Media Kix did a research on all the platforms that you can take advantage off and promote your products/services with the help of influencers and these are all the platforms that make the list. Choose your platform wisely!

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