Influence Marketing: How to Apply This Powerful Strategy

Until a few years ago, the idea behind influence marketing was limited only to celebrities, very famous people and of course big brands. Since social networks have democratized the space that each person has to relate to others and companies, this reality has changed.

In USA 170 Million, India 180 Million, Brazil 110 Million, a country that has about 100 million Instagram users and only loses to the U.S. in the time spent on YouTube, influence marketing has taken on enormous proportions. Combined with other marketing strategies, actions with influencers can help every type of company achieve good results. How? That’s what we’re going to explain now.

Read on to find out what influence marketing is, the advantages of working with digital influencers, and how to use this strategy in practice!

How InfluenceR Marketing Works

Influencemarketing is a strategy that companies use to promote their products and services through partnerships with popular social media users or bloggers and famous people from different areas.

Digital influencers, or digital influencers, often have a large, engaged audience that brands can reach to build credibility and even drive sales.

That way, instead of investing only in more traditional marketing campaigns, companies are now investing in people who have influence in the market they want to conquer and getting them to talk about their products to their followers.

In return, they get the right customers who are ready to buy their brand and also want to talk about how much they love the brand and the product for their friends. It’s like buzz marketing.

Benefits of InfluenceR Marketing

Partnering with influencers is the number one marketing strategy for many brands. The simple answer to why influencer marketing works so well lies in the benefits that strategy brings.

For those who want to know what are the advantages of influence marketing for companies, start here:

Reach a larger audience

One of the main benefits of influence marketing is exposing brands to a much larger audience. Through actions with influencers, it is possible to increase traffic, as in raccoon’s success case for the Le Biscuit brand.

In the context of uncertainties caused by the pandemic, Raccoon bet on a strategy with a macroinfluencer and several microinfluencers, in order to generate awareness and position the brand positively in the market.

The shares yielded more than 1 million impressions and gained 24,000 new followers for the brand’s profiles. Learn more about the strategy we’ve created for Le Biscuit here!

Get more leads

As you read above, influence marketing helps attract a larger audience to relate to a brand.

Therefore, followed by the marketing funnel, it is natural that the actions of influencers generate more leads for your business. Thus, the strategy can do a lot for your audience to move forward on the shopping journey.

Boost sales

All of the above benefits converge on this which is probably the largest of all companies: selling more. And the reason that explains the success of marketing by influencers is that it can really help culminate in new customers.

An Opinion Box survey on Instagram interviewed more than 2,000 Brazilians and found that 67% of Instagram users follow influencers.

In addition, 18.5% say they are very influenced by famous people when buying and consuming products. Even more impressive is that 55% have already bought something that a digital influencer was indicating or using.

High Return on Investment (ROI)

According to SocialChorus, influence marketing campaigns generate 16 times greater engagement than traditional advertising campaigns. Another study that proves the high ROI of influence marketing, conducted by Tomoson, was able to establish an average ROI of influencer marketing campaigns at $6.50 of revenue for every $1 invested. In addition, 13% of the companies studied generate US$20 for every US$1 invested.

What are digital influencers

Digital influencers or digital influencers are the central figure in the influence marketing strategy – as its name implies.

These people, who work on diverse social networks such as Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and so many others, are people who stand out for the number of followers they have and, therefore, the potential reach to advertise products, services and brands.

Digital influencers can be both big celebrities and ordinary people who have managed to win over a loyal good audience in that market and the type of content they dominate.

Types of digital influencer

The influencers you see on social networks have thousands or even hundreds of thousands or more than a million followers on Instagram, Twitter or YouTube. These people built their target audience, which is why they’re called influencers.

This variation in the number of followers is what causes them to be classified into some categories. Below are the types of digital influencers according to the number of followers they have:

Megainfluencer

A mega influencer has 1 million or more followers or subscribers on its social media platforms. Most of these people are A-list celebrities, who have gained fame for their talent on social media and in real life.

His followers are highly diverse, both in behavior and demographically; therefore, they are mainly suitable for promoting products that can be consumed by the masses.

In India, examples of Megainfluencers are names like Anitta, iamitmm and Manoj Dey.

Macroinfluencer

Macro influencers have 100,000 to 1 million followers, but unlike mega influencers, they have gained fame by participating in Internet-based activities such as blogging, vlogs, or producing specialized content.

Because of their experience, brands prefer them because they can earn with enhanced exposure, brand recognition, and engagement through followers of specific niches. Some examples include beauty, fashion and entertainment influencer Foquinha and youtuber Carry Minati who talks about motherhood.

Microinfluencer

The most common type of influencer on Instagram today is the micro influencer, which has between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.

What sets them apart from their larger part is a smaller audience reach. However, microinfluencers may be more specialized than macro influencers and therefore more reliable by their extremely loyal, highly engaged and relevant audiences.

Microinfluencers work better, even for more local and regional business strategies. They are the ones who hold the greatest potential to advertise business in their own city, especially when out of large centers.

Nanoinfluencer

Nano influencers have less than 10,000 followers. Its reach is low, but its content has a great influence on a small, narrower or niche audience.

Companies take advantage of nano influencers because they know all or most of their followers, hence high engagement and conversions. They have a high level of intimacy with their audience, which can be highly beneficial to the right campaign and brand.

3 Tips on How to Do InfluenceR Marketing

1. How to find the right influencer
   Just like any strategy, research is the first step. Choose the platform you want to focus on first. You can always expand to other platforms later, but if you’re just getting started, stick with one. Ideally, your brand already has a presence on this network or is looking to expand into it.

If you’re not sure where to start, social listening can help you identify where people are talking about your industry and brand – and can help you find the most influential voices in your industry on every platform.

2. Meet your audience (really!)
   Although everyone thinks they know their end customer, many companies and managers are still confused about their target audience. That’s why it’s important to take a step back and do some research before you start distributing your precious product.

If you don’t have a clear vision and understanding of who your customer is and what your online buying behaviors are – it’s time to go back to market research and forget about influencers for a second.

3. Don’t just hold on to the number of followers
   While a big social media celebrity may seem like the ideal influencer on paper, look beyond the total number of followers. For more effective results, relevance is always more important than achieving. If your influencers are reaching your brand’s target market, then you’re already on the right track, no matter how big or small your audience may be.

After this guide, you’re closer to achieving a successful influence marketing strategy. To help you get the best results, get to know Raccoon’s Social Media service.

Instagram App Penetration Rates vs. Smartphone Users

Below, we see Instagram’s estimated penetration rates in the top countries by the number of Instagram users.

Some developing countries have HUGE populations but low smartphone adoption rates. Like parent company Facebook, these territories are where Instagram will see the most growth in years to come:

Country	Total population (MM)	Smartphone owners (MM)	Smartphone penetration (%)	Instagram users (MM)	Instagram penetration (%)
USA	329	260	79.1	120	46.2
India	1370	346	25.3	80	23.1
Brazil	212	96.9	45.6	77	79.5
Indonesia	270	83.9	31.1	63	75.1
Russia	144	95.4	66.3	44	46.1
Turkey	83	44.8	54	38	84.8
Japan	127	72.6	57.2	29	39.9
United Kingdom	67	55.5	82.9	24	43.2
Mexico	132	65.6	49.5	24	36.6
Germany	82.4	65.9	79.9	21	31.9

As you can see below, an estimated 46.2% of all smartphone owners in the US, regardless of age, have Instagram installed on their phones. Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey are the countries that have the highest app adoption, leaving little room for market growth.

Sources: (eMarketer) (Statista) (Statista) (BankMyCell)

Instagram Statistics (Top Picks)

• MAUs – Instagram monthly active users: 1 billion monthly active users access the Instagram app globally.
• DAUs – Instagram daily active users: 500 million daily active users access the Instagram app globally.
• Instagram Stories surpassed rival Snap Chat’s 150 million DAU’s in 8 months, now reaching 500 million people a day.
• At 1.386 billion (in terms of potential ad reach) Instagram is ranked as the 4th most popular social network by number of users. In front are Facebook 2.85b, YouTube 2.29b and WhatsApp 1.6b.
• 23.92% of the 4.18 billion active mobile internet users access Instagram monthly, the same amount of people that live in Europe and North America combined.
• 9.5% or 95 million Instagram users could be fake bots according to a Ghost Data report, costing brands $1.3 billion in 2019.
• Instagram is most popular in India, with 180 million users, followed by the United States (170 million), Brazil (110 million), Indonesia (93 million), and Russia (61 million).
• People spend an average of 29 minutes a day on Instagram – Users under the age of 25 spent 32 minutes and 24 minutes for those over 25.
• Instagram now has just 450 employees servicing over 1 billion users, compared to its parent company, Facebook, which has 58,000 employees for its 2.9 billion user base.
• Cristiano Ronaldo owns the influencer account with the most followers, equaling 33.9% of all monthly active Instagram users. (stats source: backlinko)

History of influence marketing

Influence marketing began in the 19th century, when American brands began hiring celebrities to endorse brands such as cigarettes and cleaning products. During this period, the popularity of films shown in the cinema expanded the power of the influence of actors and actresses. Consequently, fans began to imitate the stars they saw on the screen of the theaters.

Contemporary of Charles Chaplin, the comedian Fatty Arbuckle was one of the first to act in this way, still in the poster-boy model. Although it’s not exactly what you see as influence marketing today, it can be said that celebrities starring advertising campaigns were the embryo of this kind of advertising. In 1905, Arbuckle campaigned for Murad Cigarettes cigarettes.

After him, many other actors did the same, turning this activity into an industry not only in the United States, but around the world. Today, it is even discussed whether artificial influencers are the same category of influencers —and this debate is almost one hundred years old.

In 1931, Coca-Cola created what appears to have been the first artificial influencer of all time. Santa Claus is a legend from the 17th century.

However, Santa Claus dressed in red and white as we know it today is a creation of Coca-Cola, with a very similar intention to what Lu do Magalu can do. What changes is the context of the digital world—and the tools available.

In 1940, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld identified the existence of a real need for people to have opinion leaders, since mass communication had a limited effect on the population.

Over the course of the 1950s, advertising professionals began selling new lifestyles. Instead of showing consumers the characteristics of products, advertising reinvented itself and bet on a more modern approach, seeking to show how important they could be to people.

Throughout the 20th century, interest in psychology increased, as people sought to understand the forces that influenced society’s buying behavior. Reference studies in this field and communication have been developed. One of them was the historical account of personal influence, in 1955, by Lazarsfeld and Katz. In it, the authors theorize that ideas move from the media to the general public through channels called “opinion leaders”. The study notes that these leaders are successful in changing the behavior and beliefs of others due to their similarity to those they influence.

In the early 1990s, Stanley Milgram published the book “Six Degrees of Separation” a work that helped bring about the concept of social networks and the power of influence. The concept is interesting. It says anyone is at most six contacts away from anyone else on the planet. For example, the pizza delivery man who answered your order yesterday knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows Pelé. From anyone on the planet, there are a maximum of six levels of separation, according to Milgram.

Well, all these theories, fascinating in the offline era, then began to be widely used especially in the field of politics.

Some argue that the first influencers of the offline era, with characteristics similar to those of today’s digital influencers, were the electoral cables. In the book Microtrends, released in 2009, Mark Penn studied several cases of niche markets that were well explored.

One of them was soccer moms, or soccer moms, as they became known in the mid-1990s in the United States. They were single, typically white, middle-class mothers who spent time accompanying their children at sporting events (such as football). They ended up forming in a way very influential social networks in a pre-internet era. And there were certainly the leaders of these groups, who were the great analogue influencers of the time.

Before the case just sums up as a curious but unrelevant phenomenon, know that many political scientists attribute to soccer moms part of President Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1996 presidential election. At the time, many doubted the scope that the word-of-mouth message — fake news, even — could be from small groups. Today, with WhatsApp in action, you can see that this effect is perfectly doable.

All this was before the internet came on the scene, which paved the way for Orkut, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram. With the arrival of social networks and the decentralization of communication channels, practice has not only changed theory, but has changed the way communication happens. And digital influencers have transformed digital marketing into what it is today.