Are you looking to get paid as an influencer?

Social media is now accepted globally and has become an integral part of everyone’s life, this has given a golden opportunity for users with rich, engaging contents to accumulate loyal followers and earn a livelihood doing so. Social media users with such quality posts and huge fan base are known as influencers and brands have realized with time they are the best suited for their marketing campaigns.

Unlike other traditional media, social media is not bound by restrictions such as geographical location and target audience worry. The social media is accessible by all regardless of their age, class, and location. The ever-growing nature of the business indicates companies are investing more in influencer marketing as well as making way for aspiring influencers. Many businesses are looking for a side stream income to increase their revenue.

The Rise of Influencer Marketing

We will all probably agree that influencer marketing is on a steady rise, but figures and statistics might help us appreciate the acceptance and the recent boom that has hit the business.

Market Size: The most important yardstick to measure business growth is the market size. The influencer marketing business was estimated to be 1.6 billion in 2016, and it rose to almost double at 3 billion in 2017, a further 50% increase by 2018 to rise to 4.6 billion. The figure presently stands at 6.5 billion, which is a 400% increase from 2016.

Internet Searches: Another vital metric to measure growth and popularity is the amount of search engine searches. Increase in search is directly proportional to the increase in consciousness and acceptability. The phrase influencer marketing was searched 4000 times in 2015, 6400 times in 2016, 21,000 in 2017, and 60000 in 2018, representing a 1500% increase within 3 years.

Are you looking to get paid as an influencer?

What to Consider for a Successful Influencer Marketing

About 80% of influencer marketing campaigns are successful while the failed campaigns are caused by inadequate planning and failure to set ideal key performance indicators (KPIs). The following should be considered for a successful influencer marketing campaign:

Get the Right Influencer: A major cause of a failed influencer marketing campaign is choosing the wrong influencer for your campaign. Getting an influencer in the wrong niche, an influencer with poor contents, and an influencer that doesn’t use your products are few of the reasons why an influencer might not be ideal for your campaign. Making use of influencer agencies in choosing your influencer can help you avoid the mistake of choosing the wrong influencer.

Creative Contents: When launching an influencer marketing campaign, it is essential to dedicate some time to creating engaging contents, and choosing a creative influencer may help with this.

Right Target Audience: The success and popularity of an influencer doesn’t make him ideal for the campaign. Age, location, and gender of influencers’ followers must be taken into consideration when choosing the influencer for your influencer marketing campaign.

Adequate Preparation: Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well, to ensure a successful campaign, linking a URL to the campaign, selecting the right influencer and setting KPIs that will ensure good ROI are necessary.

Effective Terms of Agreement: After identifying your ideal influencer, the next step is setting terms of the agreement that will clearly spell out each party’s responsibilities as well as avoiding copyright issues.

What to Avoid When Choosing Influencer

Choosing the wrong influencer ruins an influencer marketing campaign, always avoid the following when choosing your influencer:

Fake Followers: The major headache for brands seeking influencer is engaging fake influencers, there are a few fake influencers with fake followers, fake likes, comments, and reposts, going through agencies can greatly reduce chances of dealing with fake influencers.

One-off Campaign: In order to improve influencer marketing campaign success, it is pertinent to try a continuous campaign that keeps your target audience engaged. Making use of brand ambassadors who are contracted to represent, promote, and market the brand summer, winter, spring, and fall, ensuring your audience are engaged continuously.

Avoid Very Expensive Influencers: Macro influencers with huge followers command a huge fee, kylie Jenner charges 1 million dollars per post while Cristiano Ronaldo charges 975,000 dollars for a single post. Only huge brands can afford the services of the macro influencer. Always stick to a budget and make judicious use of micro-influencers in your niche. Going beyond your budget to engage the services of a macro influencer may result in a failed campaign if the ROI doesn’t complement the investment.

What Makes an Influencer Marketing Campaign a Successful One?

Few metrics determine the success of an influencer marketing campaign, KPIs vary from brands to brands and campaign to campaign. The commonest KPIs are:

Brand Awareness: The essence of an influencer marketing campaign is to improve people’s consciousness about the brand, to measure the level of awareness, engagements like likes, clicks, comments, links, and shares are taken into consideration. This is particularly important for a newly launched product.

Improved Sales: It is natural to experience a surge in sales during and after a successful marketing campaign.

New Audiences: By the end of the campaign, brand awareness must have improved among the desired age bracket, gender, and location targets.

Lead Generation: Making instant sales is important, but so is having a list of potential customers and keeping in touch. During the influencer marketing campaign, names and emails can be generated through account setups, give away entries, and newsletters.

What have we Learned about Influencer Marketing in 2019?

For followers of influencer marketing, there is nothing new to report about the industry, the industry is rapidly growing and could hit a trillion dollars in nearest future, and Instagram remains the leading platform for influencers. Cristiano Ronaldo remains the most popular user of the platform. The state of influencer marketing in 2019 can be summarized in these few steps:

15% will spend up to 50% of their marketing budget on influencer marketing.

65% of brands will increase their budget for an influencer marketing campaign.

Influencer agencies increased from 420 to 740.

Instagram is the most used platform for influencers, and 89% of Influencers use Instagram.

Marketing channel spent most on is Instagram at 69%, followed by YouTube at 11%, Twitter is least at 1%.

Snapchat is the least used at 3%.

The most common budget range for influencer marketing annually is 1000 – 10000 dollars.

The most used content format is Instagram post at 78%, followed by Instagram stories at 73%, twitch Livestream is least at 5%.

Social media has come to stay, and it is now an integral part of everyone’s life. Those who set trends and have huge followership are making it big on social media. These people are known as influencers, brands rely on influencers to reach more target audience, these types of marketing is rapidly replacing old ways of marketing of print media and billboards.

In the last year Influencer agencies almost doubled, the market grew more prominent with a potential to grow even bigger, by preparing adequately and going through the diligent process in selecting an influencer, brands can grow their brand bigger by reaching their target audience in different geographical locations.