Influencers Marketing

In a society where traditional media began to lose weight and new generations and technologies gained more power, some digital users knew how to capitalize these new platforms and form their own base of followers through social networks under the name of influencers.

An influencer is a digital user who has a large number of followers in social networks over whom he shows a certain influence, posing an aspirational and attractive lifestyle for those who follow him and for brands.

As a growing phenomenon, social networks have managed to intrude into people's private lives as a digital blog. Increasingly exposing themselves to public scrutiny, digital citizens decide to remove the barrier between private and public.

An influencer is a social network key opinion leader given that he has some credibility or prestige in a certain area and thanks to his vast number of followers in networks, he is able to become an asset for a brand. Thanks to his constant presence in networks, he can fulfill the role of role model, urging that people consume the same as themselves and follow their same patterns. It seeks to generate engagement, boost the conversation on a certain topic and / or influence the decision to buy products / services from a target audience.

Types of Influencers

Influencers can be classified by sector they represent and by number of followers:

Influencity, an Influencer Marketing Automation Platform, proposes that there are 8 types of influencers, according to the sector they correspond to: Foodie, Fashion, Beauty, Gamers, Entertainment, Vloggers, Travelers and Fitness.

Furthermore, IAB SpainCommunication, Advertising and Digital Marketing Global Association, presented the first white paper on influencers in early November 2019, which classified them into 5 groups, according to the number of followers:

1- Nano influencers (up to 10k);

2 - Micro influencers (from 10k to 50k);

3 - Mid-range influencers (50k to 250k);

4 - Macro influencers (250k to 1M);

5 - Top influencers (more than 1M).

A final distinction related to the origin of the fame or popularity of these influencers is to establish if they are or not native. That is, based on the origin and interaction with its audience, we can distinguish those people who managed to put together a profile from zero from those who positioned themselves from their previous fame.

Parameters to measure its relevance

Although for several experts the number of followers by itself is not important nor works as a valid measure to determine the profitability or the degree of quality of an influencer, largely due to the purchased accounts or false profiles that are used to increase that number, it is useful to measure the level of engagement of each profile.

Engagement is probably the most important quantitative tool to determine if a profile is good or not. To do this, the data we must consideris:

Reach: number of accounts that the publication reached.

Interaction: likes, comments, shares, saved images, reactions and responses.

In the case of Instagram stories, we would take the views (number of accounts that saw the story) and the interaction (number of reactions and responses).

Both Reach and Story Views and Interactionsare within each influencer's private metrics. These are usually requested by the brands prior to hiring them mostly to be able to calculate the results of the collaboration.

Summarized, the formula to calculate engagement would be:

(Total interactions) / (Scope of publication) × 100

Basically,the Engagement Ratemeasures the average of interactions that an account generates with its followers,establishing what type of content is attractive.

Another metric used for influencer selection is the actual Reach Rate, which measures the percentage of the influencer's audiencethat is actually reached by the content:

Reach / (Total community size (followers)) × 100

Finally, there is the value of the Sponsorship Rate, that is, how many impressions are generated thanks to sponsored content compared to organic one:

(Sponsored Impressions) / (Organic Impressions) × 100

These metrics are relevant since they provide an estimate of how beneficial it can be for a brand to associate with the image and narrative of a certain influencer.They must consider possible conversion and, to a greater extent,effects on reputation and being able to positioned within the imagery of the target audience. The main goals that can be stand out in an influencer campaign are visibility (getting impressions and views); engagement (interactions, meaning likes, comments, profile visits and direct messages); traffic (clicks to external platforms) and conversion (achieving goals similar to purchases or leads).

Once the campaign has started there are more metrics that can be calculated to evaluate how efficient the influencer's performance was. One of them is CPM, that is, the cost of the influencer divided by the number of impressions and multiplied by a thousand.

In addition to awell- defined identity and a loyal follower base that provides a good engagement rate, the influencer must have a functional, attractive narrative for that brand in particular. Its greatest asset and value, for which it is mostly compared tokey opinion leaders and role models, is the trust it generates and the way in which it is perceived. Receiving a recommendation from a user to whom weare exposed to 24/7, that is someone we feel we actually know, as an audience, it is easier to perceiveit closer than traditional advertising.

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