Influencer marketing: the main strategy to launch your brand

Influencer marketing is now worth 13.8 billion dollars. This ROI strategy has developed considerably in recent years (source: HubSpot). Indeed, 93% of marketers have an influencer marketing strategy. B2C brands are now very familiar with this strategy with multiple benefits, but it is also proving its worth with B2B brands. Moreover, far from being reserved for the beauty sector, influencer marketing can be adopted by various other niche sectors such as tech, food, publishing…

You want to launch your brand thanks to influencer marketing? Hivency by SKEEPERS, an influencer platform, gives its 5 essential steps to success!  

5 steps to launch your brand with influencer marketing

Define your objectives

Each campaign should be segmented according to the objective (or two) you set for your brand. Influencer marketing can address a variety of issues that brands face, especially younger brands:

• How to increase brand awareness? The goal is to make your values and your story known and to make your audience want to follow your brand. For this purpose, storytelling, or the way you communicate about your brand, plays a key role.
• How to increase sales, and thereby the conversion rate? Social commerce, which refers to the sale of products and services via social media, is becoming increasingly important on social networks. In parallel, influencers, thanks to links redirecting to your website, are an excellent way to increase your sales, while bringing traffic to your website. 
• How to get better visibility on your products? Influencers are an excellent communication tool. As opinion leaders (KOLS), they promote your products and/or services to their niche community.
• How to generate web-to-store traffic? This is a major challenge for brands that have a strong online presence and want to attract customers to their physical stores.

By setting clear objectives, it will be easier for you to find the right influencers and build a clear brief for your future collaborations with influencers. 

Know your target

To optimise a marketing strategy, it is essential to study your target audience. Depending on your target, you will have to use different channels, adapt your message, etc. This analysis is partly based on the study of :

• How old is your target?
• What are their hobbies? 
• Which social networks do they use?

On the other hand, once you have completed your persona, you also need to know what type of influencer to work with. Indeed, each influencer, and especially the nano-influencers (less than 5,000 followers) and micro-influencers (up to 100,000 followers), has a niche community. Moreover, each content creator has his or her own style and this must be in line with your editorial charter for a meaningful collaboration.

Choose on which social media platforms to operate in 2022 

Instagram or your brand’s online storefront

Today, Instagram has 1.386 billion active users worldwide (source: Digimind). As well as being a social network that is constantly adapting, it is also one of the brands’ favourite social networks, with 67% of them saying it is the most effective social network (source: Hootsuite). For a brand that wants to launch on Instagram, it is the social network not to be ignored if your target is present there! 

Why collaborate with influencers on Instagram? It is the perfect social network to showcase your products online. In addition, influencers create aesthetically pleasing posts, Reels and stories to capture the attention of their audience, in which they share their experience and opinion on the products you send them. Thanks to the sticker link, influencers give direct access to the product they are talking about: an excellent gain in visibility and conversion!

YouTube: the video format is growing in popularity

YouTube has more than 2 billion logged-in monthly users, it is a very appreciated platform, and with good reasons! Indeed, the video format has exploded in 2021 and has the ability to be very engaging: an ideal format to develop visibility. Note that 90% of consumers watch videos to help them in their purchasing decision (source: HubSpot). In addition, the video format offered by YouTube, where influencers speak on camera as if they were talking to friends, makes the brand-influencer partnership more human. For a brand that is just starting out, this is a winning combo: a large audience while communicating in a way that makes advertising seem less aggressive to users.

In order to collaborate with YouTubers, the influencers of the platform, you can propose them :

• To film a haul, where influencers show what they have received, giving consumers a clearer idea of your products;
• To realize a tutorial explaining how your product works;
• To organize a contest which is a good way to test your products while animating the community, etc.

The vegan and cruelty-free cosmetics brand Lush recently decided to withdraw from social networks in order to preserve the mental health of its users (source: Vogue Business). However, it continues to operate on YouTube to keep in touch with its customers and to continue to communicate on its products by presenting very aesthetic videos that embody the brand’s values. YouTube is therefore a very interesting medium to move away from traditional advertising.   

TikTok to reveal your your creativity to a large audience

TikTok has been a revolution in 2021. Many social networks have been inspired by these famous short videos, each more creative than the last. This originality has seduced the young generation also known as Generation Z (people born after 1997). With 1.5 billion active users expected in 2022 (source: App Annie), this platform offers young brands the opportunity to reach a very large audience. 

To make the choice to collaborate with influencers on TikTok, you have to agree to propose and see content with a less corporate tone, lighter, because users want to discover while being entertained! Furthermore, as a trend-setting platform, you need to be on the lookout for trends if you want to succeed in making your brand go viral.

The little plus of TikTok? A music library with more than 150,000 tracks: enough to liven up your creations (source: TikTok)!

Pinterest for your visibility and to generate sales

Originally, Pinterest was a social network to inspire its users. Today, Pinterest is expanding and installing competitive tools to facilitate brand-influencer collaborations. One of the latest features is Ideas Pins, which allows content creators to create short, permanent videos for users to keep (source: Pinterest Newsroom). As a new brand on the market, this is a great platform to gain visibility by promoting your original products, which will become your bestsellers. For example, you can propose to influencers to create a wishlist, or gift list at the time of the holidays, a routine based on 3 of your products, etc. In addition, the platform also develops social commerce, allowing content creators to attach links to your e-shop.  

A blog for your brand awareness

Blogging is still relevant, and on the Hivency by SKEEPERS platform it is possible to launch influencer campaigns via this channel. Allowing you to produce much longer and more descriptive content than a simple photo posted on another social media, it is the ideal social media to develop your brand awareness, especially if you are just starting out in your market! Indeed, the influencers using this media, also called “bloggers” have a strong power of prescription. Thanks to their pen, they write their detailed opinion with photos to support their words, such as fittings, or “try-on”, for example.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of ideas for collaborating with bloggers to develop your brand’s image in the influencer community:

• Offer sponsored articles, which consists of paying the influencer to write an article about your products in an authentic way;
• Ask for their opinion on products you send them. His article will be a powerful UGC, etc. 

Source: Zoella’s blog 

Choose nano and micro-influencers

The number of followers does not determine the performance of an influencer campaign. Depending on your objective decided beforehand and the campaign, you will not choose the same type of influencer. There are mainly 4 types of influencers that will meet different objectives:

Source: Hivency by SKEEPERS

As a new brand, it is in your interest to work with nano and micro-influencers. They are perceived as more authentic and are closer to their community. So, in order to get your brand in front of a niche target, you will have a better chance of turning their followers into loyal consumers. On Instagram, the average engagement rate for a micro-influencer with less than 15,000 followers is 3.86%, compared to 1.36% for a content creator with 500,000 to 1 million followers (source: Influencer Marketing Hub). To find influencers, don’t hesitate to use hashtags that will bring together a whole niche community! 

Curate content to keep up with the latest trends in influencer marketing

In order for users to notice you, you need to follow the trends on the social networks where you are present, especially on a platform like TikTok. But these trends are ephemeral. To help you keep up, you need to do content curation. This technique consists in creating an account with which you will follow your brand as well as influencers and other actors who evolve in the same universe as your brand. In this way, the algorithm of each social network will constantly offer you trendy content related to what you are about.

These 5 key steps are to help you structure your influencer marketing strategy if you are launching your brand. As you’ve seen, this strategy is not just for established, market-leading brands – it’s for the very best. 

Photo credits: Domenico Loeia via Unsplash