With the passing of every year influencer marketing is becoming a greater tool in the marketing for day. Spending on Ads is increasing, as a growing number of companies spend more on influencer marketing and some even start to budget for the same. About 60% of businesses are increasing their budgets for influencer marketing with every passing year.
With these details coming up the marketers and business owners ask more questions in a bid to understand more about influencer marketing. Some questions they ask are,
How to find the right kind of an influencer?
How to publish successful sponsored content?
How to measure the ROI?
And a lot more questions to follow.
However, even before answering the above questions, you will need to understand which social media platform is the best for their influencer marketing campaign. This question can be very tricky as the influencers and the social media channels are dynamic in nature and constantly evolving.
The social media channels
With every update, social media apps are adding new features, introducing new types of content formats which grow, lose or shift their audiences’ attention. These changes and fluctuations are difficult to track and have a huge impact on influencer marketing campaigns. Concurring on the dynamic nature of the social media platforms let us try to understand the considerations when selecting the right media channels for your social media influencer marketing campaign.
Let’s begin by taking a look at what channels are being used by other marketers and where their focus lies. As evident from a marketing survey, the top social media platforms to run an influencer marketing campaign are,
Instagram - 89%
YouTube - 70%
Facebook - 45%
Blogs - 44%
Twitter - 33%
LinkedIn - 19%
Pinterest - 15%
Twitch - 6%
Snapchat - 3%
Others - 1%
Instagram is currently the leader in the choice of platform for running these campaigns as it boasts of a massive user base after its huge user base expansion in 2018. YouTube comes in second as it also has a large user base and remains strategically important because of the variety of its uses.
If you consider the allocation of finances more than 65% of the influencer marketing budget is spent on Instagram. This is followed by YouTube at 11% and blogs at 7%. This suggests that Instagram is not only important as a choice of the platform but is also directly proportional when it comes to the amount of money spent on sponsorships.
It is worthwhile to know what channels others are using and at the same time, you will need to know which one suits you best for your campaign. This is more often than not decided by your own goals and targets. Consider the elements of your campaign and how they suit a platform when you select the platform for your campaign. Every social media app offers a unique audience and set of influencers along with its own benefits when it comes to influencer marketing campaigns.
The format of the content
Every social media platform has one or more content formats to offer, but which is the best. Which one should you select to deliver your sponsored content? As explained earlier you will need to understand what you want to say. Next comes how you would want to say it. This is what you also need to consider as you select a channel for your influencer marketing campaign.
Instagram: Instagram post, story, and video. IGTV as well.
YouTube: YouTube video and live.
Facebook: Facebook post, video and live.
Twitter: Twitter post and video.
Blogs: Blog posts.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn post, video, and pulse.
Twitch: Twitch live stream.
The ratings of influencer marketing content formats as per a survey on the basis of their effectiveness and popularity are as follows,
Instagram Post-78%
Instagram Story-73%
YouTube Video-56%
Instagram Video-54%
Blog Post-36%
Facebook Post-23%
Facebook Video-22%
Tweets-18%
Facebook Live-14%
YouTube Live-10%
Other-6%
Twitch Live Stream-5%
Certainly, the latest popular formats are not necessarily the best ones for your campaign. Formats like videos on YouTube or Facebook posts may not be the top-ranking ones but may be very effective when it comes to your campaign's goals and may just be the place where your target audience is accumulated.
You may even find out that the one suiting your campaign may help you reach out to a range of audiences and a variety of consumers. You may even plan and strategize to run your campaign on a range of content formats over a variety of social media platforms, as there actually can be multiple formats that can successfully promote your brand, product, or service.
To use an example let’s say you are a cosmetics brand, and you want to partner with a visually beautiful model to post a stunning close-up picture of herself wearing your makeup. You could also partner with makeup artists who use your products to transform average-looking people into extremely beautiful. You could also partner with the mother of a newborn returning to the blog after childbirth highlighting how your cosmetics has made her happy about herself and thus, prompted her return to writing blogs.
The main factor to consider when you are selecting or identifying a channel needs to revolve around your plan of the campaign. Many ways and ideas will present themselves before you. You may be inclined to use one of the ways or multiple ones as per your strategy. You may even want to work with an influencer or a set of influencers to make your campaign more effective. Beyond your strategizing phase, you might also want to run the campaign on multiple platforms, using multiple content formats and with a variety of influencers.
Influencer marketing is one of the most efficient ways to market your product or service or raise awareness about your business. It has taken the marketing world by storm and its efficiency is unquestionable. However, it comes with a lot of choices even before you start the campaign. The choices will make or break your campaign and in other words, write the success story of your brand. Choose after a lot of analysis and research and build a strategy to fit your plan. You need to plan for success and effectiveness considering your target audience, and their choices in detail. After all, the customer is the king and an Influencer is a god.