What is Influencer Marketing: All About Influencers

Influencer Marketing And UGC Mobile Marketing

Jess Ailion 16 November 2023

This post was originally published in August 2021 and updated in November 2023.

Influencer marketing has grown exponentially in the past few years. Just a few years ago, the industry was worth less than two billion dollars. In 2023, it has grown into a $21 billion dollars industry. That’s growth at a level you cannot ignore. 

At the core of influencer marketing’s success is the fact that influencers can be absolutely anyone, and in that way, everybody can find different types of influencers to whom they can relate. There are people with influence in every vertical out there, filling every niche with their content. 

The term “influencer marketing” has seen a 465% increase in Google searches since 2016. Everybody’s talking about it, everybody’s factoring it into the marketing strategy, and everybody’s allocating a budget to influencer marketing campaigns. In this article, we’ll cover what is influencer marketing, tips for building an influencer marketing campaign, and more. Let’s get started!

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing involves leveraging influencers as a crucial component of your marketing strategy to endorse your product or service. There are various methods to achieve this, including product gifting, social media post sponsorship, ambassador agreements, and more. The effectiveness of influencer marketing can be attributed to two key factors:

Firstly, there’s a high level of engagement and trust that exists between influencers and their audience, particularly nano influencers and micro-influencers. This means that if an influencer recommends your app, service, or other product to their followers, they will likely trust this recommendation more than a traditional ad. 

Secondly, influencers have a strong reach among specific audiences, particularly macro and mega influencers. Macro influencers have between 100,000 to 1 million followers, while mega influencers have over 1 million followers. That’s a lot of people you could be exposing your brand to.

What is an Influencer?

Our comprehensive guide delves into the four distinct types of influencers, but the bottom line is that an influencer possesses the capability to leverage their expertise, authority, audience relationships, and more to sway the purchasing decisions of others. These influencers can be classified based on their follower count into these types:

• Mega influencers (over 1 million followers)
• Macro influencers (100,000 – 1 million followers)
• Micro influencers (10,000 – 100,000 followers)
• Nano influencers (1,000 to 10,000 followers)

5 Ways Influencer Marketing Can Help Your Brand

If you have a strong influencer marketing strategy, the possibilities are endless. To find out all about crafting the best influencer marketing campaign strategy, we have you covered here. For now, let’s delve into the top five ways influencer marketing can help you grow your app.

1. Brand Awareness Campaign

There are plenty of influencers out there with more reach than a traditional TV ad could boast. We shouldn’t underestimate the power that mega and macro influencers have to get your app in front of as many eyes as possible. Mega influencers have millions of followers who spend hours scrolling social media on their smartphones, so catch them where they’re already hanging out and expose them to your brand. 

Mega influencers don’t have the same engagement rates as micro-influencers, for example, so they might not have the same capacity to get users to download your app through trust with their followers, but they will be able to get your app name and logo out there so it’s in people’s minds. 

2. App Downloads

It’s no secret that word of mouth is one of the most effective marketing methods. But the average person’s word of mouth doesn’t quite reach the scale of an influencer’s word of mouth – to their thousands of followers. So why not leverage an influencer’s powerful word of mouth to market your app? Their followers are following them for their opinions, recommendations, and value, so are likely to trust your app more if it’s recommended to them this way. 

A brief glimpse into your app and how it works could be just the incentive a potential user needs to download your app. Influencers can offer an inside peek before a commitment has to be made. 

3. Testing New Target Audiences

Enlisting the help of an influencer to test your product or service in new waters can be a good place to start if you want to grow your audience. Let’s say you have a travel app with mostly Millennial users, you could start working with a Gen Z travel vlogger to expose your app to a younger demographic. Based on the data following this campaign, such as conversion and engagement rates, you can gauge whether it’s worth investing more money into this development. 

4. Authenticity

The success of influencer marketing is driven by its ability to feel authentic, at least far more so than traditional advertising. Influencers are often ordinary people who other ordinary people find easy to form relationships and engage with. As such, an element of trust is built up over time that can go a long way when an influencer agrees to work with your brand. 

5. Creativity

The great part about bringing influencers on board is racking their creative brains for new campaign ideas and feeling safe in the knowledge that they know their audience well and so know what content will resonate best with them. They know what keeps their audience coming back time and time again, so you should trust their creative insights and roll with their ideas. 

The more personalized the content, the better chance it will have at success. It will make the content feel more organic. This personalization is what differentiates influencer marketing from traditional advertising and is what gives it such high success rates.

5 Tips for Influencer Marketing Strategy

For crafting the perfect influencer marketing campaign, we’ve covered everything you need to know in full detail here. However, we’ll give you a summary of our top five tips for building your influencer marketing strategy below.

1. Goals and KPIs

Let’s get straight to it. You need to set your campaign goals first and foremost. Examples include:

• Promoting a new product launch
• Promoting app expansion into new category
• Increasing downloads to an app
• Increasing brand engagement
• Driving brand awareness
• Promoting in-app purchases

Defining what your campaign goals are allows you to track them once the campaign is underway to measure whether the campaign is successful and to strategize going forward. What worked best? What didn’t work? What could be improved? The parameter is whether the different elements of the campaign contributed towards your outlined goals and KPIs. 

Once you have established your campaign goals, it is crucial to develop clear action steps and KPIs for your influencers. This will ensure they understand their role in helping you achieve desired outcomes. You can also request insights such as impressions data, engagement rates, and even use install attribution links to track app installations. To navigate this process effectively, partnering with an expert influencer marketing agency is highly recommended. They can provide valuable data-driven insights and guide you in selecting the most suitable influencers for your brand and KPIs.

2. Choosing the Right Influencers

Ultimately, this comes down to what type of influencer you want (or need) to work with and whether they will resonate with your target users. This decision is determined in part by your campaign goals – will the influencer be able to deliver your set goals? 

Platform

You need to take into account the platforms the influencer uses and whether your target audience is present and engages with them there. You need to also factor in the influencer’s reach and industry. What’s more, you can ask for their statistics regarding engagement and more.

Engagement

A good engagement rate is the key to a successful influencer marketing campaign. An influencer can have hundreds of thousands of followers, but if they have low engagement then they’re less likely to drive results for your app, and it’s a sign that perhaps they’ve got a lot of paid bots bulking up their follower counts. 

• There are certain platforms that work better for certain app verticals and target user base demographic. For example, TikTok has a largely Gen Z demographic, so if those are the users you’re trying to attract to your app, it’s a good place to look for influencers. YouTube and Twitch have a lot of gamers, so if you have a gaming app, then they’re good places to look for influencers. Also, the features of your gaming app will be best showcased in video format. 

Micro and Nano influencers often have higher engagement rates than mega-influencers, for example. This is worth bearing in mind.

Content

Another factor in choosing which influencers to work with is whether their content matches your brand image. If they’ve previously promoted products or apps that would make your audience lose trust, or would raise a red flag to your stakeholders, then they’re probably not the influencer for you. Or do they oversaturate their feed with constant sponsored posts? This can be a bad look and can threaten the trust their followers have in them. A more selective influencer is often viewed as more trustworthy.

Reach

Coming back to the idea of an influencer’s reach, this refers to the number of accounts you can potentially reach from their following. However, you need to look at the number of bots or inactive users contributing to this number because they do not indicate a good reach even if the number itself does.

• Many influencer marketing platforms and tools, such as Klear, FanBytes, and Upfluence, are able to help you identify bots and inactive users within an influencer’s following.

It’s okay to stop working with an influencer if they don’t deliver on your set goals. In the same vein, if the campaign is a success, consider working with them again. You have so much data to leverage based on their specific audience. For as long as their audience responds well to the campaign and your desired metrics are being achieved, the partnership can only be positive. 

3. How to Reach Out and Craft the Brief

These days, it’s very common to reach out to influencers via agencies or platforms. Many agencies have marketplaces and services that feature reliable influencers and will help you get matched with the most relevant creators for your brand and goals.

Before reaching out to an influencer, try engaging with their content by liking, commenting on, and sharing their posts. Then, when you do reach out, provide some information about your brand, your campaign goals, and what you can offer the influencer – what’s in it for them? This shouldn’t just be in relation to money, but what is the benefit for their self-brand to be gained by working with your brand?

• Another benefit of engaging with an influencer’s content before requesting to work with them is the exposure it will give their followers to your app in a totally organic way. This can help give your brand credibility. 

Don’t expect an influencer to post a lot of content for your brand very quickly. Remember the oversaturation of sponsored posts we touched upon above. This can be a big negative. 

When crafting your brief, you need to be clear and direct. Some questions to answer throughout the brief are:

• What USPs do you want the influencer to highlight?
• What Call To Action are you after? E.g., “You can download the app here”. 
• At what point do you want the CTA to be mentioned in the content? E.g., Video content benefits from a CTA in the first and last thirty seconds. 
• What are the format-specific inclusions? E.g., video content benefits from showing the app in use to give users an indication of what they’ll be getting if they download it. 
• Do you want a multi-platform approach or a single-channel approach? 

As far as the signed agreements go, these could be for anything from simple mentions of your app to a full-on brand ambassadorship. A single mention or short description would obviously be the cheapest, it only goes up and up from there. 

In the brief, you can request influencers to explain your product’s or service’s features and how they can use them. Ultimately, you want them to show potential customers what they’re missing out on and make them want to engage with your brand and ultimately make a purchase. 

4. Use the Influencer’s Creativity

Influencers are essentially self-made brands. They’ve either built up their following by being a celebrity in the public eye or by providing consistent, creative, and valuable content to their audience. Particularly when it’s the latter, they know exactly what kind of content resonates best with their followers. Take advantage of their creativity and knowledge to make your campaigns more authentic and the most likely to succeed. 

Out of everyone, they know their audience the best, so trust their creative take on the content they produce for your app. What ideas do they have to successfully promote your brand to their audience? If each of your influencer campaigns is different because each one has a different influencer’s input, it’s a lot better for your brand. Ten different carbon copy content pieces from ten different influencers aren’t going to have as much input because each audience is slightly different, and it will feel less authentic. 

Another factor at play here is the fact that their social media channels are effectively their entire brand, and they won’t want to do anything that could damage it, so the content they produce will need to be in line with their general aesthetic. They’ve invested time into building their brand and following, so their reputation is of utmost importance to protect this. 

5. Budget

Different types of influencers charge different amounts, and even within each influencer category the fees each influencer charges vary significantly. However, you can rely on the obvious facts like mega or celebrity influencers being the most expensive and nano influencers being the least expensive. Usually, a bigger reach equates to a higher fee. 

The fact that there is such a huge price variation among influencers is actually a positive because it means there’s an influencer out there for every brand no matter how big or small your marketing budget is. A celebrity influencer could cost up to $1,000,000 for a single post, which is totally unattainable for a small business, whereas micro-influencers can charge as little as $200, which is much more reasonable. 

When setting the budget, you need to consider the planning time, execution time, and review time. Influencer campaigns need monitoring to measure their success so they don’t just end when the content has been posted. 

To determine your budget, you’ll also need to take into account the expected ROI of your campaign. This will help you figure out what you can justify spending on each post. In 2023, businesses are making around $6.50 for every $1 they invest in influencer marketing.  Finally, it’s always beneficial to seek guidance from an expert influencer marketing agency to manage your campaigns effectively. By leveraging data-driven insights, they can assist you in optimizing campaign performance and achieving your desired results. 

FAQs

Jess Ailion

Jess is Moburst's Content Marketing Manager who came to us all the way from the UK. After studying English Literature, she found herself writing about all things mobile marketing. When she's not spending her time writing, you can find her cooking for her friends or exploring new places.

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