WARNING: You’re about to read the word “influencer” a lot! According to Collabstr, Influencer marketing will grow to a $15 billion market by the end of 2022. It’s a core content strategy of many brands and investment in the sector continues to grow year on year. But what is influencer marketing? And why has it taken the online world by storm? In this guide, I will provide a brief summary of influencer marketing and how it works.

What is Influencer Marketing: A Definition

Influencer marketing combines traditional content strategies with celebrity endorsement. An influencer is anyone online who has an audience that trusts them. This allows them to potentially ‘influence’ the audiences’ buying decisions. There are a wide variety of types of influencers, varying in the style of content, audience size and specific niches. Influencer marketing is the idea that any type of influencer has the possibility to sell products and services to their following. As such, businesses engage influencers to promote their goods in various ways.

Influencer marketing can take the form of endorsement, special offers, giveaways or straightforward ads. The marketing is done through the sharing of content primarily on social media, video and blogs. The influencer (or influencers, if there are more than one person involved in a social profile) produces content and the brand is mentioned in some capacity as part of it. When their followers see this endorsement they are more likely to consider a company or purchase from them directly. The return on investment in this type of marketing is high, and this is the reason we are seeing such consistent growth in this sector of marketing.

Types of Influencers

Influencers can be split into two sectors. The size of the following and the niche they cater for.

Influencer by Follower Count

Influencers can be defined simply by their following size.

Nano influencers (1K–10K followers)
Micro-influencers (10K–100K followers)
Macro influencers (100K–1M followers)
Mega or celebrity influencers (1M+ followers)

If you are looking to engage an influencer, it’s not just about their following size. They must have an audience that is interested in your brand style, products or services. This is where the other side of influencing comes in, what niche or industry does the influencer cater to.

Influencer by Niche

Any industry could potentially have influencers. You’ll find a wider variety of niches in the nano and micro-influencer sectors. But when it comes to larger followings there are certainly a handful of industries that are incredibly popular and will continue to grow in 2022. These include;

Gamers
Beauty and Fashion
Sports, Fitness and Health
Bloggers and vloggers
Travel
Finance
Parenting
Photographers

It’s all about finding the right niche for your target market audience.

How does influencer marketing work

To explain the mechanism behind influencer marketing, this is the process by which it works.

Influencers create quality content

The main job of an influencer, even before they have a following, is to create content. Content encompasses lots of things, but in the case of influencers, there are several core content types that are the focus.

Images and text – Particularly popular on classic social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Linkedin. The influencers focus on high quality, curated images to produce an aesthetic that is pleasing to their audience.
Videos – Youtube could be argued to be the home of influencers with a long history of established and extremely wealthy influencers. Youtube used to have a strict upload limit of 10 minutes which fostered a lot of creativity from buddy videographers. But nowadays, you’ll find that most videos by top influencers are much longer, some extending to 2 hours! However, that doesn’t mean that short videos are dead. Tiktok is probably the social video platform with the most growth and their limit until very recently was 1 minute (Videos can now be up to 3 minutes)
Blogs – Blogging is still very popular despite what critics say. In fact, there are 600+ million blogs worldwide and while the marketplace is crowded, there are countless successful influencers whose primary focus is writing about their lives and interests.

Consumers Trust Influencers

Influencers don’t just appear overnight. They are often people who have crafted a following over many months, years and even decades. For example, some of the most successful Youtube influencers have been on the platform for well over 10 years. PewDiePie, a Swedish YouTuber founded his YouTube channel in 2010 and, today, it boasts more than 110 million subscribers and has an estimated net worth of $40 million. This longevity, coupled with quality content that engages followers means they have great influence over their audience. The biggest influencers are essentially online celebrities, and their beliefs, views and endorsements are trusted by their users.

The influencer endorses your business

Now an influencer has a great reach and amazing content, they can endorse some brands. As I said above, this could take many forms. For those sharing social posts, it’s likely they’ll display a product directly on the image and/or caption. Those influencers whose platform is mainly video-based will talk about the business, product or associated offer. Sometimes this can be a fairly long part of their video, especially on Youtube. In shorter videos like TikTok, they may curate a series of videos or show the product or service in action. For blogs, there is usually a lot more focus on the paying business. The result is a more personal advert to a captive audience.

The Audience Purchases the Product or Service

And that’s how influencer marketing works. With the combination of a targeted audience, quality content and trust in the influencer, you create a marketing campaign with a high return on investment. In many ways, it’s exactly how any other content marketing strategies work. The difference is you are cutting out months and years of content creation by hiring or investing in influencers who have already done the hard work. This ability to tap into a ready-made content strategy is why influencer marketing works and is on the rise.

Influencer Marketing will continue to grow

Trust. That’s what influencer marketing is all about. With an online world that is packed to the rafters with companies vying for your attention, influencers can cut straight to their audience without distractions. While many marketers will spout about ‘personalised’ campaigns being the thing to change in your strategy this year, influencers can be a human alternative to the bombardment of ads. People still want human connection. After two years of the pandemic, this is truer now than it’s ever been. And that’s why influencer marketing will continue to grow.