Including an influencer in your brand strategy is an opportunity
to reach a specific audience, especially here in Peru where 44% of users on
social networks follow an influencer, according to a survey conducted by the
multinational market research company and consultant (Ipsos) in 2019. But
adding them to your marketing strategy cannot be taken lightly. There must be a
prior investigation of possible collaborations that a certain influencer could
have with your brand.
Influencer marketing has an objective for brands and that is
that through these people they can be humanized, especially with brands that
still do not form a community on social networks. It greatly helps brand
engagement and allows you to take your content to other platforms in a more
organic way. The entire strategy behind it should be based on planning the
message and its objective, the rest is provided by the influencer.
Do you want to apply influencer marketing to your brand? First,
there are some points that must be clarified on how to choose the right
influencer, country regulations and how to direct a strategy from this third
party without sounding like a sale. Because sometimes there are people who
confuse the great organic potential that an influencer can have for the brand
and make wrong content with very commercial messages. So let's define:
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is advertising that
is done through collaborations with people who influence a certain community on
social networks. The content that is transmitted with an influencer will be
motivated by the recommendation of a product or service without straying from
the idea of telling the story of the brand from their voice, a mixture of
what is known as Unboxing.
An influencer manages a number of followers that must be
sponsored by the level of interaction of that community. For a few years now,
influencer marketing had to become more rigid in order to consider a useful
social network account. The reason? Many followers and few interactions. It is
important that when choosing an influencer you take into account how committed
your community is to him or her. So that you can identify the influencers we
will divide them into:
Micro Influencers:
They are the influencers who have a close, participatory and
faithful community. Created from the trust that person generated in users, they
usually have less than 10,000 followers. This group includes: fans of a
subject, specialists, bloggers and all those people who have a very specific
range of content, that is, they focus directly on something like: makeup
bloggers, doctors, chefs and fans of a lifestyle like veganism. Normally to
contact them the treatment is personal and they answer their comments and
interactions themselves.
Micro influencers generate a lot of empathy and trust because
their content is very “homemade” and they tend to share their lives to a great
extent. These are the ones to go for if you want to reach a fairly specific
community.
influencers:
For a character to be considered Influencers, the number of
followers does not matter, but the power of conviction that a certain community
has. Normally these people manage with more than 50 thousand followers, whose
interaction and engagement is very high. Sometimes they usually have
representatives and in some cases they manage their accounts themselves.
The National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the
Protection of Intellectual Property of the Peruvian State (INDECOPI) also
defines it as: "a person who has some credibility on a given subject and
who, given his ability to convince or reach his followers, without necessarily
taking into account the number of these, can become a determining component in
the decisions that consumers make in the market.
Celebrities:
Celebrities are public figures who have become famous for great
achievements in music, sports, and television. They are the characters who
already have credibility for considering themselves an artist and therefore are
more likely to be recognized globally and regionally. In general, a character
of this magnitude has a team that helps him run his networks and his level of
engagement can be even higher than the other previous ones if the personality
exercises it frequently.
Here you can download the guide on digital advertising and
recommendations for influencers from INDECOPI. A guide whose main objective is
to guide the correct exercise of digital advertising practices, with a special
focus on influencer advertising in Peru.
Types of digital content that an Influencer can make
The formats can be varied, but the most used by influencers are
video as it allows them to be closer to their followers. However, there are
ways to show or talk about your product to empathize from the experience they
have had, which can be very helpful during the content strategy. For this,
social media formats such as Instagram Live, stories and Facebook Live can be
very helpful. But these terms can also be referred to:
Unboxing, a term that began to be used since 2006 according to
Wikipedia and that refers to showing a product with a video that reveals the
entire journey to take it out of its box and show the product from when the
influencer receives it to showing their ways of use. They are usually
continuous and name the brand or how it has worked for them according to their
use.
According to the INDECOPI Guide, unboxing is defined as follows:
"sharing on social networks the process of unpacking and/or revealing
products, services and/or experiences offered by the brand/advertiser and which
have been sent by the latter to an influencer, in the framework of an
advertising strategy”.
In such a way that to make this type of content the influential
person must have previously tried the product and have made sure as a brand
collaborator that it is something real. The genuineness of this act is
paramount, to prevent it from becoming a kind of misleading advertising.
Record using the product: Short videos that show the person
using a certain product or service for a good period of time. Where, in
addition, brands are usually tagged so that the people captured can go directly
to their main page. In the case of services such as specialists and
restaurants, short videos, photos of the dishes while attending the place and
content with fun activities are usually added.
The key to this content is creativity, which although sometimes they leave it to the influencer, it is necessary to have an allied marketing agency to help them plan the influencer marketing strategy.