Just 4-5 years ago, brands sought to collaborate exclusively with top bloggers, motivating this by the desire to reach as large an audience as possible. But this desire ultimately had the opposite effect: the level of trust of the target audience in the opinions of million-follower bloggers has significantly decreased due to the abundance of advertising content. As a result, advertisers began to pay more and more attention to influencers with a smaller, but more devoted and loyal audience.
Let’s take a quick look at the categories of influencers by audience size and average advertising price:
- Nano bloggers — up to 10,000 followers. As a rule, they special database blog not for the purpose of earning money, but as a hobby. Often, these are specialists in narrow niches, well versed in a certain topic. You can negotiate with them for advertising by barter or for a small price. But only if your product is relevant to them.
- Microbloggers — up to 100 thousand followers. Often they also cover a certain topic, have a quite loyal, interested audience. The cost of their advertising services is about 50 dollars, barter is possible.
- Middle bloggers — up to 500 thousand followers. Their publication topics are usually more general, and the audience is quite diverse. Therefore, it is necessary to carefully study subscribers and their interests. The level of loyalty of followers is still quite high, but the percentage of activity may already be lower than that of nano- and microbloggers. Advertising costs are from $100 and up.
- Macro blogger — from 500,000 to a million followers. There is often no strict thematic attachment in publications, the audience is less loyal, but still quite active. Advertising costs from a thousand dollars per publication. Conversational Stories on Instagram — from $250.
- Millionaire bloggers have 1,000,000,000 or more followers. They advertise a wide variety of products (from the aforementioned dumplings to new cars, bank cards, and online games). The audience engagement level is high, but trust is not always there. There are usually a lot of haters in the comments. There are many millionaire bloggers with tarnished reputations.
Media personalities stand a little apart.
The thing is that their advertising cost often depends not on the number of subscribers, but on the level of media coverage. For example, an advertising publication from Alexey Durnev costs about $1,000, although his audience is relatively small – less than 500,000 followers. And Tina Karol and Tatyana Parfileva have very different prices for advertising posts, although the number of subscribers is approximately equal.
The Main Mistake of Advertisers and How to Avoid It
The reality of influencer marketing is that cultivating resilience and joy more than 75% of companies measure the effectiveness of advertising with bloggers solely by the reach of a post/story/video (according to research by Later). We do not deny that this approach has a right to exist. But it should not be the only one.
In addition to the coverage level, we strongly recommend that you take into account three more indicators:
- Engagement rate — the number of likes, comments, reposts and other interactions with the audience. Large coverage in itself does not mean high engagement. But user activity is another matter.
- Brand sentiment is the level of brand recognition. Sometimes it’s more important for people to know about your brand than just your product. When Apple releases a new iPhone, there are huge lines at stores not because the updated phone offers them something completely new, but because it’s Apple.
- Website traffic — the number of users who came to your website from a blogger’s post, as well as the amount of time they spent there. This metric is not always applicable, but consider it if possible.
Let’s add that influencer marketing sometimes does not give instant results. When a brand or product is just entering the market, it needs time to become b2b fax lead recognizable and in demand. And you shouldn’t expect that one advertising publication from a popular blogger will provide you with a stream of clients for months and years to come.
Let’s sum it up
Influence marketing is a powerful marketing tool that can quickly increase brand awareness, attract a huge target audience, and make your offer popular. But here, as in any type of marketing, there are also disadvantages.
We are confident that in the next few years, the influence marketing segment will only expand, and the cost of advertising integrations will increase. If you are already planning to launch an advertising campaign, we advise you to carefully think through the promotion strategy, approach the selection of influencers for cooperation with special care, and objectively assess your advertising budget. This is the only way you will get real profit, and all investments will pay off with interest.
