Influencer marketing is gaining attention these days.
The method of marketing itself is changing from mass
marketing,
which deploys measures over a wide range, to personalized marketing, which develops content and various measures tailored to each customer. As times change, people’s recognition, consideration, and purchase criteria for products are also changing.
For example, messages from influencers are becoming an important factor, such as “because someone I admire uses it” or “my favorite influencer recommended it.”
In the coming era, marketing that uses influencers as a means of advertising will be essential.
In this article, we will explain the important aspects of influencer marketing.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing
is a marketing method in which companies use influencers, who are people who have a strong influence on a specific community, to introduce the company’s products and services through social media, etc., and influence the purchasing behavior of consumers. is.
Typical examples of influencers include celebrities, fashion models, athletes, experts in specific fields, and politicians.
Influencer marketing can be said to be a method that can more effectively increase awareness of products and brands and increase purchase intent than traditional marketing, where companies send messages directly to consumers.
Specifically, a common method is to have influencers actually use a company’s products and content and promote them using SNS etc.
The big difference from the traditional method of simply using talents and celebrities in commercials and advertisements is that the influencers post on their own accounts. This allows you to reach a wider audience than just those who follow your company’s channels.
Another feature is that by casually blending it into your regular posts, you can create a “less pushy” appeal without making people aware that it is an advertisement.
Companies can effectively use influencers who have gained tremendous support from specific communities, such as “reader models who are influential among teenage high school girls” or “charismatic working women in their 20s.” This means that it becomes easier to aim at the target. Furthermore, influencers create content that is highly empathetic to the target audience, making it easier for high-quality word of mouth to spread among the target audience. This “diffusion” effect is also one of our aims.
Popularization is affected by the shift away from existing media
One of the reasons influencer marketing is attracting attention is the shift away from television.
In recent years, with the spread of the Internet and smartphones, the way we gather information has shifted from mass media such as television to smartphones.
In fact, according to statistics from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the average time spent watching real-time TV (weekdays) has fallen from an average of 184 minutes in 2012 to an average of 168 minutes in 2016.
On the other hand, when looking at the amount of time spent using the Internet on weekdays, the average time spent using the Internet on weekdays increased from an average of 71 minutes in 2012 to an average of 99 minutes in 2016. Furthermore, the user rate of SNS was 79.3% as of 2016, and it has become an essential part of people’s lives.
Against this background, SNS is highly expected to be effective as an advertisement, and marketing methods that utilize influencers have recently been attracting attention.
History of influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has a short history and is said to have been born in the 2000s.
Gradually, “influencer marketing” was introduced to the world and became recognized among marketers.
Specifically, it is said that two booms are coming.
Influencer boom started with bloggers
The first influencer boom is said to be from around 2005 to 2008.
At that time, influencers were bloggers.
The term influencer itself became popular around 2007 as the number of people using blogs increased. At that time, there was no name called SNS, and personal information was mainly disseminated through blogs.
Events inviting bloggers and product sampling have become popular, but their dissemination and influence are still limited, and companies are still a step away from getting a solid response and return on investment.
Then, when celebrity blogs came under fire due to so-called stealth marketing issues, influencer marketing temporarily fell into decline as negative images such as “cooking” were attached.
social media trends
After 2010, the rapid spread of social media and smartphones led to the arrival of the “second influencer boom,” when a diverse range of influencers such as YouTubers and Instagrammers once again became active.
Instagram started its service in 2010, so it is a latecomer compared to other famous SNS, but it has attracted attention due to the explosive increase in the number of users, and marketing using Instagram has also started to attract attention. It has become.
Around 2010, YouTube began approaching famous YouTubers and using them for promotional activities. In 2011, YouTube opened its partner program, which recognizes users with a large number of viewers as partners, to general users as well as commercial users.
With the rise of Instagram and the popularity of YouTubers, the negative image has been dispelled, and influencer marketing is once again attracting attention.
Also, from around 2013, production companies that employ influencers such as YouTubers began to be established. Recently, major entertainment production companies and publishers have begun to enter the market, and the market is expanding day by day.
Benefits of influencer marketing
Brand/product popularity is high
By transmitting and spreading information on SNS, information about the brand or product reaches more people.
Easy to visualize the product
By seeing influencers actually using the product, you can see at a glance how the product is used, and you can create an image of yourself using the product.
The speed at which information spreads is remarkable.
On SNS, you can spread a single post to many people other than your followers by sharing or retweeting other people’s posts.
Narrow down your target
Many people follow influencers whose posts align with their interests.
In other words, you are effectively transmitting information to people with the same interests.
Words from people close to you are persuasive.
Influencers only post their opinions as fellow consumers.
Their opinions are far more reliable and persuasive than ordinary advertisements. In other words, it is highly reliable as an information source for followers.
While public relations and advertising activities conducted by mass media may be perceived by consumers as information advantageous to senders such as companies, the information provided through influencer marketing is merely examples of the influencer’s experiences. Therefore, even if it is personal, it is easy to receive it as a genuine impression or valid evaluation of the product.
Followers choose influencers based on how much they sympathize with their values and worldview, which increases their trust in the information.
You can strengthen your SEO
By adding URLs to influencer posts, external links will increase and SEO will be strengthened.
Weaknesses of influencer marketing
May be mistaken for stealth marketing
PR through influencer marketing is clearly different from stealth marketing because it clearly states that the request is from a company.
However, even though it is clearly stated that the request is from a company, there are a certain number of users who misunderstand the PR as stealth marketing, and it can give a negative impression in the Internet world, which dislikes stealth marketing. It happens often.
(*Stealth marketing is prohibited under the Premiums and Representations Act.)
Risk of information traveling alone and becoming a hot topic
If you post too long sentences, engagement will be poor, so in influencer marketing, where information is often posted in short and easy-to-understand chunks, there is a risk that the information will take on a life of its own and cause a firestorm.
Influencer marketing, in which influencers are asked to send information rather than companies that provide sales or services, the content may not be carefully considered and may result in unexpected reactions from users. Please be careful.
How to implement influencer marketing
There are said to be three main types of companies that provide influencer marketing services: (1) influencer production, (2) influencer casting companies, and (3) influencer marketing companies.
influencer production
We manage, produce, and support the activities of influencers active on SNS such as Instagram and Twitter.
influencer casting company
In addition to influencer production work, we also cast influencers suitable for the marketing desired by companies and organizations.
influencer marketing company
We can provide all the services necessary to realize highly effective influencer marketing, such as selecting the optimal influencer, proposing highly appealing ways to use them, effective brand design, and measuring effects from various angles.
Appropriately select the media to transmit
Choose media that can easily convey the appeal of the product or service you are asking an influencer to introduce.
When it comes to videos, whether it’s short videos on Instagram, videos up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds on Twitter, or long videos on YouTube, carefully considering what will be the most effective measure will increase cost effectiveness.
Also, in influencer marketing, choosing the media to disseminate is important.
From here, we will introduce the characteristics of the media mainly selected for influencer marketing.
Instagram
On Instagram, we introduce our services in the form of images (videos) + text.
As the term “instagrammable” suggests, the basic format is to introduce a photo-worthy image with text attached.
Additionally, as the number of users searching for products and services on Instagram is increasing, by effectively using tags, you can reach users other than your followers and products and services even after posting.
YouTube
Since YouTube is a video site, it is possible to introduce user experiences and reviews of products and services in a more concrete and easy-to-understand manner than Instagram or Twitter, which introduce images and text.
However, if you hire a YouTuber who is active on YouTube, you will be asked to do everything from filming to editing and posting, so it will depend heavily on the influencer’s discretion, and the fees tend to be high. .
Twitter
Influencer marketing on Twitter aims to increase user behavior and recognition by posting short texts, images, and videos of up to 140 characters.
If you are an influencer who is popular only on Twitter, text (+ image) is effective. If you are a YouTuber on Twitter, short text + video is effective.
If you are a popular influencer, you can expect a certain number of spreads (retweets) regardless of the content, so you can get a lot of engagement.
Although it has the strongest spreading power among SNS, it also has the disadvantage of being easily prone to uproar.
Specific examples of influencer marketing
apparel industry
A certain fashion brand from Spain has adopted a method of “Rather than actively marketing, they have their customers become influencers themselves, and use their virality and word-of-mouth effect to further increase sales.”
This not only resulted in online sales, but also resulted in customers visiting physical stores two to three times more frequently than in regular branded stores. As a result, the brand itself has more than 25 million followers on Facebook and more than 16 million followers on Instagram, and the ability to spread the information it sends out has become extremely large.
In Japan, major apparel e-commerce sites are also incorporating influencer marketing. For example, the site uses popular young actresses as influencers. The person has over 1.3 million followers on Instagram, so we can expect it to spread widely.
In addition to celebrities, web staff and store staff are also active as influencers. This method aims to further increase sales by having staff members wear the company’s products themselves and promote them on SNS, thereby shortening the distance between them and their followers and viewers.
sweets industry
There are also examples of successful influencer marketing in the sweets field.
It was a Valentine’s Day campaign run by a certain confectionery company.
The company created a short song called “Friend Chocolate Equation Dance” to promote sales of chocolate and cocoa powder in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, and conducted influencer marketing by asking friends to hand out handmade chocolates.
A model with over 320,000 Twitter followers who learned about this campaign posted a dance video on YouTube. As a result, we received over 40,000 likes! Got a number.
The word “tomo choco,” which means giving chocolates between friends rather than between men and women as in the past, also attracted attention, and as a result, the video was viewed more than 100,000 times. Furthermore, the words “Friend Chocolate Equation” were also a success on Twitter, receiving approximately 4,300 tweets and approximately 5.3 million impressions.
Casting points in influencer marketing
Influencer casting is an important point for successful influencer marketing.
When making an offer, you may want to focus on the following factors:
engagement rate
A common mistake that many companies make is deciding that a person with a large number of followers = a more influential influencer. However, the important thing to focus on is not just the number of followers, but also how “actively” users responded on SNS. The number that represents this percentage is called the engagement rate.
For example, on Instagram, the more likes and comments a post receives, the higher the engagement rate.
Compatibility with products
We also need to consider affinity. The big appeal of influencer marketing is that it’s more realistic than regular advertising. It is no exaggeration to say that the effectiveness depends on how realistic you can make the user feel.
In order to pursue that reality, carefully determine whether the influencer’s personality and worldview match the product.
In recent years, production companies with a large number of influencers have been established, so if you are having trouble finding influencers, you can make an offer to such production companies.
summary
Influencer marketing is undergoing remarkable development, and the number of players such as companies wanting to promote PR, new influencers, and marketing support services continues to increase, and it is thought that the market will continue to expand as a marketing method in the future. Why not carefully monitor trends and consider using influencer marketing?