Influencer Marketing and Micro-Influencers

Influencer Marketing uses key opinion leaders to promote a brand or product, using their social authority, a combination of relevance, credibility, and reach to shape buying behavior. Influencer Marketing uses and is related to several other marketing techniques:

Social Media marketing and Content Marketing are used as delivery methods, but they are not the same as Influencer Marketing.

Influencer Marketing is a form of word-of- mouth marketing; however, not all word-of-mouth marketing is driven by influencer campaigns.

Advocate Marketing focuses on encouraging already-loyal customers to share their love of a brand or product, for example, by way of product reviews or references. Influencers typically have a greater reach and credibility than customer advocates, and they often require some form of payment.

Influencers not only bring their audience, but they also bring their audience’s network. The loyalty of this audience allows the influencer to drive traffic to your sales channels and increase your Social Media exposure. Distributing your content and generating links to your site via social influencers also increases your organic search rankings.

Influencers can encourage their audience members to act. This is a natural outcome of their credibility: their audience chooses to follow their blog or social media posts and is therefore engaged with the subject and open to consider your content and therefore your product. However, it is critical that the content used is authentic, relevant, and of high quality.

The benefits of Influencer Marketing are becoming very apparent. McKinsey have found that Influencer Marketing can generate up to a 6.5x ROI, and customers acquired by this approach have a 37 percent higher retention rate. They also found that social recommendations induced an average of 26 percent of purchases across all product categories, especially for first-time buyers.

Research has shown that influencer marketing was rated as the fastest growing online customer acquisition channel, beating organic search, paid search, and email marketing with 400% increase from 2014 to 2017. 88% of customers trust online reviews by strangers as much as they would recommendations from friends. This trend is likely to continue as 47% of online consumers use ad-blockers.

However, as Influencer Marketing has grown, relying on the limited pool of top influencers has its drawbacks. A fresh approach is needed to find highly relevant and authentic Social Influencers.

Unlike most Influencer Marketing platforms, we don't rely on relatively limited databases of overused influencers, or base our selection on a simple analysis of social media and blog traffic. We perform a deep and comprehensive Web analysis using our patent-pending technology to identify a larger number of micro-influencers.

Our technology finds authentic influencers highly relevant to your product/brand. This approach is particularly effective at identifying influencers for niche products.

We calculate social authority not just using Social Media followership. We analyze an influencer's total presence on the Web, search engine ranking, content quality, and other proprietary factors.

At Setanta Analytics we create Influencer Marketing campaigns using the following steps:

We identify a network of relevant, authentic, and highly effective influencers.

Our Web analysis also identifies trending topics, keywords, hashtags, and customer preferences to drive content creation and marketing strategy. We also create an understanding of your customers’ voice, allowing content to speak in a style that is more credible and likely to connect with your audience.

We create a dual-layered marketing campaign, first aimed at recruiting influencers, and second providing relevant, high-quality content for the influencers to publish for their audience. Based on our analysis, the campaign will target types of influencer— activists, informers, and technical authorities, for example—and the most effective channels, such as blogs, forums, and specific Social Media.

We track key metrics relating to reach, sales, and brand awareness, adjusting the campaign to optimize ROI.

Periodically, we reperform the web analysis to identify emerging influencers and fresh topics for content generation.

We offer turnkey solutions including strategy formulation, identifying and engaging influencers, followed by content creation, campaign execution and management. If you are already working with specific Social Media marketing platforms or agencies, we can improve your campaign effectiveness by providing an enhanced list of Social Influencers and topics for content creation. We can also integrate our services with your campaign management platform of choice.