What Is Influencer Marketing? A Guide to Building Your Strategy

When most people think of an “Influencer,” they picture famous celebrities with huge fan bases, and assume only they can sway audiences in marketing strategies. In this article, however, we will walk you through everything there is to know about what an Influencer is and how to choose the right Influencers for your business’s marketing campaigns.

What Is an Influencer?

Influencer roughly translates to “a person with influence” – someone who is well known on the Internet within a certain field or community. They may also be creators of content and new trends on social media platforms. Influencers include famous celebrities, Streamers, Beauty Bloggers, Vloggers, YouTubers, and more. The greater an Influencer’s reach, the more attention a brand attracts. Their role is to act as the face of a brand, promoting the image of its products and services.

Today, Influencers are divided into 6 main groups, depending on their level of influence and the number of followers they have on social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more:

• Nano Influencer
• Micro Influencer
• Small Influencer
• Medium Influencer
• Macro Influencer
• Mega Influencer

What Is Influencer Marketing?

If Influencers are people with influence, then Influencer Marketing is the practice of making smart use of those influential people in a business’s marketing campaigns, that is, “marketing through influencers.” The goal is to deliver a message, increase brand awareness, or promote a business’s image to its target customers. Instead of advertising directly the way traditional ads do, advertising through Influencers puts products into consumers’ hands in a more subtle way.

The information an Influencer shares about a business can be pre-written by the marketing team or written by the Influencer themselves, depending on the message you want to convey, so that the campaign feels as natural and effective as possible.

Influencer Marketing is widely used by businesses of every size in Vietnam. Large brands mostly use Influencers to deliver their message and build customers’ affection for the company.

For small and medium-sized businesses, or those that have just entered the market, Influencer Marketing is especially worthwhile: it helps customers accept a new brand more easily, reach potential customers effectively, and increase brand awareness in the market.

How Many Types of Influencers Are There?

In practice, Influencers are diverse and varied, and there are several common ways to classify them:

By Number of Followers

Follower count is one of the criteria that shows an Influencer’s appeal on Social Media platforms. People with a large number of followers may be stars, actors, or famous singers, or simply people who are highly active on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more, and who keep attracting new followers. Based on follower count, Influencers can be divided into:

• Mega Influencers: This group includes famous entertainment stars working in fields such as film and music. They are often called “A-list stars,” with 1 million followers or more.

• Macro Influencers: This group includes well-known B-list entertainment stars and people who are highly active on Social Media platforms, with 500,000 to 1 million followers.
• Medium Influencers: This group includes Influencers working in specialized fields, with professional expertise or the ability to lead a crowd, and a mid-sized following of 100,000 – 500,000 people.
• Small Influencers: 25,000 – 100,000 followers.
• Micro Influencers: 5,000 – 25,000 followers.
• Nano Influencers: 1,000 – 5,000 followers.

By Type of Content

Based on the content they produce, Influencers can be divided into the following groups:

• Blog: Influencers who build and create content for Blogs in different fields reach different audiences. In practice, there are not many influential people in this group. However, Blog Influencers can guide the mindset and direction of, or even change the behavior of, the people who follow them.
• Social media: This is arguably the largest Influencer group today. They are active content creators; they manage communities and build ecosystems on Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more.

• YouTube: This group has a strong influence not only on the audience they target but also on the broader YouTube user community. They operate through their own channels, and their influence is “measured” by subscribers (Subscribe) and views (Views).

By Level of Fame

Beyond the two classifications above, Influencers are also divided by how well known they are in the community, not just on digital platforms. As follows:

• Celebrities: Celebrities are the influencers with the greatest popularity. They may be entertainment stars, a hot YouTuber, and so on. Thanks to their far-reaching influence on the community, this group of Influencers often appear at events and advertise for famous labels and brands.
• KOLs: KOLs do not hold as much sway in the community as celebrities because they only operate in a certain field or have expertise in a specific industry. They may be journalists, advisors, bloggers, and so on. As a result, KOLs can lead groups of influencers with their own ideas, viewpoints, and more.

Criteria for Choosing an Influencer That Fits Your Marketing Strategy

Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing within Digital Marketing. It is not a new strategy, but competition is growing fiercer. So find out right away which Influencers your audience is paying attention to and which fit your brand, and reach out to them before it is too late. But what criteria should you use to choose an Influencer for a Marketing campaign?

There are 4 criteria for evaluating and analyzing Influencers on social media platforms: Reach, Relevance, Resonance, and Sentiment. Let’s look at each of the 4 criteria in detail below:

Criterion 1: Reach – Level of Influence

Reach is assessed based on the number of followers on social media platforms. Many brands today prefer Influencers with a large reach and plenty of attention on social media platforms for their promotional campaigns. However, this is only one of the criteria for judging how well an Influencer fits a brand.

Criterion 2: Relevance – How Well an Influencer Matches the Brand’s Personality

To determine how relevant and well connected an Influencer is to a brand, assess them on the following 4 factors:

• Personal brand: This covers their outlook on life, habits, way of speaking, and the topics they discuss in public, along with their fashion and beauty style.
• Demographics: This includes factors such as gender, age, marital status, and the field they work in
• Characteristics and content of shared posts: Their writing style, the topics they care about, and how they convey them to their fans
• Audience: Who is the target audience, and what are their demographics and topics of interest?

Criterion 3: Resonance – The Ability to Change Users’ Minds

When Influencers create content in their Social Network “home,” the people who love or follow them engage with the posts they share. This encourages people to try the product and creates a crowd effect, making it easier for the product to reach its target customers.

Criterion 4: Sentiment – The Emotional Response

Sentiment is an extremely important factor when choosing Influencers for a brand’s communication campaigns. It means that Influencers may evoke either negative or positive emotions in the audience.

If they convey positive emotions, they help increase the audience’s fondness for the brand. If an Influencer is caught in a Scandal, it can seriously affect the brands they represent or promote, leading users to boycott those brands.

Are KOLs and Influencers the Same Thing?

Many people are still confused about what Influencers and KOLs are. Are KOLs and Influencers the same? Although they have a lot in common, in practice KOLs and Influencers differ in some important ways:

KOLs: are people with in-depth knowledge of a particular field (food, healthcare, architecture, …). KOLs influence a specific community, with a limited number of followers and engagement, from 10,000 to 1,000,000 people. They mainly spend their time focusing on their area of expertise and sharing knowledge.

Influencers: are famous people with influence who are highly active on social media platforms and mass media, such as singers, MCs, and actors, … or young people, streamers, and TikTokers, … who rise to fame through an “Internet phenomenon.” Most of them are not experts, but they are very famous, with a lot of fans on social media.

How to Tell Influencer Marketing Apart From Other Types of Marketing

It is very easy to confuse these two concepts, simply because both forms of marketing rely on influencing a segment of the audience to talk about your brand. The biggest difference lies in the relationship between the business and the person it trusts to spread its message.

Influencer Marketing vs. Affiliate Marketing

The biggest difference between these two forms of marketing is that an Affiliate only earns a commission if a customer makes a purchase or takes some other action that positively affects the product. Influencer Marketing, by contrast, is paid based on the final results of the campaign.

Influencer Marketing vs. Word of Mouth Marketing

Influencer marketing focuses on the benefits (usually financial) for Influencers. They introduce a brand’s products or services to their followers and, in return, receive a commission agreed on in advance.

Word of Mouth marketing, on the other hand, happens when someone loves a product or service and wants to spread the word to more people. Usually they are not paid to do this.

Influencer Marketing vs. Advocate Marketing

These two forms of marketing are easy to mix up because they are fairly similar, and both increase brand awareness by spreading widely through strong influence. The biggest difference lies in the nature of the brand communication. Advocate marketing focuses on delivering long-term value to customers, inspiring them to trust the brand, feel satisfied, and share more with others.

What Are the Influencer Marketing Trends for 2022?

The Rise of Video on TikTok

Right now, TikTok dominates the popularity rankings of social media platforms, and Influencers are what keep driving the platform forward. TikTok is an excellent channel that helps brands reach more audiences through Influencer Marketing campaigns.

Influencers can turn a product’s message into a short 60-second video so customers can come across it more naturally. These channels also make products so popular that stores can sell out their entire stock within seconds.

Live Shopping

2021 was a breakout year for Live Shopping, and the trend is expected to grow even stronger in 2022. Creators and influencers often promote products to their communities by engaging with live videos.

In addition, social platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Amazon have all been using Livestream to focus on developing their shopping tools. In recent years, we have seen the partnership between Shopify and TikTok, as well as the virtual stores of Instagram’s founders. So businesses should integrate Live Shopping features to keep up with the latest trends.

Content Booms on Social Platforms

The growth of information technology has created demand for space for newly developing social media platforms, and that is also why content on social platforms keeps booming. This shows clearly in TikTok – an entertainment app that has quickly set new records in recent years, especially during the recent pandemic. Seeing TikTok’s ever-faster growth, many Influencers immediately followed the trend, quickly bringing a large amount of advertising and a large following over to TikTok.

Influencer Specialization

Today, Influencers tend to create their own content themes, digging deep into specialized content to catch the attention of specific brands. Thanks to the growth of the Internet, more and more photographers, artists, authors, and others – collectively called “Influencers,” “KOLs,” and so on – or simply famous people, are appearing online. In essence, these people still provide value to the community, but depending on the industry each one works in, every Influencer develops in a different way.

Influencers Focus on Authenticity

Before the pandemic, most influencer content was heavily edited. However, working from home and the obstacles caused by COVID-19 gave social media a sense of transparency. As a result, everyone felt comfortable sharing their difficulties and challenges with one another.

That allows Influencers to keep sharing more authentic images with the community. Depending on the brand message and target audience, influencers can use authentic, real-life elements to build trust with customers.

Influencer Marketing Shifts Toward Brand Ambassadors

Brands are turning major influencers into brand ambassadors instead of the partnerships of the past. By working continuously with a group of influencers, companies can save both money and time by streamlining the content review and editing process. This ensures that the high-quality content a brand produces meets the public’s expectations for engagement and awareness.

Moving from a short-term influencer marketing strategy to long-term brand ambassadorships takes planning and an investment of time. The two most essential steps for building a successful brand ambassador image are defining your marketing strategy and setting goals.

Micro and Nano Influencers

Influencer is a term for people with great influence, and depending on their level of influence, Influencers are divided into different types such as Nano, Macro, Micro, and Mega. People with fewer than 100,000 followers are small influencers, who typically have an engagement rate of around 7%. With a good follower count and a cost-efficient price, Micro Influencers are an ideal solution for businesses.

Businesses that invest in Micro and Nano Influencers can diversify their marketing strategy while keeping costs down when running Influencer marketing. As a result, new Influencers get more opportunities to collaborate with big brands and grow themselves.

Influencer Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Become Familiar

Influencer Marketing and Affiliate Marketing are two closely related activities. Both work the same way: a third party carries out advertising, encouraging people to look at and buy the brand’s products that the company offers.

Influencers can introduce their fans to your products. That is why not only businesses but also Affiliates have decided to partner with Influencers to promote products to an Influencer’s enthusiastic fan base. At the same time, many Influencers are also choosing to run independent affiliate activities because of the potential benefits they bring.

A Guide to Running a Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign

Step 1: Define the Goals of Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

The first step in any Influencer Marketing campaign is to define your campaign goals so you can shape the overall strategy. Every aspect of your plan and content strategy depends on what you want to achieve, so having a clear goal is crucial to success.

However, most of them can be grouped under the following main goals:

Increase reach and brand awareness: This is one of the most common influencer marketing goals – brands partner with influencers in their niche to reach an audience already interested in similar content. This is why brands like to work with major influencers, so they can grow their reach and customer awareness. Keep in mind that followers and engagement are not always the best measure in this respect.

Attract and retain customers: A key reason brands use social media is to engage their potential customers on platforms they already use regularly. Influencers can be extremely helpful in doing this, because they have already built a loyal, engaged following.

Generate revenue conversions: Many marketers use influencers to drive traffic to their websites or to maximize app installs, newsletter sign-ups, sales conversions, and more. In short, setting a key, comprehensive goal is the first step toward mapping out a more effective Influencer approach. Then you can move on to the next stage of the process.

Step 2: Use Influencers to Achieve Your Influencer Marketing Campaign Goals

Once you have settled on your goals, the next step is to find the right influencers to collaborate with. You can find influencers in your niche by using search tools such as BuzzSumo or Influence.co.

Once you have chosen a list of good influencers, you can reach out to them and start a conversation. For those who agree to collaborate, move on to creating and posting content. Below are the 3 most common types of content you might consider asking your Influencer Marketing partners to produce for you.

Product Reviews: Product reviews are a great way to use influencers to introduce your products to their audience. And if they write positive reviews of your product, that also goes a long way toward building and positioning your brand.

Contests, Quizzes, and Polls: Creating a contest, quiz, or poll can be a great way to engage your audience on social media. By nature, these types of posts are very engaging and get quick responses from everyone who takes part. This strategy works best for companies that already have an established brand and for followers who know the brand on social media. The main goal of posting this kind of content is to engage your audience, but it can also be used to drive traffic to your website and grow your following.

You can run social media contests that ask people to tag their friends and follow your brand to enter. You can also post a preview of a quiz on social media and then send people to your website to take it.

Brand Mentions: This simply asks the influencer to mention your brand in their social media posts. The mention can be anything from talking about a specific product to the brand in general. This is where influencers can create and promote your brand in a way their audience will enjoy, and Influencers do not need to disclose that the post was paid for.

Tutorial and how-to content: Another way to use influencers is to ask them to create content explaining how to use your product, in their own presentation style, to maximize appeal to their audience. For example, the electronics industry is a dynamic one, where new and innovative products are launched often. For an electronics brand, it makes perfect sense to post videos about a specific product that explain another product feature.

Promotions and discount codes: Running promotions and discounts is a sure way to bring people to your website. Giving influencers a unique discount code can also be a great way to track individual results while raising awareness and engagement among their audience.

Overall, instead of discounting for anyone and everyone who visits your website, you can make your advertising campaigns more targeted by using Influencers. If you use the right influencers who have a target audience similar to yours, you can focus your ads specifically, because Influencers have loyal, engaged followers, so their audience is more likely to buy with a discount code.

Step 3: Use KPIs to Measure Performance Against the Goals Set for the Campaign

The final step in running a successful influencer marketing campaign is measuring how well it is performing against your preset goals. For this, you need specific KPIs that help you judge how the campaign is doing and whether it is achieving the desired goals. Below is a list of the main Influencer Marketing goals and their corresponding KPIs that you can use to measure performance against each goal:

Reach and Brand Awareness: Although there is no 100% accurate, quantitative way to measure brand awareness, you can measure the reach of your content. This is an indirect way to gauge brand awareness.

Consumer Engagement: Consumer engagement is relatively easy to measure by checking the likes, comments, and shares each piece of influencer content receives.

Leads and Conversions: Leads can be measured directly by analyzing the volume and sources of traffic on your website. Conversions can be measured by the increase in sales during your Influencer Marketing campaign. Another metric you can use to measure conversions is the number of logins / sign-ups.

Impressive Influencer Marketing Campaigns

“Tiki đi cùng sao Việt” (Tiki with Vietnamese Stars) – Taking advantage of the fact that Vietnam is one of YouTube’s 5 biggest markets, with the average Vietnamese person spending more than 100 minutes a day watching videos, Tiki used music video (MV) sponsorship with a single, wide-reaching strategy.

“Tiki đi cùng sao Việt” is a project sponsoring the artistic works of Vietnamese artists across many fields, most notably music. It kicked off with the MV from Masew and B-Ray – two well-known names in Vietnam’s underground music scene. Riding that momentum, Tiki continued to support and sponsor the music of young Vietnamese artists. The campaign was a brilliant success, with songs by singers Đức Phúc, Min, Chi Pu, and others reaching YouTube Trending’s top spots.

Influencer Marketing is clearly becoming a trend that businesses are turning to as information technology keeps advancing. If you are interested in this form of marketing, contact The7 right away for a more detailed consultation. We are a Digital Marketing Agency that specializes in advising on and delivering full-service Marketing for businesses in a wide range of fields. For clients who need Influencer Marketing, The7’s team of experts will work alongside you to design a strategy that fits your business goals, optimizes costs, and delivers the best results.

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