How to Choose the Right Influencer to Promote Your Product
In January 2019, football fans were surprised that the Egyptian football star and Liverpool FC player, Mohamed Salah closed his accounts on social networks without explanation or explanation, and wrote in his last tweet on Twitter: “2019, the time has come for real communication.” This was nothing but a plan to raise the question. The intense controversy over the reason for the disappearance of the star was made by the shipping giant DHL, which then published a 10-second video indicating that it had reached the whereabouts of Mohamed Salah, and that she was the only one able to reach him, and that the reason for closing the accounts of the Egyptian star is related to the influencer marketing campaign influencer. The company held it with him.
What is influencer as a partner marketing and how will you choose the right influencer who will promote your products or brand? Let’s find out in this article:
What is apartner marketing influencer?
It is a type of marketing that relies on using the “influncer” or “the holders of the highest follow-up accounts on social media sites”, as a marketing partner, to pass the company’s message to a wide audience of followers influenced by the personality of the influencer and those driven by his decisions, instead of using traditional marketing tools in order to reach a group Large audiences, and in this strategy, the influencer creates attractive content in which he talks about the product or service, tells his personal experience after using the brand, and evaluates it on Internet platforms.
The importance of hiring influencers or partner marketing?
In partner marketing, “ the influencer “mixes two important marketing tools, which are social media marketing, content marketing, and sometimes word of mouth praise, as technology development provides continuous support for influencers’ activities, whether using live broadcasts, stories or images. Fundamentally in increasing audience interaction with the product, raising sales rates, as promotional videos help to enhance customer confidence in the brand, attract new customers, and the value of influencer marketing services is expected to increase in the future, and this marketing policy will grow and flourish, which opens a great door for cooperation. Between companies and influencers.
Types of influencers
Influencers can be categorized into three main groups:
Celebrity stars or public figures – mega influencers
They have millions of followers around the world, such as the stars of art and celebrities in various fields, Cristiano Ronaldo, Mohamed Salah, and the stars of art, and they are distinguished by reaching a large number of audiences along with a high level of professionalism with little possibility of falling into the risk of fake followers.
The members of this group are considered an inexhaustible mine for the owners of companies, but the most important disadvantage of marketing with mega influencers is the high costs, and the global player Cristiano Ronaldo is considered a star in this field, and he has carried out several promotional campaigns, including the campaign of the brand “Nike”, he is one of three athletes. Only they have a lifetime deal with the brand.
Networked Influencers – Macro-influencers
These influencers have a huge audience of nearly a million followers, they are mostly ordinary people who excel in a specific field such as travel experiences or fashion, or they have great talent such as photography and drawing, and they were able to achieve great fame on social media platforms, and they can be considered marketing professionals, but rely on them. In campaigns it may not be suitable for startups due to high expenses.
Micro-influencers
Content creators, bloggers and YouTubers whose audience exceeds ten thousand followers, their most important advantage is the low cost that suits all companies, and despite the lack of numerical followers, these influencers have high rates of audience participation and continuous interaction, which creates a state of mutual trust between the influencer and the followers.
Collaborating with this type of influencer allows companies to target a specific segment of the audience, thus intensifying their marketing efforts and reaching consumers or users, but the main disadvantage here is the low level of visibility of the direct impact on sales or direct results, so you have to pay attention to monitoring and analyzing results through the use of metrics and measurement methods. Diverse, to determine how well this strategy meets your campaign goals.
How do you choose the right influencer as partner marketer?
1. Your campaign goals
Determining the purposes of the advertising campaign is a major key to choosing the right influencer, and among the most popular goals of influencer marketing campaigns are four goals: inviting target customers and consumers to try your product or service, or raising awareness and reminding of your company’s brand, increasing followers on social media sites, or raising sales rates and increasing turnout.
You must choose the goal clearly, and make sure that the work contract accurately reflects the details of the strategy and the method of implementation, for example if the goal is to announce a new product, is there a summary of the product’s contents, components and method of use that the influencer must adhere to in order to share it with the public? Or is the campaign goal for the influencer to become a brand ambassador, and thus it is considered a long-term ongoing relationship, then you can write a main contract with adding the cost of each additional task that the influencer provides.
1. 2. Reputation
Certainly, the first criterion is its positive reputation, the response of the audience and their interaction with it, whether in the virtual world or in the real world, and good reputation is related to credibility and transparency, so you must make sure that it has real followers, not fake accounts, and you can compare the number of audiences, interaction and participation rates. Actual postings to make sure of this.
2. 3. Is the work of an influencer legally permissible?
There are some countries that consider practicing any activity that generates material profit or free products and services is a commercial business that has legal effects, so has the influencer obtained a license from the competent authorities in accordance with local laws and the legal requirements regarding promotion and advertising within each country, in order to save yourself the trouble of legal problems and lawsuits Legal.
3. 4. Budget
As we explained in the types of influencers, each category is characterized by costs that vary according to the number of followers and the personality of the influencer, and therefore if you have an open or large budget, you can rely on mega or macro influencers, but if you are at the beginning of your project, you should focus on micro-influencers to save expenses while following the work methodology With multiple micro influencers at the same time, this gives you a golden opportunity to reach a renewed and diverse audience.
The importance of choosing the right influencer
Choosing the right influencer and providing appropriate content will avoid the failure of your campaign, similar to what happened two years ago in the advertising campaign for PepsiCo, in which the American model Kendall Jenner, who raised a lot of controversy on social networking sites, was subjected to a violent attack that ended with the withdrawal of the advertisement.
The advertising content revolves around a group of youth protests on the street, in which people of various identities and cultures participate, then they are confronted by a group of police officers, and then “Kendall” appears to end the protest, and she introduces the Pepsi product to the officer, so the policeman calms down and the protest ends peacefully.
Activists around the world considered this advertisement a mockery of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which is protesting police racism against black-skinned people in America, and Kendall Jenner’s photo with the officer was inspired by the famous photo of the activist, “Lesia Evans”, who stood in front of the police in the American protests.
The company “Pepsi” apologized and withdrew the advertisement only one day after its launch, and the value of its shares on the Will Street Stock Exchange decreased after the offer.
On the contrary, the global shipping company, DHL, was agreed to choose the star Mohamed Salah to be the hero of its advertising campaign, which was classified by social media pioneers as one of the most innovative advertising campaigns.
How will the interview be?
There are several ways to pay for the influencer’s services, including the commission in exchange for selling the product in exchange for the publication on his own accounts, and there are free samples that the influencer uses in exchange for advertising products, or the one-share cost system, and here the financial amount is determined based on the number of posts, likes or comments on the post It can also pay based on each click the consumer makes on the links that the influencer places in the posts, and of course the payment method must be included in the contract.
Intellectual rights to the content
Who is the creator of advertising content, advertiser or influencer? Because this controls the form of the content, and if the influencer is the product, you will not be able to control the content, its publication dates, or the duration of its stay on social media sites, and you must obtain permission from the influencer if you want to re-exploit the content, and therefore you must indicate in the agreement the necessity the influencer obtains your consent, before broadcasting the content, and offers you some flexibility in using the Sponsored Content.
What is the mental image expected?
If the influencer is an ambassador for your brand, then you will certainly want to appear in a certain way to your customers, so what are the restrictions or conditions that you impose on him, for example, he is not related to competing brands, and he does not carry out an activity that is not compatible with your target audience, and perhaps he must attend some events and events to promote of the company.
How to terminate the contract
It is always expected that things will go positively, but possibilities must be set for everything, so if the influencer does not achieve the desired result, harms your product, or breaches the terms of the contract, you must write the legal position and means of resolving the dispute in agreement.
Marketing strategies are constantly evolving with the emergence of new mechanisms and different technology, so you must keep pace with these developments constantly, and even search for them, to choose the appropriate ones, and the most effective for your product or service, and influencer marketing is one of the latest and most effective trends in marketing, so be sure to choose a campaign the occasion, the right influence.
