An Influencer, also commonly known as a key opinion leader (KOL) is a person with an online presence who has specific knowledge or niches on certain things and also has a steady social media following.
An influencer can be the mutual friend connecting your brand with your target consumers. When you engage influencers, not only do they bring their audience, but they also bring their audience’s network as well. These influencers have the ability to drive traffic to your site, and increase your social media exposure because of the loyalty of their audience.
As a brand, you can leverage on influencers to endorse your product or services, and have them mention, showcase and review it. If the influencer’s followers like what they see and ended up buying your product and found it amusing, they might even become your recurring customers afterward.
For years, a lot of brands like Shopee and Watsons use influencers to promote ongoing product promotions or product launching.
With the fall of traditional outbound marketing, influencer marketing is becoming one of the most effective ways to attract customers and clients. Why? This is because today consumers are blind to billboards and deaf to commercials. They are self-sufficient and want to research a brand on their own and hear about it from someone they trust.
Defining Social Media Influencers By Follower Size and Scope
We place Influencers in tiers and we split them by their follower count.
Each influencer tier has their own pros and cons for businesses depending on their campaign objectives and budget. We’ll make it easier for you and list out each tier’s specialties!
Nano (2K-10K Followers) – They are the up-and-coming influencers. Typically they have a niche audience and have a strong group of supporters. You can do a seeder campaign with a smaller budget as a way to test the waters before diving deep into influencers marketing. Seeders are also great to use if you want to do a mass shout out about your promotion on social media.
Micro (10K-50K Followers) – Micro influencers content production is usually better than the seeders and their rates are reasonable. They provide a more targeted demographic to achieve your campaign goals .
Mid-tier (50K-100K Followers) and Macro (100K-300K Followers) – If you have a bigger budget and prioritize reach, these 2 tiers are for you! They have their own content style that may be beneficial to brands that want fresh ideas for their campaigns.
Alpha (300K above Followers) – If you prioritize total following and a larger audience, Alpha influencers are perfect for you. They have their group of followers that are eager to support them. They are able to able to reach very wide audiences in a single post. The downside is that they are costly and their demographic is not as targeted as the previous tiers.
Do remember that going bigger isn’t always better. Many brands see large follower counts and believe it will enable them to achieve their objectives but keep reminding yourself what is your campaign goal and what you want to achieve! Then only select Influencers that will help you in achieving them.
So why Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing when paired with your existing marketing strategy can help your business grow. Influencers help your overall brand awareness. They help to expand your reach and positioning in the market. Nowadays consumers like to do their research either by youtube videos, blog posts or to see what influencers have to say about that particular brand/product. Getting influencers to post about your brand is a good way to build an online presence, awareness, and credibility!
Influencer marketing helps brands to bypass obstacles that other marketing mediums face in today’s age. With ad blockers becoming a common practice, influencer marketing offers brands a new way to interact with consumers in a non-intrusive way. Using brand-centric hashtags helps to make your content easier to find in one place (example: #WatsonsMY #OnlyAtWatsons). Adding popular hashtags in postings will help new people to discover your brand (example: #skincaremalaysia with over 1.1M posts on IG)
Not only that, you can target a precise demographic based on the influencers that you choose. If your brand is skincare-related, then lifestyle or beauty influencers should be chosen to be part of your influencer marketing campaign. Their demographics typically consist of more females that have an interest in beauty and their audience is eager to hear what they think about a specific product.
Why do big brands like Shoppe still do Influencer Marketing? We believe that influencer marketing is a long game much like SEO. With monthly campaigns, it helps consumers to build trust and the campaign serves as a reminder for consumers of Shoppe’s ongoing or future promotions.
Influencer Marketing in Malaysia still not showing any signs of slowing down. To this day, a lot of brands have established a foothold in the influencer marketing space. For years, Watsons has been using influencers in their campaigns and also live streams where they invite influencers to promote products. In order to set up a successful campaign, influencer selection is key. Pairing the right influencer with your campaign goal will help your business grow.
Not only that, influencers can help with building your online presence. When consumers research about your brand and products, the contents that have been posted by these influencers will pop out. Influencer marketing is a “long game”. Constantly doing influencer marketing campaigns help your brand to build credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of consumers.
Here at Noice, we will help you match influencers according to your campaign goals! Let us help you to kickstart your influencer marketing journey! If you’re interested to learn more, contact us at [email protected] or WhatsApp Ummi +601121917196
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On our next blog post, we’ll be writing about the types of influencers and their contents!
See you soon!