Consumers are getting wiser to the way we market our products.
Many are aware that brands are placing cookies on their computer to be able to show them personalized ads later on Facebook or Google. This was not the case five years ago.
According to Telesian, the average person sees branding material on average 300-700 times per day. Consumers are so used to marketing that they have conditioned their brain to ignore all messaging that is not relevant to their needs.
As consumers evolve to marketing, ad strategies must evolve too, and it’s why more and more brands are renting pages from influencers as a way to reach new audiences.
In this article I’ll explain how influencer marketing works, where you can rent pages, how it can work for your brand, and how to measure ROI.
What is influencer marketing? (Example shown)
Influencer marketing is when you partner up with an individual or group who have a large social media following and audience. These influencers are usually in the same niche as you.
For example, Phil Heath is the most popular competing bodybuilder today and has won Mr. Olympia seven times. With more than 2.4 million followers, he is an influencer in the health and fitness niche.
Dozens of brands partner up with Phil Heath to promote their products. You can see an example below from Fat Gripz, which run a competition on Phil’s page:
27,888 likes, hundreds of comments, and quite easily 100k+ impressions. If Fat Gripz ran this on their own page they would never get this sort of reach or engagement given they have fewer than 60,000 followers.
What’s more, many aspiring bodybuilders look up to Phil Heath, and his endorsement will help sell more products.
One of the biggest benefits of using social influencers is that even if the audience knows nothing about your product or service, if they trust the influencer then they are more likely to trust your product if the influencer tells them it’s good.
How to rent pages of social media influencers
There are many ways you can form partnerships with social media influencers from putting them on your payroll, sponsoring them, or working out some sort of shared revenue scheme.
The issues with these methods is that they aren’t flexible and things can get messy if the influencer does something their fans don’t agree with or if they fail to return you a positive ROI.
The newest solution is to rent or lease an influencer’s page. Unlike the methods mentioned above, renting pages offers you great flexibly in running campaigns.
How does it work?
FamePick is the leader in this industry with thousands of influencers. You can rent social media profiles from as little as $199 per day, lease pages for longer, or run traditional sponsored ads on pages.
Once your lease ends, that’s it. You’re not obligated to pay anything once the lease period ends – no contracts or revenue share deals.
Unlike duplicating a Facebook ad campaign that has had success before, it’s harder to estimate how well influencer marketing will do for your brand. Being able to rent a page for a day or two allows you to test and try various influencers to see whose following resonates best with your brand.
Is influencer marketing worth it?
There is no doubt in my mind that influencer marketing, if done right, will be highly profitable.
The keyword in my last sentence being IF.
I’ve seen cases where businesses have done amazingly well renting out pages, and I’ve also seen brands lose a lot of money.
You first need to pick the right social media influencer who matches up with your brand and their followers and who has a good crossover with your customers. Then you need to create the right marketing strategy, which is another beast within itself.
But if you get both of them on point, they can have long-lasting results and rocket-launch your brand’s online visibility.
How to measure the ROI of an influencer marketing campaign
There are many things you can measure when renting out social media pages, and the most important metrics depend on your goal.
For example, if you’re running a flash sale on a rented page, your most important metric would be conversions; whereas if you rent a page showing the influencer just using your product, impressions and engagement will be considered more valuable.
As a rule of thumb, here’s what I like to measure when running influencer marketing campaigns.
Sentiment – What do the influencer’s fans think about my brand or product? The whole point of using influencer marketing is to get your brand in front of new eyes.
There’s no guarantee that influencer marketing will yield good results. I’ve seen cases where an influencer’s fans turned on a brand which then brought the brand tons of negative engagement.
Look to see if their fans are saying positive things about your product, tagging friends, or asking questions to learn more about you.
Website traffic/followers – During the time you rented out the page, how many more followers did you gain on your own social media profiles, and how many visited your website during that period?
A good way to measure website traffic is to create a tracking link that is connected to each post. If using Instagram, put the tracking link in the bio and state in the post that to learn more about your product the user needs to click the link on their bio page.
Conversions – If you’re running a campaign to drive sales, this is the ultimate statistic you want to look at. How many sales came from influencer marketing? A good way to measure your conversions is to create a unique voucher code and use tracking links to see where conversions come from during the campaign.
Visibility – Did your brand’s online footprint increase during the campaign? Were others talking about your business on their own social media pages, forums, or blogs?
This is a little harder to measure, but there are many social media listening tools, such as Sprout Social and HootSuite, that scan the Internet for mentions of your brand for various time periods.
Should you start renting pages?
I certainly think that influencer marketing is a tool to have in your marketing tool kit.
Today everybody is on social media following people they admire (influencers), watching their stories, reading their blogs, and doing what they say.
However, you do need to go about renting pages and dispensing your content in the right way. If you go too heavy with the direct response you’ll do more harm than good for your brand, but with the right balance you can increase your exposure and drive more sales.
Are you looking to take advantage of influencer marketing but aren’t sure where to start? If so, then contact us today for a free consultation.