If you’ve been using social media lately, you must have come across the term ‘influencers.’ These people have used social media to cultivate a loyal fan base, allowing brands to reach new audiences without investing in customer acquisition.
With the market size for influencer marketing more than doubling in 2 years to reach a $13.8 billion cap, it’s safe to say many brands will be looking to tap into this niche.
Getting in touch with or hiring individual influencers is a tedious effort. You never know if you’ve found the ideal individual for your brand or whether or not that individual can be trusted not to make a small but costly error such as a wrong tweet.
Fortunately, with the growth of individual influencers globally and the increase in demand for this form of marketing, the world has seen a substantial rise in influencer marketing agencies.
Stay with us, and we’ll tell you all about what an influencer marketing agency is, why you need them in 2021, and where you can start.
What’s Influencer Marketing?
It can be defined in a variety of ways.
Still, the one that makes the most sense would be to define it as a strategy of marketing that revolvesaroundfamous individuals online to promote your business in the noisy online market so that your product reaches your targeted audience.
An Influencer fit for your organization is that individual, trusted, respected, and adhered to by your target audience. Through influencer marketing, you use the fame and notoriety of the influencer or influencersto promote and grow your business, hoping that a slice of their popularity rubs on your product.
Why Use Influencer Marketing?
Influencers have always been around to boost the credibility of products and businesses for centuries. In 1760, Robert Wedgewood of Wedgewood China began using endorsements from the Royal Family to boost his pottery sales. However, the impact of influencer marketing has evolved tremendously.
Here are a couple of reasons why you ought to apply it for your business and brand.
- 17% of companies spend over half their marketing budget on influencers.
- 69% of marketers plan to spend the most money on Instagram for influencer marketing this year.
- 90% of all marketers find ROI from influencer marketing comparable to or better than other marketing channels.
Benefits of Influencer Marketing
It’s essential to be crystal clear of your plans before embarking on an influencer marketing campaign.
Here mentioned are a couple of benefits that may interest you.
Increases Brand Awareness and Reach
Influencers are an excellent way of reaching your target audience, new and old, for your products. And when you collaborate with an influencer whose niche aligns with your business, you can reach an already engaged audience.
When an influencer mentions your brand, it allows you to gain more visibility.
This increases your reach and also improves your brand awareness.
Suitable for Small & Big Business
Influencer marketing is suitable for any business regardless of the scale or industry. You can need someone influential in your industry to leverage them for your marketing.
However, it does take time and planning to find the ideal influencer.
The success of your campaign relies on whom you choose out of the influencers to work with you.
If you make the right selection, the rewards are immense. It is essential to work on building a cordial relationship with your influencer. This is as much about their growth as your products
Quicker Customer Acquisition
The audience you reach with influencer marketing is essentially your target audience; the conversion rate is much quicker.
Why?
Since they are already interested in that particular product, they are not only an audience but a customer.
In a survey carried out by Influencer Marketing Hub, it was found that 28% of marketers in the survey believe that influencer marketing is the fastest in acquiring customers online.
Offers Intrinsic Value
Influencer marketing offers solutions to problems. This is the best way to educate and motivate your target audience. Since influencers pay close attention to their audience and fans, they are naturally prone to creating content that offers value. If you can adjust that with your business, that’s something no one else would be offering.
What’s An Influencer Marketing Agency?
An influencer marketing agency assumes a middleman’s role between your organization and the influencer’s ideal for your business. They save you the hassle of finding and managing influencers, and a dedicated team is assigned for you.
Collaborating with an influencer marketing agency makes launching influencer advertising simpler because they have the mastery and experience to run them efficiently and produce results.
Moreover, that’s not only what an influencer marketing agency provides. They provide all relevant tools for your business to grow, including but not only limited to social media copywriting, social media presence, and media relations.
Why Hiring An Influencer Marketing Agency Is A MUST?
Marketing is hectic, and it can turn into a nightmare. And that can happen for a variety of different reasons. It can be a silly tweet from an influencer that does not bode well for your target audience, or it can be something too insensitive presented in the content. That’s why having a dedicated team to handle this is extremely important.
You do not want to experience the nightmare influencers can cause for a business when things go south.
Oreo & Lick Race
Oreo hired influencers Dan and Phil, on a Lick Race challenge to see who could lick an Oreo clean first. Unfortunately, Dan and Phil did not disclose that their content was paid by Oreo’s parent company Mondelez.
This caused an incredible uproar from viewers and a legal issue, and the video had to be removed.
A lesson for you: Make sure you contractually obligate your influencers to disclose payment for content to avoid an influencer marketing fail like this one.
Fortunately, an influencer marketing agency would have made sure for this not to have happened. And even for the sake of argument, we assume that such an incident had occurred while using an influencer marketing agency. In that case, your business would not have been exposed since the fault would lie at the agency and not on you.
Lil Wayne Strapped Down
Strapped Condoms and rapper Lil Wayne, while working on an ad to raise awareness of HIV and STDs, highlighted another important issue: racist police violence.
The ad features a photo of a cop harassing Lil Wayne with the tagline “Go Down Strapped.”
Unfortunately, the wrong camera angle and a condom promotion were the ends of it.
The ad looked as if Lil Wayne was engaging in a sex act with the cop.
Even though that is not what the ad wanted to imply, the internet made a mockery out of it.
A lesson for you: Make sure to recheck all content before launching it in public.
Again, an influencer marketing agency has a team of people dedicated to your product. They cover all angles and present content to the public that does what it is intended to do.
What Does An Influencer Marketing Agency Bring To Your Business?
There is so much an influencer marketing agency offers to a business. The list includes countless benefits from finding potential influencers for your brand and tracking analytics for your campaigns.
Efficient Campaign Management
Managing influencers and the content requires a dedicated team. Many metrics need to be taken into consideration toestablish influencer marketing success.
This is where an influencer marketing agency fits.
The dedicated team provided by the agency will manage the campaign for you and produce definitive results for your product and business.
Measuring ROI Made Easy
To effectively understand your ROI from influencer marketing is a confusing task.
However, an influencer marketing agency understands how to do this. They are equipped to provide an accurate measurement of your ROI at any point in your campaign.
It Saves Time and Money
Success is never guaranteed; all one can do is maximize the potential of success and minimalize failure.
To do so with influencer marketing, would it not be better suited to let the professionals handle it? Who can make the most out of your money through their knowledge and experience? That’s what an influencer marketing agency is all about.
Things to Look For In An Influencer Marketing Agency
Knowing the benefits of hiring an influencer marketing agency for your business only get you so far. This industry is ever-growing and vastly congested—simply put, there are too many agencies in the world.
So, how does one find the best influencer marketing agency fit for their business or product?
Here are a few things you may consider when choosing an influencer marketing agency.
Trends
From living for live-streaming workouts to sippin’ on CBD, these trends have rocketed. And trendsare critical to any influencer marketing strategy.
Therefore, it is important to make sure that the influencer marketing agency you hire knows what’s hot and not, especiallyto your target audience.
Cross-Platform Capabilities
While YouTube and Facebook are still the top social media platforms, Instagram and Snapchat are more prevalent in the 18-24 demographic.
An influencer marketing agency that understands these statistics and can provide content for them will give your business the uplift it requires.
Rate Of Success
An influencer marketing agency’s rate of success should be the deciding factor in choosing to work with them or not.
Any agency that shows successful campaigns and isn’t shy in sharing numbers is good.
It is also essential to see what type of businesses they worked for and if those can be reliable case studies for your business.
This helps you gauge the expertise that each influencer marketing agency has and whether their strategies can be useful for your brand.
Top Five Influencer Marketing Agencies in 2023
Our team has brought forward five of the most exciting and vibrant influencer marketing agencies in 2021 for you after meticulous research.
- SugarFree
- Ignite
- Lorenzo Gutierrez
- The Out Loud Group
- Kairos Media
SugarFree
In August 2018, TikTok absorbed Musical.ly. The following month, SugarFree worked on its growth and promotion, and by Q3 of 2018, it surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat in monthly installs in the App Store.
Despite TikTok having a young target audience, SugarFree manages and uses many mature and experienced creators for their campaigns.
Using their strong relationship with top influencers and content creators, they use the influencers’ experience to maximize success for the brands they represent.
They’re mainly focused on selecting the right influencers ideal for the business while keeping a strong focus on storytelling.
Ignite
Ignite Social Media started in 2007.
They have years and years of experience in this industry, which is their main advantage.
They believe in creating authentic content to connect businesses to their target audience online through social media applications.
Successful businesses such as IKEA, Estee Lauder, UNICEF, and Microsoft Office continue to work with Ignite. Most notable of all, Ignite Social Media won the Social Agency of the Year award in 2016, which shows its credibility and performance.
Lorenzo Gutierrez
Lorenzo Gutierrez is known for its commitment and relentless effort to find the right formula that works best for its clients, which sets them apart from the rest.
Lorenzo’s digital marketing team has helped drive paid and organic reach to websites, blogs, and numerous brand events and has always helped guide their clients throughout the process.
BioChain hired Lorenzo Gutierrez, and the results have been impressive.
They were able to boost the number of daily visitors from 116 in January to 4043 in December.
Within one year, the agency was able to do the following:
• Scaled the Ad account up to 22 leads
• Reduced lead acquisition by $122 per lead
• Acquired leads from top brands & institutions
• 6 months ROI went up 4,000%
The Outloud Group
With 12 years of experience in marketing services, The Outloud Group promotes and helps businesses use high-quality content and data.
Their partnership with NordVPN was a success. A video made for the company was able to pull off 73 million views.
Kairos Media
Kairos Media is known for its eye-catching content, making the experience engaging for its audience.
The Syfy Channel wanted content for their competition of the computer game Rocket League.
Kairos Media took on this venture and utilized 4 YouTube content makers to make Rocket League recordings for promoting the competition, which amassed 1.5 million views.
Wrapping Up
The fact is, around 65% of influencer marketing budgets increased in 2020, and the same suit will follow in 2021, if not in higher numbers. It is the age of influencer marketing, and you ought to get on board; otherwise, your rivals in the industry will sail away from you.
It is crucial that you find the correct agency that is well trusted in the community and shares your business’s principles.
