Whether you like it or not, social media has had a big impact on our generation.
Approximately half of the world’s population uses social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. In addition, 54% of users follow their favorite brands on social media platforms to help make purchase decisions.
Nowadays, customers’ decision-making process is greatly influenced by social media influencers – those with large followings.
Brands have the power to collaborate with influencers and drive a sustainable stream of new customers towards their products and services.
Is influencer marketing a good choice for your business?
To help you make a decision, we’re sharing more than 30 influencer marketing statistics, including the costs, platform engagement, and ROI you can expect from various influencer marketing activities and channels. With this information, you’ll be able to create a more informed marketing strategy as you head into 2023.
What is influencer marketing?
An influencer is someone who has the ability to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship. Brands use influencer marketing to tap into large audiences that they would not be able to reach otherwise.
Influencer marketing is a social media strategy where brands partner with people who have a large and engaged social media presence. This strategy can also help build brand awareness and trust.
Ecommerce brands can do any of the following in order to receive an influencer’s public post: give away products, pay for a sponsored endorsement, or collaborate on a big creative project.
The main benefit of influencer marketing is that it is more trustworthy to consumers than traditional advertising. This is because people are more likely to trust the recommendations of people they know, rather than faceless brands. If you can identify and work with the influencers your target customers follow, you can achieve many benefits for your business, such as increased brand awareness and website traffic.
The influencer marketing landscape
As of 2019, influencer marketing was a $8 billion industry and is expected to have grown to $16 billion in 2022. There are currently around 7,000 influencer marketing agencies worldwide.
Influencer marketing is an industry in which people with a large social media following are paid to promote products or brands. Generally, the more followers an influencer has, the more they are paid per post. For example, an influencer with 1 million followers might be paid $5,000 per post, while an influencer with 10 million followers could be paid $50,000 per post.
The influencer marketing industry is worth $13.8 billionÂ
Influencer marketing is a very successful and growing industry. Data from Statista shows that the industry is worth almost $14 billion in 2021, which is a 42% increase from 2020. It is projected that the industry will exceed $16 billion in 2022.
50.7% of brands working with influencers run ecommerce stores
The types of brands that are most contributing to the influencer marketing industry are ecommerce stores.
Data shows that more than half of brands working with influencers have ecommerce stores. This demonstrates the rise of ecommerce businesses and suggests that ecommerce businesses are particularly well-suited to the influencer marketing model. Influencers can easily link to their store, without being limited by geography.
Types of influencers
When you’re looking for an influencer to collaborate with on your marketing campaigns, there are a few things you should keep in mind. First, think about what kind of influencer you want to work with. Do you want someone who has a large following, or someone who is niche and has a smaller, but more engaged, audience? Once you know what kind of person you’re looking for, search for influencers in that category and you’ll see hundreds or even thousands of potential partners. Take some time to look through their profiles and see who you think would be the best fit for your brand.
The categories of influencers are based on their follower count on any given social media channel.
- Nano influencers:Â between 1,000 and 5,000 followers
- Micro influencers:Â between 5,000 and 20,000 followers
- Power or mid-tier influencers:Â between 20,000 and 100,000 followers
- Mega influencers:Â between 100,000 and 1 million followers
- Celebrities:Â more than 1 million followers
Let’s take a look at how they compare.
Nano influencers have the highest engagement rate
It’s important to consider the number of followers an influencer has, but it’s more important to look at the engagement rate—the percentage of people who follow their page and like, comment, or share their content.
An influencer with a high engagement rate is more likely to influence the opinions (and purchases) of their followers.
HypeAuditor’s data reveals that nano-influencers with fewer than 5,000 followers boast the highest engagement rates of 5%. This figure starts to decrease as the follower count starts to increase, until it reaches celebrity level at 1.6%.
Micro-influencers account for almost half of all influencers
Brands that are looking to collaborate with influencers on campaigns should consider smaller partners, as they tend to have higher engagement rates.
Unequivocally, the most challenging influencers to encounter are those who fall under the categories of macro, mega, and celebrity influencers—with the latter representing a mere 0.5% of all social media influencers.
Marketers are more interested in working with micro influencers than celebrities
Additionally, micro influencers are often more affordable and can connect with audiences in a more authentic way.
It’s no surprise that marketers and brands are more interested in working with micro influencers than traditional celebrities for influencer marketing campaigns.
This is because smaller influencers have higher engagement rates and there is a larger supply of them. Additionally, micro influencers are often more affordable and can connect with audiences in a more authentic way.
The majority (77%) of marketers say micro influencers are the best, followed closely by macro influencers (64%). Almost no one wants to work with unpaid or affiliate influencers, with fewer than one in five brands adding them to their ideal collaborations list.
Demographics most impacted by influencers
The number of people active on social media varies between different age groups. Therefore, it is understandable that some age groups are more likely to pay attention to recommendations from social media influencers than others.
Gen Z is most influenced by social media influencers
Your influencer marketing campaigns will be more successful if your target audience is considered.
If you’re targeting people between the ages of 16 and 23 (Generation Z), you’re in luck. This demographic is most likely to respond to influencer marketing efforts.
Unfortunately, influencer marketing gets a bit more challenging when you’re trying to target older consumers. The percentage of people following social media influencers decreases with age. Only 23% of Millennials, 16% of Gen X, and 9% of Boomers follow influencers on social media.
Although influencer marketing may not be the best option, it isn’t completely out of the question if you’re trying to reach Boomers. Moon Lin, a 93-year-old fashion blogger with almost 100,000 followers, is a great example that demonstrates that older generations are using social media more than ever before.
Customer surveys can help you identify which influencers your older audience is following. You can add a question to your purchase confirmation emails asking which influencers they actively follow on social media.
Women aged 16 to 24 are 31% more likely to follow social media influencers than men
The vast majority of social media influencers are women, with 84% compared to just 16% of men, according to data from Statista.
A similar pattern can be seen among the number of female social media users who buy into influencer campaigns. Amongst Gen Z, one-third of women aged 16 to 24 follow an influencer on social media compared to just 25% of men.
Pros of Working with Blogger Networks
The most time-consuming part of blogger outreach is finding blogs that fit your brand or campaign. Once you have a list of bloggers, finding their contact information, their reach, and often their social media profiles, is another task.
After reaching out to 100 bloggers, only a fraction of them respond back. Therefore, many companies have decided to use blogger networks as it is more time and cost efficient. With these networks, companies are able to easily scale their blog campaign outreach. The network communicates the schedule and post links to the company.
Networks usually only work with bloggers who have a lot of reach, or who are popular. Before they agree to work with a blogger, they will check their traffic data and content to make sure the blogger is a good fit. If a blogger they are working with starts to perform poorly, or doesn’t post on time, the networks will often remove them from their contact list. This means that the bloggers who are left are usually reliable and have a lot of influence.
The network only allows bloggers to sign up for opportunities or brands that they actually like and want to review or write about, in order to ensure that the bloggers are authentically representing the brand. I would suggest only joining these types of networks, so that you only get sincere posts.
In a network, brands can more easily require specific actions from bloggers than through traditional outreach. For example, a campaign might require a blogger to write a product review, tweet about the brand using a specific hashtag, pin on the brand’s Pinterest board and write a Facebook post.
Determining ROI for Outreach Campaigns
It’s important to determine the ROI for your outreach campaign so that you can see how effective it was. To do this, you need to figure out how much money you spent on the campaign, and then subtract that from how much money the campaign made.
It’s not as simple as it seems. First, how do you assign a value to things like brand awareness or a post impression? Normally, a brand or agency comes up with an estimated value for their metrics so that they can plug in numbers to determine how well a campaign did once it’s over. These are all things to consider when determining ROI:
Set goals right away
It’s important to set goals and get your campaign organized before you start contacting bloggers and networks. When you reach your goals, be sure to celebrate those accomplishments by attaching value to them.
A soft metric would be something that’s not essential to the success of the campaign, but is still a nice bonus – like social media shares. Although social media shares are great, they’re not the most effective metric to use to measure the success of the campaign, because they’re not very easy to track.
Hard metrics are the most important things to focus on, as they are the goals and results that actually help your brand to improve. Examples of hard metrics include an increase in online sales or the number of people filling out a lead capture form. Social following is often also considered more of a hard metric than a social share, because people who follow your brand are showing an active interest in it.
Talk to Bloggers about Their Connections
Bloggers are often friendly with each other and promote each other’s content. Blogging is more collaborative than competitive.
When you have a good working relationship with a blogger, ask them for contact information for other bloggers they know who would be happy to work with you. This way, one strong relationship can lead to many more strong relationships.
We will see an increase in the number of brands working with large networks of bloggers. However, it is not possible to maintain long-term relationships with all of these bloggers. Therefore, it is important to use both approaches in order to achieve positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
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