Influencer Marketing: What it is and How to Create a Strategy
Elevate your brand with top Influencer Marketing in Dubai. Reach, engage, and convert your target audience effectively.
Influencer marketing is a big problem.
From Instagram and TikTok to other platforms, brands are collaborating with popular people to reach new followers and promote products and services. As the popularity of social media increases, so does the investment and interest in these types of opinion leaders with large numbers of followers.
There is a lot more behind this phenomenon than you might think, and if you approach it the wrong way, influencer marketing can ruin your budget and, in extreme cases, your brand.
This guide will help you navigate this digital communication tactic and build a solid strategy that reaches your target audience. We will see the following contents:
What is influencer marketing?
The influencer marketing data that you should know
Understanding the different types of influencer
More effective platforms and collaboration formats with influencers
The Rise of Influencer Marketing Dubai
Why you should invest in Influencer Marketing
How to Create a Solid Influencer Marketing Strategy
FAQs about our Influencer Marketing Agency Dubai
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is the collaboration between companies and people who have a large number of followers online.
Brands work with these people (known as influencers because of the influence they have on their followers in the social world we live in) to reach their network of followers and promote their products and services.
Traditional advertising is becoming less effective, and many online channels are even beginning to show stagnation due to the increase in ad blockers and changes in user behavior.
Influencer marketing is the digital version of our influence among our peers in the offline world over their purchasing habits. As humans, it is part of our nature to influence the experience of family and friends on our purchasing habits.In the publication Psychologist World we find a good explanation of this social influence, where it is stated that:
People feel the need for accurate information, and when they cannot trust their knowledge, they turn to others in the hope that they will provide them with correct information. By accepting this information, regardless of whether it is accurate, the person is subject to social influence.
In the digital marketing agency environment, we have often seen this type of definition applied to social proof.
As a marketer, you can use influencer marketing to reach new audiences and drive increased brand awareness, web traffic, and sales to potential customers through a marketing campaign. This tactic includes finding the right people and encouraging them to tell their followers about your brand.
Chances are you’ve seen collaborations with influencers every time you scroll through social media.
Have you ever seen that a popular account you follow on Instagram has a hashtag in a #AD post?
It is, neither more nor less, influencer marketing in practice, a collaboration between a brand and an influencer to promote a certain product to an audience, achieve brand recognition, and increase affinity with it.
This tactic is often confused with other types of marketing, due to the overlap of different approaches, but to fully understand what influencer marketing is, you must first understand how it differs from other approaches.
Influencer Marketing Agency vs. Word of Mouth
Since both marketing techniques involve telling other people about a product or service, you’ll find extensive overlap between influencer marketing and word of mouth.
The difference lies in the relationship between the business and the person in charge of generating the content and promoting the product.
Influencer marketing usually includes an incentive (financial or otherwise) that the brand gives to the person. The influencer talks about your products or services because they have been compensated for it, both with money and goods.
On the other hand, word of mouth occurs when someone tells others about your business because they want to share their experience with your brand spontaneously.
The result is similar, in one case there is compensation, and in the other, there is no.
Influencer Marketing Dubai vs. Affiliate Marketing
It is common to see influencer marketing confused with affiliate marketing, especially since both encourage third parties to promote a product or service.
The main difference between these two tactics is that affiliates typically receive a commission when a sale is made, and influencers have a flat rate that is not tied to sales.
Affiliates only receive money when a sale is made, while influencers receive payments regardless of the profits of a campaign. Semrush also has its affiliate marketing program that allows affiliates from different sectors, from webmasters to agencies, to earn commissions.
Referral Marketing vs. Influencer Marketing Agency Dubai
Another common confusion is generated by the differences between influencer marketing and recommendation marketing (advocate marketing).
While influencer marketing is directly tied to the influence a person has on their community, referral marketing is about giving brand ambassadors a voice to amplify the message.
Referral marketing is much more like word of mouth, but instead of reaching out to everyone, you’re encouraging brand ambassadors to tell your story and rewarding them for it, creating a real connection between brands and consumers.
It is similar to influencer marketing in many ways, but the big difference is that referral marketing relies on people who are already satisfied customers of the brand.
The Facts About Influencer Marketing that You Need to Know
Before we move on to how to create a solid strategy, here are some facts about influencer marketing that you need to know:
- For every dollar spent on influencer marketing, companies get $5.20. (Influencer Marketing Hub)
- 80% of professionals believe that influencer marketing is effective. (MediaKix)
- 70% of teenagers trust influencers more than traditional celebrities. (Digital Marketing Institute)
- 60% of influencer marketing budgets will increase in 2020. (BigCommerce)
- The influencer industry is on track to surpass $15 billion by 2022. (Business Insider)
- 49.6% of influencers say their followers care about authentic content. (Zine.co)
Influencer marketing is a big deal, and as a marketer, you can’t ignore it as a tactic anymore if you’re not already using it.
Understand the Different Types of Influencers
Despite what you may think, an influencer is not just an influencer, so you must know the different types to create a successful strategy.
You will often have heard of influencers depending on the platform, such as Instagram influencers, Youtubers, or others. In reality, the platform on which they spread content is just their distribution channel.
To fully understand the different types of influencers, we need to pay attention to micro-influencers and (macro) influencers.
In recent years, many marketing professionals have realized that there is a lot of value in having “regular” people promote products and services. Precisely that has been the trigger for the explosion of investment in micro influencers.
In 2018, Forbes defined this group as the marketing force of the future.
Micro-influencers are not famous, just normal people who use social networks and who have gained followers with similar characteristics. They typically have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers with whom they interact daily.
The key word in this definition is that these followers “interact” with the micro-influencer.
While micro influencers’ followers are far fewer than a celebrity, their target audiences are strongly connected to them and interact with their content. For a brand, it is cheaper to collaborate with a micro-influencer than with a celebrity. Although the reach will not be as high with a single collaboration, it is more focused on the key audience.
Famous (or macro) influencers are those renowned stars with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers.
Working with these types of influencers makes it easier to reach a large number of people and associate your brand with renowned stars. However, it is expensive, with a very high barrier to entry for many businesses.
Working with celebrities is not for all brands, but the most successful strategies seek to balance both types of influencers to achieve the maximum possible impact.
Although not much has been said about them, there are also influencers with less than 1,000 followers that are very suitable for small but very loyal niches.
More Effective Platforms and Collaboration Formats with Influencers
When planning an influencer marketing strategy, you need to start by thinking about the most effective way to reach your target audience through someone else’s followers.
Collaborations with influencers materialize on different channels and no two strategies are the same. To achieve maximum reach, it helps to know which formats are the most popular and most effective.
Let’s now pay attention to the most popular platforms on which brands usually collaborate with influencers.
TikTok
Twitter (now "X")
Snapchat
YouTube
Blogs
Knowing which of these channels is the most effective depends on both the individual influencer and your audience. We will soon see how to choose the right platforms.
The Rise of Influencer Marketing Dubai
We have already mentioned that the influencer industry will reach a value of 15 billion dollars in 2022, which represents an increase of 8 billion compared to 2019.
The growing popularity of this tactic is expected to continue growing at a good pace and there are no signs of slowing down, largely because different social platforms continue to evolve and new ones emerge (as has recently happened with TikTok), allowing for the emergence of new collaborations.
Even if we pay attention to the interest in the matter on Google Trends, we can see that it continues to rise.
If we compare the growth of interest in influencer marketing compared to content marketing, we see how big the topic is:
Influencer marketing works. If this were not the case, brands would not continue investing so much in it. But why should you use this tactic as part of your marketing strategy?
Why You Should Continue Investing in an Influencer Marketing Agency
When a company invests in a new marketing channel, there needs to be a clear return on investment, so here are some of the most important reasons to opt for this tactic:
Traditional ads are becoming less and less effective...
While collaborations with influencers are becoming more and more successful. This is mainly because consumers prefer social media posts to traditional ads and interact with them in a completely different way. That is, they do not have the feeling that seeing a collaboration between a brand and an influencer is an advertisement.
People buy from other people,...
And collaborations with influencers help you show your human side as well as add authenticity to your campaign. We have all become immune to advertising, but we are increasingly receptive to products promoted by influencers we admire.
In most channels, the effort and responsibility are one-sided
When you work with influencers, they also want the campaign to work, because it can be the door to more jobs and collaborations. Influencers are proud of their communities and want these types of collaborations to work.
Younger generations trust influencers and their product recommendations...
And promotions more than celebrities, so marketers can take advantage of this. After all, why invest in someone who doesn’t have the trust of their audience?
Influencer marketing is a fantastic way to reach new audiences...
Who actively interact with content that can offer a way to increase brand recognition of products and the business itself more economically.
Despite what many say,...
You can measure the ROI of influencer campaigns in the same way you do with other channels, meaning you can shape ongoing investment based on the returns achieved.
How to Create a Strong Influencer Marketing Strategy in 6 Steps
If you haven’t considered using influencer marketing to grow your brand, we hope this article changes your mind.
But how can you build a solid strategy that generates a stable ROI?
As the first step to designing a successful strategy, you need to define your objectives. If you don’t know what success looks like, how will you know when it hasn’t worked?
The success of an influencer campaign can mean different things to different businesses, but regardless of what it ends up being, you need to make sure you’re using SMART goals (an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound Goals).
If you invest in a collaboration with one or more influencers, what do you expect to get out of it?
Among the most common objectives are:
- Scope. If your goal is to increase awareness of your brand’s products or services to new audiences, reach will be a good goal. After all, if your influencers are well-segmented, focusing on reach can be a good way to maximize the number of people your promotion reaches.
- Traffic. Another objective could be to increase the traffic to your website as a result of a collaboration, both directly and as a result of an increase in searches for your brand on Google.
- Sales and conversions. At the end of the day, all campaigns have the ultimate goal of making money. Thanks to how you track an influencer campaign, you can know if it has generated direct sales. For example, you can use discount codes to incentivize quick purchases while tracking performance back to the influencer.
Each brand must choose its objective, and it is always a good idea to start building your campaign around a defined objective.
Influencer marketing is only effective when your business is promoted to the right audience.
If you define your target audience correctly, you can greatly benefit from a collaboration with an influencer. If you do it wrong, it will be a waste of time and money, as well as something to be embarrassed about.
Influencer marketing is not about reaching a large audience and hoping that hopefully, someone will be interested, quite the opposite.
The essence of this marketing tactic is that you can reach very specific niches, for which you must know in advance who they are.
Don’t forget that you can be very specific; It’s not necessary, and you probably shouldn’t, to try to reach an entire audience in a single campaign or collaboration. Instead, focus on those segments or people who are most attractive.
With these goals in mind, identify who you want to reach, and understand the specifics of demographics.
Just as you need to know your audience and your goals, before you start reaching out to influencers, you need to identify your campaign messages. It is something that can differ greatly, depending on the objectives and purpose of the collaborations.
- Are you looking to increase brand recognition around your business as a whole to reach new audiences?
- Do you promote the launch of a new product to those who are already familiar with the brand?
- Do you want to highlight a feature of a service?
- Generate direct sales of a product?
Campaign messages should be directly aligned with your goals, but until you have the focus of your campaign, you’ll have trouble mapping out a successful strategy.
Focus your efforts on developing a campaign briefing that communicates both your objectives and what you expect from an influencer to collaborate with. The clearer it is, the more effective you will be in generating valuable collaborations.
One of the most common mistakes is not setting a budget.
And let’s make something clear; Almost all influencers (even micro influencers) will want compensation for their efforts. The days of collaborations in exchange for free products are gone. To work with more significant influence, you need a budget (as well as products and services to offer).
When setting up an overall budget, you need to keep in mind the division between compensating influencers and covering the cost of the products or services.
You don’t want to enter into negotiations with influencers (or even contact them) until you are clear about your budget. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time coming up with a plan to address them.
To set a budget, you must have answers to questions like:
- What is the main objective? Reach or get a return?
- How many influencers do you want to work with?
- What platforms is our audience active on?
- What is our priority, engagement, or reach when it comes to audiences?
At this stage, you’ll probably want to understand approximately how much it costs, on average, to work with influencers on each platform. Thanks to WebFX data, we know that:
- Facebook: $25 per 1,000 followers
- Instagram: $10 per 1,000 followers
- Twitter: $2 per 1,000 followers
- YouTube: $20 per 1,000 followers
- Snapchat: $10 per 1,000 followers
- Blogs: $60 per 1,000 views
Once you have a budget in place, you can figure out how to use it more effectively.
Depending on the objectives of your campaign, you must decide if you will work with famous (macro) influencers as part of your campaign or if you will work only with micro-influencers.
Both have their place in different strategies and there is no right or wrong approach. However, when it comes to finding influencers to collaborate with, the path is very different between macro and micro-influencers.
If your idea is to work with influencers who are famous, you will almost certainly need to approach them through their agents. An example is the Ministry of Talent, which represents a whole series of influencers. It is very rare for them to manage their collaborations.
Most of you reading this article want to work with micro-influencers and the good news is that you will often be able to analyze what is best for you and contact them directly yourself.
But how do you find the right influencers?
You can start by analyzing hashtags and determining who your competitors are working with, but the most effective way to determine who to work with is to use a dedicated tool that has been created for just that.
Some of our favorites include:
Try them out for yourself and compare their features to find the one that works best for you and your industry.
Once you have identified some influencers who can help you achieve your campaign goals, we recommend that you connect the social media kit (you can add them as “competitors”) so that you can see the content that works best for them easily and quickly.
You must understand in more detail what types of campaigns work best for these influencers, to ensure that the way you collaborate is the most attractive possible for their followers.
When it comes to how to work with influencers it all comes down to how you position your brand and your campaign.
You have a few different options when it comes to tracking the performance of your influencer marketing campaign.
If you’re thinking about monitoring post activity, you can do so by assigning a hashtag to each influencer to use in their social media posts; Thanks to this you will be able to monitor the interaction of the campaign more easily.
You can also use a brand monitoring tool to find and report on mentions of influencers and their audiences across the web, to help you perform deeper analysis of your campaign.
To track traffic and sales, give each influencer both a custom tracking link and discount codes so you can directly assign a return to each influencer and calculate ROI based on their specific rate.
This way you can get data on each influencer, making them part of the agreement, so that you can understand the real scope and engagement of each collaboration.
The more you know about campaign performance, the better-informed decisions you can make for future collaborations.
A Note on Diffusion
If you are working with influencers either by giving away products or with a collaboration fee, you need to understand the importance of outreach.
Last year, the FTC (United States Federal Trade Commission) published updated recommendations on how influencers can spread their paid collaborations. These are some of the most notable:
- “The FTC works to prevent misleading ads, and its guides detail how advertisers and sponsors can stay on the right side of the law.
- If you promote a product through social media, your message should make it clear that you have a relationship (“material connection”) with the brand. A “material connection” with a brand includes a personal, family, employment, or financial relationship, such as a brand that pays you a fee or discounts on products or services.
- Tell your followers that these relationships are important because they keep your recommendations honest and trustworthy, so your promotions have more value.
- As an influencer, it is your responsibility to enforce these recommendations by helping you comply with the Sponsorship Guidelines and comply with laws against misleading ads. Don’t trust others to do it for you.”
Although it is ultimately the influencer’s responsibility to ensure that paid collaborations are properly communicated, as a brand working with them, you must ensure that the rules are followed.
It’s good to always be willing to have open conversations about the way influencers spread your collaboration and take the time to understand the recommendations and how they change over time.
The FTC is responsible for the recommendations for the United States, in the United Kingdom, the responsible body is the ASA.
Influencer marketing is probably the fastest-growing channel right now. It opens up a whole world of opportunities for your brand to achieve segmented income in brand recognition as well as to present your products and services to new audiences.
If you are not using this strategy as a way to generate growth, you should seriously consider it. After all, if your competitors are doing it, there’s a chance you’ll be left behind. If not, you will gain a competitive advantage if you take the plunge.
With a solid strategy, you can work with influencers to reach a specific audience, track progress, and understand how they contribute to your goals’ success.
FAQs about Influencer Marketing Agency Dubai
Influencer marketing is a strategic collaboration between a brand and individuals who have a substantial online following, known as influencers. These influencers promote the brand’s products or services to their audience, leveraging their credibility and reach to generate brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately, sales.
Working in an influencer marketing agency allows me to be at the forefront of a rapidly evolving field. It’s exciting to be part of an industry that combines creativity, data analysis, and social trends to create impactful campaigns. Plus, I’m passionate about connecting brands with authentic voices in the digital landscape.
A micro-influencer might be primarily behind the scenes in your marketing campaign. Micro-influencers have smaller, more niche followings, but they often have a deep and engaged connection with their audience. This can make them ideal for promoting products or services within specific niches.
Influencer marketing is effective for several reasons. It offers authenticity, as influencers are seen as trusted figures by their followers. It can reach highly targeted audiences, and it’s often more cost-effective than traditional advertising. Additionally, it provides valuable social proof, making it a powerful tool for brand promotion.
Influencer marketing in digital marketing is a specialized strategy that harnesses the power of social media and online platforms. It involves collaborating with influencers on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to create content that promotes products or services. This form of marketing takes advantage of the digital landscape’s vast reach and the ability to connect with niche audiences, making it a vital component of modern marketing strategies.
About the Author
José Ramón G.
I work like SEO freelance expert , I'm in love with SEO, I like to follow SEO trend and stay up-to-date with news tools and practices, My main skill are and tasks are related to writing search engine optimized copy, optimizing current copy on a client's website (page titles, Meta descriptions, h1s, alts, anchor text, etc.), blog writing, blacklining, keyword research, rank analysis, content marketing strategy analysis, to monitor the competition, evaluate affiliate pages etc ) Google ads (certificated) and Google analytics (certificated).
