Influencer Marketing Bible 2022: Ultimate Guide and Roadmap
Written by Crescencio Zhao
We will walk you through everything about influencer marketing roadmap in this ultimate guide.
Influencer marketing is not a new concept for global marketers. As one of the formats of social media marketing, influencer marketing is being adopted by more brands and few of them are doing it right.
A successful influencer marketing campaign can secure skyrocketing business growth for brands. Therefore, we write the ultimate influencer marketing bible to guide your marketing campaigns in 2022.
1. What is Influencer Marketing
As social media platforms rise up as the main marketplace for brands, influencer marketing has been a proven social media marketing tactic for most marketers. As one of the main types of digital marketing, running social media marketing campaigns has been adopted by more brands, especially by e-commercers and APP dealers.
Who are influencers?
Generally speaking, influencers are people with great influence on their audience through their opinions delivered through content, such as blogs or articles, videos, photos, and social media posts, among others. They use their content to lead opinions among followers and impact all kinds of their decision-making, such as purchasing decisions.
Influencers on social media
With much more time spent on social media, people tend to read and create content on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Creators or channels with a large following can be defined as social influencers who have great influence. For marketers, to make the most use of influence, collaborating with these influencers to do marketing is an effective way to build brand awareness and acquire business growth.
Main influencer marketing pattern
Including brand information in influencers’ content is the main pattern of influencer marketing.
Working with influencers, who are usually key opinion leaders in their niche, you can also say influencer marketing is a form of word-of-mouth marketing. With a large social media following, reviewing or mentioning your brands in their content is a great way to build awareness for your brand.
There are many different types of influencers — YouTubers, bloggers, Instagrammers, etc. — and they each have their own unique style and audience. The key to successful influencer marketing is finding the right partner. A good fit between your product and influencer will lead to more engaged followers who are more likely to buy your product.
2. 2022 Influencer Marketing Key Statistics
Global Influencer Marketing Market Size
According to a data report published by Influencer Marketing Hub, the global influencer marketing market value is projected to be $16.4 billion by the end of 2022. While per Statista, this industry size is growing from 2021’s $13.8 billion and 2016’s $1.7 billion, with a growth rate of 865% in recent 6 years.
Thanks to the marketing needs of brands and monetization needs of creators, influencer marketing industry has seen an explosive rise in recent years. Behind the ever-growing field, various kinds of market players appear to drive growth in every aspect.
Global Influencer Marketing Platform Industry Size
In addition to brands and influencers, the whole influencer marketing industry is supported by other key roles, the influencer marketing platforms or agencies, who are providing marketing services and are indispensable players.
Influencer marketing platforms or agencies provide services from influencer discovery, campaign management to influencer relationship management, and analytics and reporting for brands, and sponsorship opportunities for creators.
With a valuation of 137 million U.S, dollars in 2018, influencer marketing platform market was expected to grow to be a $370-million one in 2027, per Statista. It was a predicted number in 2021.
While in 2022, this number was updated by Insight Partner, another research institute, to be US$ 337.74 million by 2027 with a CAGR growth rate of 13.4.
Despite the slight difference in forecast between different reports, all stats signal a vibrant industry growth. With a different vision into this industry, NoxInfluencer saw a rise in every point of this service supply chain. All influencer marketing-related service providers, companies, agencies, or software tools, have been springing up globally.
In 2021, the total number of service providers or companies in this supply chain increased by 26%. And concerning players from the United States, the rate was 30%.
Influencer Marketing Spend Changes
According to a third-party institute forecasts, in 2022, 68% of brands will allocate more marketing budget to influencer marketing campaigns and 75% of them will make a dedicated marketing budget to collaborating with influencers.
As reported by Insider Intelligence, in 2022, the US marketers’ spending on influencer marketing will reach $4.14 billion. This spending growth recorded a high in 2021 by 33.6%. Impacted by the pandemic, this rate decreased to 12.2% while the number still keeps going upward.
Most Popular Platforms to Do Influencer Marketing
With 3.96 million users worldwide in 2022, social media platforms are the largest places to do influencer marketing. For marketers, taking which platforms as the major battlefield depends on their niche and goals.
In general, Instagram has remained the most popular platform used by brands according to research. 79% of marketers tend to choose Instagram to launch campaigns in 2022.
Although TikTok showed robust growth in recent 2 years, with an MAU of 1 billion, 46% of brands incline to work with TikTokers, pinning the most popular short-video sharing app in the second place.
However, brands from the United States have a different taste when seeking social media marketplaces. According to a report by Insider Intelligence, Instagram and Facebook stay in the top 2 platforms from 2020 to 2025 as estimated, with 72.5% and 55.2% respectively.
In 2021, TikTok surpassed YouTube as the third most-used platform by US marketers with 42%.
Creator Economy Market State
If we see brands as demanders of influencer marketing services, influencers will serve as the direct suppliers in this market.
With skyrocketing user volume and using time of social media, content creators gain more monetization opportunities, through accepting sponsorship and promotion of their content. Social media platforms are also launching incentive policies or affiliation programs for creators to encourage them to create better content and provide more revenue resources.
Per stats by a report, it was estimated that social creator market will reach 104 billion U.S. dollars in 2022.
Strong growth from both supply side and demand side is a powerful signal of influencer marketing market being under golden age.
3. Influencer Marketing Benefits: Why does it matter?
Entering an age of Web 3.0, consumers gather on the Internet and every aspect of business goes digital, including marketing. Changes happen everywhere: consumers’ buying habits, advertising formats, and costs, people’s entertainment ways.
There are dozens of reasons to explain why we should do influencer marketing. But here, NoxInfluencer concludes with a few essential benefits of influencer marketing to tell you why it matters to brands.
Benefit 1: Web traffic equals revenue
After websites, influencers become new traffic owners.
Marketers run campaigns where full of people. In digital world, it’s a rule of doing business where full of traffic, which can be defined as the new currency circulating on the Internet. Webmasters trade traffic for money, while marketers use traffic to bring customers, leads, and even sales.
Driven by larger usage of mobile devices, the world has seen a soar in social media usage. The global social media usage rate registered at 58.4% in 2022. In 2021, the total users of social media networks worldwide reached 4.26 billion and is projected to be 4.49 billion in 2022.
According to Statista, every user spends 147 minutes on social media on daily basis in 2022, increasing by 2 minutes from 2021.
As readers transfer from traditional media to social media, advertisers and marketers have to shift their ad content to social media, a new hub of attention.
On social media, it is influencers or channels followed by a group of users, that hold traffic on social media. Marketing with social influencers is a direct way to reach the audience on social media.
Benefit 2: Habits, trust, and authority
Digitalization also changes consumers’ purchasing habits. Social media marketing and social commerce are both results of digitalization process. Purchasing on social media, or looking for reviews on social media before consumption has been a habit for people nowadays.
Influencers of a specific niche build authority in their field through professional content. Such authority will help creators to have an influence on social media and be opinion leaders. Opinions and decisions of users who follow these influencers will be impacted.
As we mentioned in previous paragraphs, searching for reviews of the products or services on social media before purchasing has been a habit of consumers, due to authority.
On the other hand, trust will be built between influencers and followers. Once a brand is promoted or mentioned in the content of influencers, followers usually choose to believe in their recommendations.
According to a survey by Oracle, 37% of consumers trust influencers over brands themselves. And the number of Gen Z is 63%. 32% of Gen Z consumers discover new products and brands through influencers, whereas just 13 percent of Boomers do so.
Benefit 3: Cost effective
Influencer marketing is a more cost-effective way to promote a business than traditional advertising channels, such as Google Ads and Facebook.
By partnering with niche influencers, brands can reach a specific audience in a pretty precise way than through traditional advertising. This is a quick way to find potential customers through niche influencers. Finding the right audience is an effective way to make count every buck you invest into marketing.
Influencers are trusted by their audiences, so they can help your brand build trust and credibility. They can also share content that connects with your target audience, which can help build brand awareness.
By paying influencers, you’re paying for visibility and engagement. This is a win-win situation for everyone involved. Not only does it increase the reach of your ads, but it also increases the likelihood that people will engage with them and share them with their friends and family.
Influencer marketing can be tricky, though. You must find the right influencers who align with your brand values and message. You must also be prepared to pay them in order to get the results you need.
4. Influencer Marketing Strategy and Guidance: How to do it?
Entering an age of Web 3.0, consumers gather on the Internet and every aspect of business goes digital, including marketing. Changes happen everywhere: consumers’ buying habits, advertising formats, and costs, people’s entertainment ways.
There are dozens of reasons to explain why we should do influencer marketing. But here, NoxInfluencer concludes with a few essential benefits of influencer marketing to tell you why it matters to brands.
Step 1: Define marketing goals
First of all, a professional marketer needs to define marketing goals. This is the core principle behind any successful marketing strategy and it’s also the first step in developing an influencer marketing strategy. Every other element of this strategy will be designed to achieve these goals.
It’s only by understanding what brands want to achieve that marketers can create an effective strategy that works. If you’re not sure what your goals should be, here are a few examples to get you started:
– Increase brand awareness.
– Drive conversation around a specific product or service.
– Generate leads for your business.
– Drive sales from existing customers.
– Build relationships with potential customers.
– Create a positive brand image.
Step 2: Select the platforms where you want to run campaigns
Once campaign goals have been identified, marketers can move on to selecting the platforms where they want to launch campaigns. Different social media have their own advantages and disadvantages, due to various different features.
YouTube is a long-video sharing platform while TikTok is for short videos. Instagram is a perfect place to post luxuriant images and Facebook helps build relationships between your brands and customers. In terms of audience demographics, TikTok and Instagram are adorable to Gen Z. YouTube content gain lower impressions than content on TikTok but YouTube users have a more solid loyalty to channels they subscribe to.
All of these options can work well, depending on the goals of your campaign. If you want to build brand awareness, it’s a good idea to create a piece of content that can be spread organically. This way, you’ll reach a wider audience and you won’t have to pay.
The choice of platform is also important, as it can affect the cost of your campaign.
Step 3: Find the right influencers for your campaign
Now that you know where you want to run your campaigns, you need to find the right influencers for your campaign. Influencer marketing is all about working with people who have a strong following on social media. This way, you can reach your potential customers with little effort.
The first step in finding the right influencers for your campaign is to create a list of potential target markets. This can be based on your existing customer base or a specific segment of society.
The next step is to confirm how large and how many influencers you want to collaborate with. It can be calculated by your total expected impressions and average following of an influencer.
In a word, marketers should locate the best influencers for their campaigns based on a number of different criteria. You can search for influencers based on their location, number of followers, and more. From here, you can start contacting influencers and building relationships.
Step 4: Write campaign copy and proposal letter
When creating a campaign for your influencer marketing strategy, you need to create ad copy that resonates with your audience. This is especially true if you’re creating organic content, but it’s also something to keep in mind if you’re designing ads to run on other platforms.
The best way to write ad copy that resonates with your audience is to find out what they want. Ask your customers what interests them and what problems they’re facing. This way, you’ll be able to create ads that speak to their needs and solve their problems.
In addition to resonating with the audience, marketers should also take influencers’ creation styles into consideration. After all, it is influencers who speak for your brands and brands need their credibility to attract customers.
When finishing ad copy designing, marketers should include it in proposal letters used to invite influencers to cooperate. An interesting and creative copy is more attractive to influencers to pitch your offer. Make it clear in letters what you need influencers to do and what they will get in it, such as payment and other long-term benefits
Step 5: Make a performance measurement strategy
Finally, you need to decide on a measurement strategy for your influencer marketing strategy. After all, measuring the success of your campaign is the only way to truly understand how effective it is.
There are a few different ways to measure the success of your campaign. You can track the number of video clicks and conversions, the amount of organic traffic, and even the number of social media interactions.
No matter which metrics you choose to track, it’s important to be consistent. By tracking these metrics regularly, you’ll be able to understand the progress of your campaign and be able to make adjustments if necessary.
5. Influencer Types
Social media influencers can be divided into 4 types by the following size. Choosing which type of influencers to collaborate with can be affected by your marketing budget, goals, industry, and platform you choose.
Except for the following size, different types of influencers differ in multiple other metrics, such as engagement rate, pricing, impression level, etc.
Mega-Influencers
Mega creators on social media refer to those channels followed by over 1 million users. This group of influencers has incredible reach. Most of their content published on social media always gains large impressions while lower engagement rate due to high views.
Macro-Influencers
Macro ones are influencers that have a following between 100,000 and 1,000,000. Not all macro-influencers are experts in their field — they might be entertainers, athletes, or business leaders.
Micro-Influencers
With the following interval between 1,000 and 100,000, micro-influencers are the smaller, but no less influential, influencers in the marketing world. Like any influencer, they have followers who trust them for their expertise and take their advice as fact.
However, micro-influencers have a smaller number of followers and are therefore more niche. This means that they are able to reach a more specific audience. They may share personal photos of products or posts about specific topics like travel or food. They could also be a brand ambassador, traveling to festivals and events with their products.
Nano-Influencers
Influencers followed by less than 1,000 users are often defined as Nano-influencers. They are newcomers to the creator community and just start their creation careers on social media.
Despite their limited following, their seed followers have a pretty strong loyalty to them. And their price is usually cheap and sometimes free to collaborate with if brands can send them sample products as rewards.
6. Influencer Marketing Campaign Types
Type 1: Dedicated review video campaign
A dedicated video campaign is the most ideal type brands would like to adopt. For this type of campaign, companies will often provide influencers with a product or service to review at no cost. They’ll ask influencers to shoot a dedicated review video, lasting 5 minutes or longer, and post it on their social media channels.
These types of campaigns are beneficial because they’re designed to build hype around a product or service. They’re also a great way to collect honest reviews from people who may have tried it out first-hand.
Type 2: Integration video Campaign
An integration video refers to a video with a clip sponsored by brands in the middle or end. Compared with dedicated videos, the topic of videos with integration for promotion content is unnecessary to align with promotion.
To feature a product or service in a video, brands are likely to ask influencers to mention their brands by name or make the product an organic part of the video story.
Integration campaigns are commonly used for product launches. They’re also a great way for influencers to show off a new piece of equipment, like a camera. You may want to consider an integration campaign if you have a new product or service you want to promote. You can also use this type of campaign to highlight the benefits of your product or service.
Type 3: Shout out video
A shout-out video campaign is when brands work with select influencers to create videos promoting a brand. These types of campaigns are designed to drive traffic and increase awareness of a brand or product.
Brands may ask influencers to include a call-to-action (CTA) in the video. This could encourage viewers to take a specific action, like visiting your website or purchasing a product. Shout-out videos are beneficial because they’re a quick and easy way to collect shares and engage a target audience. They’re also a cost-effective option when compared to other strategies, like paid ads.
Type 4: Giveaway event post
A giveaway campaign is when brands work with select influencers to create a post about a giveaway. For this type of campaign, influencers will promote the post and ask their audience to enter the giveaway sponsored by brands, informing them of the prizes being offered, as well as any rules associated with the giveaway.
Typically, brands hold a giveaway to promote a go-to-market product or celebrate a new launch. Alternatively, a giveaway campaign can also serve as a testers campaign, inviting customers to try new products.
Type 5: Guest posts campaign
Guest posting used to be adopted in SEO or content marketing. Copywriters from sites offer guest posts to other sites or bloggers to post, as a way to build links or drive traffic.
For influencer marketers, guest posting is also applicable if brands want some renowned journalists or bloggers to post relevant content for them. It is similar to a news story pitch in PR channels.
Different from other types, guest posts should be written by brands and offered to publishers. It costs less but requires brands to have a great ability to create. Most journalists and websites that accept guest posts are very picky about article quality and value.
7. Influencer Collaboration Types
Varying with payment structure claimed by influencers, three main collaboration types are formed.
Type 1: Paid collaboration with a flat rate
Paying influencers with a flat rate to promote is the most common type of influencer collaboration. Influencers tend to set several fixed prices for their promotion packages. 49% of influencer marketing collaborations pay at a flat rate.
As a way to avoid risk, brands often claim to pay in two parts, upfront payment before publishing and end payment after publishing.
Type 2: Affiliation-like payment
This type of collaboration’s payment method is more like affiliate marketing payment. This price consists of a basic payment and percentage payment based on the sales driven by influencers’ promotions. 42% of collaborations go this way.
Type 3: Free Collaboration
The last type of collaboration is free to cost. It often takes place between Nano-influencers and brands who provide free sample products as rewards.
8. Influencer Marketing Tactics
Host an Influencer Contest
If you really want to tap into the power of influencers, consider hosting a contest. This is a great way to build a relationship with influencers while also growing brand awareness. Hosting a contest is an excellent way to attract high-quality influencers.
Run a Brand Awareness Campaign
Another successful way to leverage influencer marketing is to create a brand awareness campaign. This can be done by working with a single influencer or through a network like Bounty Hunter. This type of campaign is designed to boost brand awareness by having influencers talk positively about your brand in posts, on their social media channels, or through video.
Provide Free Content to Audience
If you are working with individual influencers or a network like Bounty Hunter, you can also offer to provide free content to their audiences. This can include things like guest posts, blog posts, e-books, webinars, podcasts, or even videos. By offering to create content for an influencer’s audience, you are helping them out while also boosting the visibility of your brand.
