How would you engage with your community in the middle of crises? Almost every industry is affected by the global pandemic. There is a certain category of influencers who will help you to reach your customers and bring your sales up during the crisis. 

With all the cuts in ad spend, the global pandemic turns influencer marketing into a more meaningful form of digital marketing. Influencer marketing is adjusting itself to changes requiring more improvement based content. Followed by the spike in consumer demand for social media content, influencers massively increase their posts. Live streaming gets more popular as it generates more social interaction. They also try new content styles and new platforms. 

Let’s see some influencers categories who are shining during the crises and will help your brand to reflect it.

#1 Foodies are busy at the kitchen

 

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A post shared by Jake Cohen (@jakecohen) on Jul 2, 2020 at 6:27am PDT

Raise your hands if you have cooked something you have never done before the quarantine. We all did. And the biggest inspiration for us was food influencers who are busy with sharing posts about trying something new. 

Also, affected by the closure of restaurants, now people have more time to try homemade recipes. Live streaming is the most popular and rising content type among food influences to educate and enjoy time with their followers. 

Besides, this is a godsent time for food brands to communicate with their consumers and nail their influencer campaigns. There are so many creative ways brands can work with food influencers during the lockdown crisis.

#2 Lockdown is going well for fitness bunnies

There is not a better time to stay healthy and physically active than ever. While the demand for a home workout is increasing digital fitness industry has boomed. Today, fitness videos are one of the most viewed videos on YouTube. Home exercise videos have increased by more than 200 percent in the UK. 

Since gym studios were forced to close fitness influencers make home exercise tutorials. They encourage social interaction among followers and help to reduce stress and anxiety during the quarantine. 

#3 Home has the best background 

Although there is no place to try fashion trends of 2020, fashion influencers do not stop creating content with work-from-home outfits. The quarantine also forces fashion gurus to create more creative and purposeful content at home.  They offer a healthy distraction in this nervous situation for those who want to work on their personal styles. Video content is also popular among fashion influencers as they prepare videos while taking ongoing social media challenges.

 

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A post shared by KATIE ONE (@katie.one) on Jun 30, 2020 at 1:17pm PDT

#4 Tech wizards are upgrading influencer marketing

Tech influencers are taking advantage of crises by actively posting about the latest digital news and innovations. Influencers often share their user experience and recommendations. Usually, these people are industry bloggers, experts who are a genuine source of information and tent to have authenticity and engagements. This is also an opportunity for people to add new skills while getting digitally connected. 

With the rapid digital transformation, the role of tech influencers is becoming more important as consumers value third party advice before making purchase decisions. Considering that many brands continue to digitalize their operations the role of tech wizards will be vital for B2C and B2B business as well.

 

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A post shared by Gadget Flow (@gadgetflow) on Jun 26, 2020 at 1:42pm PDT

#5 Lifestyle influencers reshape their content strategies

Lifestyle influencers are tailoring their content to “home edition”. The range of lifestyle content is increasing with lifehacks to combat the crisis, to #workfromhome, house cleaning, the lists of books, must-watch movies, and of course Netflix recommendations. In addition, influencers try and advise different time management tools and apps to manage time at home efficiently. 

Along with influencers, many brands increase their social media posts and adjust timings to drive more engagement. A good example was done by P&G’s brand Always. The brand let popular social media influencers take over their Instagram stories for a day and post IGTV videos on the brand’s page. Such activities contribute to better brand-influencers also brand-audience relations.

#6 Hustlers beat crises

Entrepreneurs are another rising influencers category during crises. By posting about their taken steps and future expectations of the business these people are getting more social interaction. Profound knowledge and solid backgrounds allow them to be accepted as a valid source of information. From marketing perspectives, entrepreneurs have more significance in B2B business being the right players for endorsing related products.

Don’t just dream about it.
Take action and work as hard as you can.

— Neil Patel (@neilpatel) June 26, 2020

Last but not least

These are influencer groups who pivoted their content and expected to be in favor of brands in crisis. Influencer marketing has never been this important to connect your audience and spread your message. To find more influencers go to Keepface’s Influencer Discovery and get access to one of the largest influencer database. Here’s our step-by-step guide on how to find the right influencers for your brand in seconds. 

We live at a time when there is so much competition amongst brands and services. This challenge has forced brands to come up with a highly effective marketing strategy to stay in business. One such is influencer marketing as a social media marketing strategy. For instance, in the online casino gaming, a brand such as Lightning Link is engaging influencers in their marketing strategy to create brand awareness.

According to a study conducted by Tomoson, businesses are making as much as $6.5 for every $1 used in influencer marketing strategy. The poll additionally rated influencers as one of the fastest-growing customer acquisition channels. 

We highlight 6 of the most common mistakes in influencer marketing strategy.

#1 Not Cherry-Picking an Influencer for your Marketing Strategy

If you pick a wrong influencer, your marketing strategy will barely result in sales. The biggest assumption that we make is that more social media followers would result in more sales, while it is not an obvious cause.

To effectively pick an ideal influencer for your online business’s marketing strategy, we recommend that you consider the following:

Scrutinize the Influencer Followers

For influencers, followers make one of the most critical marketing strategy elements, and hence they are always on the race to bag them. Surprisingly, some influencers purchase ghost ‘followers’ such as bots, which would always have their numbers spiking. Looking at the posts by most influencers, you will always find the bots posting unrelated or incoherent comments, which should be a red flag.

Analyze Previous Influencer Engagements

If a competitor previously used the influencer in their marketing strategy, it would be prudent to analyze the level of engagement on their posts. A keen analysis of the influencer posts helps you understand whether the comments and interactions are by organic followers or bots. You will know rich influencer interactions from the comments and feedback on inquiries made by followers. 

However, there might be posts with followers who comment or engage more with the influencer’s personality instead of the product. This only means that this influencer might not be ideal to be one of your marketing strategy components. 

#2 Having No Primary Goal in Mind

Since you are considering an influencer for your marketing strategy ideas, do you have any specific goal in mind? 

It would be a waste of resources to engage an influencer without any intent. Just getting the product mentioned is not always an end to itself. 

Thus in your business marketing strategy steps, you need to pause and analyze your primary goal for involving an influencer. Some of these goals could be:

• To increase your own brand social media following.
• To capture a new audience through brand awareness.
• To drive sales and business leads.

Develop a specific communication strategy for any of these goals without a general one unless under special circumstances. This critical component should point you in the direction of the right influencer for that marketing strategy. 

#3 Failing to Measure Results in the Marketing Strategy

To gain a return on investment (ROI) in your marketing strategy, measure the effectiveness of the influencer campaign vis-à-vis the set goals and objectives, ensure that each objective ties to a measuring metric, and link the results. 

If, for instance, you aim to drive traffic to a site like Lightning Link, insert tracking links on the website. The tracking helps you understand if there is any new traffic to the site resulting from the influencer’s posts. 

On the other hand, if gaining more social media followers was your primary goal, use relevant social media analytical tools to gain some insights. At the end of it, the results help you analyze your marketing strategy and learn from any mistakes in future influencer engagements. 

#4 Ignoring the Few Posts by Micro-influencers

While celebrity influencers have millions of followers, micro-influencers rake in between 1000 to 100,000 followers on social media. We recommend that you target both types of influences but with a balance on the volumes of their postings for your marketing strategy. 

Develop a marketing strategy whereby a given number of micro-influencers will post a certain number of posts per day and for a certain duration. The repeated posting will result in the audience remembering the message or call to action much longer.

#5 Sitting Back as Influencers take Center-stage

Once you came up with a clear marketing strategy for online business and identified an influencer to champion it, you should not take a back seat. Influencer marketing requires that you walk with the influencer throughout the marketing campaign.

If you identified the right influencer for the products, you would expect that inquiries, comments, calls, and reactions would be on the rise. Practically, it is nearly impossible for the influencer to respond to all these inquiries. It is at this point that you kick in and address the relevant questions concerning your brand. No matter how long it takes, keep track of the post, and respond to queries. 

#6 Treating Influencer Marketing Strategy as Actual Sales

A big mistake made by businesses that hire influencers for their marketing strategy is assuming that influencer marketing is actual sales. In the real sense, influencer marketing strategy is just that; marketing. 

Influencers could help drive traffic to your website or social media platforms, which would make most of the time drive sales. As marketers, you need to involve them in your marketing strategy so that they own the process and become persuasive in their pitches. 

Conclusion

Finally, social media influencers have become a big hit, and if tapped into correctly coupled with a proper marketing strategy can magically create the much-needed sales leads and traffic.

Do you know of any other mistakes made in influencer marketing strategies? We would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

With more and more brands investing in influencer marketing, influencer discovery becomes more complicated and diversified. The growing market generates new influencer categories and new audiences over time. And brands should stay up-to-date to nail the most effective influencer marketing campaigns.

In 2020, 51% of marketers say influencer-created content is more effective than brand-created content. So, finding the right influencers is half of a successful influencer marketing strategy. The more influencer resonates with your brand, the more successful your campaign will be. But finding the fittest influencer is not as easy as it sounds. 

If you’ve already defined your campaign goals, the next step is to dive into influencer discovery. It’s in your best interest to find and reach out to relevant influencers in the shortest time. Today we’ll guide you through how to streamline influencer discovery and outreach via Keepface’s Influencer Discovery. 

Let’s get started!

Search and find influencers

After logging in to your account jump in Discovery – it’s just in the left corner. 

Click Discovery and you will be directed to Search bar automatically. Below the bar, you can see the latest registered influencers.

Use Filter to get concentrated results for your campaign. Filter button is designed to find out the most relevant influencers by their category, audience size, engagement, social platforms, price range, country, and gender. And with the Upgraded Plan, you can even go further by filtering influencers’ audience search on language, location, gender, interests category, and age groups. 

Click Show Results next to Filter to get the results according to your filter. 

Influencer names come with filtered results. In a few seconds, you will find your best fit influencers on the database. There are two view options, List and Grid view. You can choose how you want to see your results. 

Overview of each influencer’s profile

Click View details to quickly see the overview of influencer profiles. You will be able to see the latest and most engaging posts of influencers, as well as their category, global and country ranking score, total audience, and media value. So you get an in-depth view of influencers without leaving the platform.

Dive into their Audience Analyze to see whether that influencers’ audience matches with your target audience. By looking at the latest posts you will have an overview of their styles and engagement of the recent posts beforehand. These are all necessary stats that will help you to decide whether the influencer is relevant to your brand or not. 

Add influencers to your lists for later use 

On the right side of the section, you see Add to list. Lists are a great way to save your filtered results so you will save time while campaign planning. 

You can either add influencers to the list you created before or Create a new list. Influencer lists help you in your future campaigns where you just choose the list and submit the campaign.

Say, you need a list of “Fashion micro-influencers”. Adjust filters accordingly and select influencers who you think are the right fit by clicking the box in front of each name.  Click Add to List (red button below Search Bar), choose the List and all the selected influencers will be added to that list. Or you can add influencers individually, just clicking Add to List (blue button next to Influencer Profile) and selecting the list. 

Your list is ready

You can reach your lists anytime by clicking Lists on the drop-down menu under the Influencer Box (see on the screenshot).

Note that the number of lists depends on your Subscription Plan, so with a free plan, you can create only one influencer list. 

Creating lists before starting your campaign will save you a huge time, so when you create a campaign you’ll only need to add your brief, content types and add your list of influencers with a few clicks. That easy!

Difference between micro-influencers and celebrities

Why do companies prefer smaller influencers?

1. Cost-effective

2. Scepticism of the public over celebrity promotions

3. They seem more genuine

4. Smaller influencers have more specific content

5. It is easier to find genuine brand fans

6. They are better to work with

Typically, micro-influencers tend to be more engaging on a personal level, which makes it easier for businesses to establish personal connections to them.  

“A lot of the times, businesses claim that smaller influencers go above and beyond to satisfy the needs of their client, as they show their gratefulness towards the people that notice them and value their work. They also claim that it is easier to contact them and that they tend to be more open to explore the tasks they are given and provide out-of-the-box content,” says Hillary Ian, a blogger at State Of Writing and Oxessays.

7. Great for small businesses and startups

#1 Target untapped-niche segments

#2 Launch an initial campaign

#3 Measure and optimize your success

We’re here to help

As one of the foremost human tragedies, Coronavirus is affecting the lives of the world population, endangering the health of hundreds of thousands of people, bereaving social freedom. It has also dramatic effects on the businesses in public and private sectors. It is difficult to define the true financial cost of the virus on the economy as the outbreak spreads day-by-day to new regions. 

Beginning in China and following in the world, leading technology, apparel, automobile companies have been compelled to shut down their factories, close sales stores, and lay off employees. The downturn put pressure on logistics, supply chain management, and shipment services. 

Businesses are canceled 

Lockdown due to the Coronavirus negatively affects the B2B market too. Major tech conferences, sports, art events are canceled causing billions of losses to the whole world economy. According to the US B2B marketers, in-person communication and tradeshows are the most effective channels for driving conversion and lead generation. Expected cost of cancellation of the biggest tech conferences is $1B loss. 

What does this mean for marketers?

It is vital to keep relations with customers in the first wave of the crises. Discounts, special offers are a good way to engage with current customers. 

However, not to exploit the fear people are experiencing, platforms like Google and Facebook are blocking any ad that might be abusing the situation. From the beginning of the outbreak, Facebook started to ban ads for goods like hand sanitizers and face masks. It also prohibited the sharing of misinformation causing panic, or about the cure of the virus.  

Some brands renovate delivering services 

Due to the increased online shopping Amazon focuses on the stocking and delivery of the essential products following the situation. The company prioritizes the delivery of household staples, healthcare supplies, personal care, grocery and baby products. Sales outside these categories are suspended up to 5 April, which can be extended.

Cut down in marketing budgets

According to the Econsultancy and Marketing Week’s survey, product and service launches are delayed to uncertain times. 55% in the UK and 56% in US marketers said that their marketing campaigns are under review or delayed. 

Besides the travel and hospitality, FMCG, restaurants, entertainment industries seriously stumbled in the first quarter and expected to continue in the second quarter, as well. Reduced ad spend on these sectors also cause fall off in the budgets of Google and Facebook. Considering the fact that in 2019, travel ads accounted for 10% of Google’s ads revenue.  Marketers anticipate a 30% to 45% drop in Facebook’s revenue because of hits on travel, consumer packaged goods, retailer and entertainment in the first quarter. 

Social responsibility

It is the best time to build public trust that will always be remembered. Through corporate social responsibility programs, companies take initiatives for the benefit of their employees and society. The different range actions include covering sick leaves of workers, helping the government to fight against the disease, producing face masks or hand sanitizers, giving food support away and etc. The American fashion brand Ralph Lauren donates $10M for the relief of the virus. The donation will go to the WHO fund, the corporation’s employees and cancer institutions. 

Several brands run different social campaigns to invite people to stay at home. The global franchise chane McDonald’s separated its golden arch M to support self isolation. The change in the logo is only made in the social platforms. Nike, which closed all stores in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US, launched Play inside, play for the world campaign. To prevent the spread of novel Coronavirus, Starbucks stops the use of reusable cups in its stores. Plus, it offers a 10% discount to customers who bring their reusable cups or ask to use the brand’s cups. 

 

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Now more than ever, we are one team.⠀ #playinside #playfortheworld

A post shared by nike (@nike) on Mar 21, 2020 at 7:00am PDT

Despite its diminishing ad revenues, Facebook offers $100 million grants as cash and ad credits to 30 000 small businesses in 30 countries that it operates. Along with donating 10M masks to the citizens in the US and Europe, Apple launched a website and an iOS app that allow users to screen themselves for the Coronavirus. Another tech giant Google gave $800M mainly in the ad form to support the fight against the virus, including $20M in  Google Cloud for academic institutions and researchers, $200M for NGO and financial institutions, $340M for small and medium enterprises. 

Difficulties create opportunities 

With all complexity and obstacles, the virus challenges all markets to redirect their marketing and sales plans and utilize them to the current conditions. 

Time spent on social media has enormously been rising as more people stay-at-home to minimize the risk of the virus. Now people have “unlimited time” to produce and consume more content than ever. 

According to a report by Izea, 66% of the correspondents predict their social media usage will increase. Internet users believe that YouTube usage will increase by 64% while Facebook will increase 63%, followed by Instagram by 43% and Twitter by 34%. 

Remote working is a new era now

Several business events shifted online such as Google Cloud Next, IBM’s developers conference. The loss of face-to-face communication and the cancellation of social events creates a huge demand for online conferencing platforms such as SLAC, webinars. Slack said there is almost a 40% increase in the numbers of paid customers. Daily active users of Microsoft Teams more than doubled from November to March. It also added new features to the platform for telehemedice. 

The growing need for telehealth and teleconferencing accelerates the implication of 5G technology. 

According to the Appsflyer’s report, there is a 15% increase in organic non-gaming app installs starting from mid-February. The non-gaming app categories mainly include communication, finance, health & fitness, news, a utility which means people turn their social habits to online presence.

Spike in online gaming industry 

Social distancing makes people gather and entertain on online games. Video gaming companies either extend or introduce new promotions. In China, total game downloads in Apple’s app stores made a 27.5% increase that is a 12.1% rise in revenue. According to Douyu’s streaming index, games like “Honor of Kings”, “League of Legends” and “Playerunknown’s Battleground” now are twice as popular compared to 2019. “Honor of Kings” reached 63 million views during the New Year holiday.

In the US there is 75% upswing in the number of online game players. The largely damaged Italy sees a 70% increase in internet traffic which is mainly contributed by the gaming industry like “Fortnite”, “Call of Duty: Warzone”. Steam reached 22.5 million all-time user peaks during last week.

What is happening to influencer marketing in the meantime? 

It is important to engage with the audience during this hard time. Social distancing is largely overwhelming fashion, lifestyle, travel influencers whose content is mainly based on outside activities. 

Due to economic stagnation and slacking consumer behavior in different fields, lots of clothing, entertainment brands are constrained to withdraw or delay their partnerships. But, this will not cause the influencer marketing to go away.

We all know it is not the right time to pose in the perfect looking outfits at social events, holiday travels. At the same time, we see an increased number of social media usage, and engagements rise up. It is an opportunity to create useful and educational content and rebuild trust with the followers. As authorities who influence our lives, they can call people to understand the situation and follow the guidelines, spread positivity, advise on activities to effectively spend our time at home.

The different types of content such as streaming daily vlogs to show how they use their time well in these hard times, adding movie and book recommendations, distant learning programs, and home recipes. It will also help to reform the market in a more authentic and communication-based nature. 

Gaming, fitness, yoga and wellbeing influencers are the most followed categories in the stay-at-home period. Psychology experts are the next category people feel the need in self-isolation period. Changing living habits, fear of health issues, and financial uncertainty in many traditional works make people seek to keep physical and mental balance in a sedentary lifestyle.

Challenges with uncertainty 

It is early to voice the precise amount of economic loss. Continued uncertainty hinders to define needed actions to be taken. Drop-in the main spheres of the economy makes brands alter their marketing, sales strategies, and set new budgets. 

Although negative consequences of the Coronavirus virus is expected to continue in the upcoming months, a positive lesson that we learned in these days is global lockdown opened a new and ongoing stay-at-home economy. The vast majority of businesses more or less can perform the same results as in the in-person working. Now it is possible to serve food, grocery, health care kits to millions of people at the same time. Purchasing habits of people will not be the same as the pre-break period. 

An essential step in any influencer marketing campaign is appropriate and effective outreach. Influencer outreach is essential in running a successful campaign, so avoid the following common mistakes:

1. Reaching out through the wrong platform

It is important to reach out to potential influencer partners on the right channel – the best contact method is often simply through email. Though social media is the popular choice for other types of communication, email is more demanding of response and makes the conversation easier to track and reference later. Social media can be cluttered for this kind of business conversation, but useful for sending a message pre-pitch to ask how best to get in touch about your idea. It is also always safe to go through the business account, not personal accounts.

2. Not having clear campaign objectives

Establishing your campaign objectives is essential in building the foundation for the rest of the project. Depending on what you hope to gain specifically from this campaign, you will need to use the appropriate channel (i.e. social media platform) and at the same time the right influencer.

A social media influencer will have their own personal strengths, which you will need to be aware of and select them according to whether these things will help you in reaching your campaign goals. Communicate these goals with your influencers so everyone is on the same page and the campaign will be more successful.

3. Picking the wrong influencer

Having a clear list of criteria for finding the perfect influencer to head your campaign is vital, as well as knowing how these requirements are prioritized.

It is important to remember that an influencer’s number of followers isn’t everything – audience engagement is another influential factor to consider. Small, niche followings can be just as valuable as larger, mainstream audiences, even more so, if chosen and applied effectively. Daniel Hardison, a business writer at Ukwritings and Academized, says: “These things contribute to creating a presence that will drive sales and promote brand visibility.”

Thorough research and clear goals are both crucial in this stage of the process – you need to ensure your values align and that you have the same or at least overlapping audiences.

4. Writing a generic, long-winded, or just bad pitch

When it comes to writing your pitch, use personal details and specific connections between the brand and the influencer to make it more effective. Never use the same template for multiple pitches, or, even worse, send the same pitch as a mass email.

Also, remember that the pitch is just that – it isn’t your entire plan and doesn’t need to include every detail about your business, it is simply the hook. Be concise and try to get to the point quickly. Communicate the vital information clearly, the basics, and include the next step you would like to take.

Wayne Smith, a communication manager at Boomessays and Bigassignments, says: “Framing is everything: you want to pitch an offer to them, like you are doing something for them, rather than asking them to do something for you. Your pitch needs to sound like a unique opportunity that will benefit them as well as you.”

5. Taking things too personally

When it comes to getting turned down, it is important not to take things personally. The influencer could have any number of reasons for declining your offer, most of which have nothing to do with you, your brand, or even your campaign pitch. If their response is lacking in details or reasons, it may be reasonable to enquire as to why they chose to decline and whether they are giving you a hard no or just a ‘not right now’. Of course, this shouldn’t ever come across as a bitter plea, begging to know why they rejected you – instead, make sure you frame this line of questioning as constructive advice to help you with future pitches.

Finding the right influencer for your marketing campaign can make all the difference when it comes to building your brand image and audience and increasing sales. So, it is extremely important to ensure your outreach is perfect!