The influencer marketing mix is an age old question for marketing teams. How should I invest my marketing budget in influencers? One mega influencer with a million followers? One hundred micros with 10,000 followers? How do I decide?
Answering this question isn’t as black and white as you’d like. There are multiple factors at play, but in order to break it down, we need to start with your objectives.
This is the first question every marketing director and their team needs to ask themselves. What are you trying to achieve? Obviously sales is the final goal, but you have to earn sales. How are you going to take the audience from the top of the funnel (awareness), the middle of the funnel (consideration), down to the bottom (conversion)?
What you are trying to accomplish will dictate what type of influencer tier and type of content is most suited for your campaign.
Let’s take a look at where in the marketing funnel each tier of influencer can be used in your influencer marketing mix.
If you need to drive awareness, mega influencers are still a good option. Even if people can’t relate, mega influencers can get the word out at an awareness level. Here, at the top of the funnel, people just need to hear your brand, see your logo. They don’t necessarily have to know what you do. But it will click later on because they’ve been exposed to your brand.
Macros are one of the most flexible tier of creators. You can do a campaign entirely made up of macros or you can use a few to expand your campaign reach and complement them with micros and nanos.
Micro influencers are great at consideration and conversion level content. They’re trusted because they’re not too large. Audiences will listen to what they have to say and want to “support” this creator. They want the content, but don’t want to pay for it. So they’ll be more willing to watch/listen to their branded content.
Nanos are great for promotions, launches, and creating buzz. Working with a community of nano influencers can start a groundswell of chatter and engagement about your brand and promo.
ALSO READ: What are the Differences Between Each Influencer Tier?
I wish we lived in a world where money grew on trees. Alas, it doesn’t. We need to be careful with our budget and how we spend it. If you need a primer on how much to invest in influencer marketing, reference my guide here.
Your budget will start to dictate which tier of influencer you can afford, how many influencers you can afford, what type of content (i.e. Reels vs Post) and how long you can invest in influencers.
Typically your team or an agency will help you with your media plan. This plan will help you budget your influencer marketing budget and where you need to spend your budget.
If you have a large budget, congrats, you have a lot of choices. If your budget is modest, you’re going to have to prioritize your influencer spending for strategic moments and probably focus on the consideration and conversion stages of the funnel. You’ll likely have to pair this with a top funnel channel, like Instagram ads.
Now that you understand your objectives, the roles of influencers, and your budget, you can start to lay out your influencer marketing strategy.
For example, you might want to take your budget and plan for an entire quarter. First month, you’re investing in top funnel awareness and traffic. You can afford one mega influencer and two macro influencers. Hire them and boost their content with paid media. Now you’ve exposed your brand to millions of people.
Follow that up with a month of 50 mid-macro influencers, maybe 150,000 followers. Have them create one minute vertical videos, really explaining your product. Naturally, you can direct them to buy, but the focus is to educate the audience and get them to consider your product.
In the third month you can align with an ecommerce sale, and invest in 500 micro and nano influencers who are using Instagram Stories or TikTok videos to drive conversions to your online shop.
That’s how you might put together a full funnel strategy with different tiers of influencers, based on your desired objectives.
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