one's influence

I'm going to talk about Rounds 7 and 9 in this post.

In these 2 rounds, I have been instructed to introduce and try out "Influencer Marketing".

Influencer Marketing

My tasks here was to have analyse and review which big-time celebrities should endorse Buhi Supply Co. in order to influence our audience to purchase our products. Influencers were separated between 3 different groups, Mega, Macro and Micro-Influencers. Each Influencer had a certain type of following, Mega Influencers tend to have millions of followers on various social media channels, Macro Influences have hundred thousands of followers on different social media channels while Micro-Influencers have ten of thousands of followers on their social media accounts. These influencers also have different interests which suit different target audiences as well.

The Chosen 2

These are the 2 influencers which I have chosen, Kathy Berry is a mega influencer who has millions of followers on Instagram and has interests in travelling and appeals towards women more. While Foodies Travelling Foodie is a micro-influencer who has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and also has interests in travellings and appeals towards males and females.

One struggle, I encountered while trying to hire these influencers was the money they were going to be paid. I struggled to offer a fair amount at the start as I thought they could be paid lesser than the suggested price. I did this a few times to one of the mega influencers

options which eventually resulted in not being able to use that influencer. So, when dealing with Kathy Berry and the Foodie, I decided to just pay the suggested offer amount.

Strategy

Another thing important for influencer marketing is the strategy the company is going to get them to do. There were a few strategies like gifts, affiliate marketing, brand ambassador, etc. But I made all my influencers use Affiliate Marketing as it rewards the customers more since I can give the influencer a code for them to promote in order to drive more traffic to my company by offering discounts to customers when they use the influencer's code.

Hence for Round 7, it was a good introduction to influencer marketing.

Round 9

In round 9, I chose these 3 different influencers, one macro influencer a mega influencer and another micro-influencer. I used a macro influencer this time because I felt that micro-influencers wasn't doing so well and I changed the mega influencer to my initial choice of the mega influencer in round 7 before the budget issue.

Target Audience

For these 3 influencers, my target audience this time were people who were more outdoors, loved travelling and needed simple backpacks from BUHI and mostly were young male adults.

The results of this round were good at the end, Chris Ronald beat Kathy Berry with his insane numbers of impressions, engagements, shares and conversions and macro-influencers were a better choice than micro-influencers

Strategy

For the most part, I stuck to Affiliate Marketing as I felt that its a good strategy for the influencers, I've chosen. However, one new strategy which I tried to explore in this round was a giveaway which I used for the Mico-Influencer. This saw 42,905 impressions and 8095 engagements on Instagram which was decent since that is the number of followers the micro-influencer has. I believe that strategy was good for micro-influencers as its easier to have a giveaway for a smaller audience as it's easy to see the numbers as compared to a macro-influencer or mega-influencer.

Review

In general, influencer marketing was quite beneficial to my success in these 2 rounds and I learned a fair bit about which influencers work and what form of marketing strategy works with different types of people.