Courtesy of Amra and Elma Beganovich
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- Influencers are the best way to attract customers to your brand on Instagram.
- By 2021, shopping on Instagram is expected to generate $10 billion a year in revenue.
- Business Insider spoke to influencer marketing expert Elma Beganovich on how to navigate the industry. She gave us tips on the five types of influencers, how much they cost, and getting loyal customers to build your network.
- Beganovich suggested starting small — don’t go after celebrities and macro-influencers until you’ve established your brand and following.
- Click here for more BI Prime content.
Influencers are the compass that navigates consumers toward new and interesting products.
Startups are using influencers for market research, product development, and free or low-cost marketing. Business Insider previously reported that shopping on Instagram is expected to generate $10 billion a year in revenue by 2021.
But when it comes to marketing your brand, not all influencers will give you the same results. The most successful strategy is one catered to your customers — one that speaks to them on a personal level but isn’t forced. Social media is ultra saturated and followers are fickle. Miss the mark and you become invisible.
Elma Beganovich founded a $5.2 million digital-marketing agency with her sister Amra Beganovich before “influencer marketing” was coined. They were on the fashion blogger scene back when fashionistas documented their outfits on their blogs and shook up the front row at fashion week. The sisters’ agency now works with a database of one million influencers and has created campaigns for international brands like Uber, Huawei, and Johnson & Johnson.
“Since Amra and I started this, it has really developed into a fairly sophisticated industry,” she said. “Once upon a time, you could even get one of the major influencers to do something on a trade basis — it doesn’t happen anymore.”
Beganovich told Business Insider what brands need to know about influencers, from macro to micro (and what those terms mean), how much they cost, and how to hire them. We also talked to startup founders who have rapidly gained followers on social media, worked with influencers, and formed legions of loyal customers.
Here is your ultimate guide to working with influencers to market your startup brand.
Following: The difference between a macro-influencer and micro-influencer.
AP Photo/Martin Meissner
The influencer landscape has changed drastically in the last few years. What used to include just celebrities and Instagram users with 500,000 followers, now includes people with medium- and small-sized audiences.
Beganovich broadly breaks influencers into five tiers by number of followers:
Celebrity ≈ more than 5 million followers
Macro ≈ 500,000 to 5 million followers
Mid-tier ≈ 75,000 to 450,000 followers
Micro ≈ 10,000 to 50,000 followers
Nano ≈ 5,000 to 10,000 followers
Nano-influencers are the newest on the scene. These are the everyday people who are average consumers more than they are public figures. Your aunt or best friend could be a nano-influencer, as long as they post content about a specific topic and have a distinguished voice or style.
Brands are increasingly using them as approachable and cost-effective audience builders. “They still have a very good network and brands do use them,” Beganovich said.
Followers are general guidelines for brands and marketing agencies to assess how they work with an influencer. There are outliers, of course, and the amount of followers is only skimming the surface.
Content: How an influencer will impact your branding.
Courtesy of Casely
The most important component to influencer marketing is what gets posted. Influencer content has to reflect your brand image, values, and target customer.
Every influencer has specific viewers in mind. That gives a brand access to an entire demographic through one account. For example, if a skincare company specializes in plant-based products, it could market through beauty influencers — but also with yoga, vegan, and health influencers.
Phone-case startup Casely made its Instagram account three months before launching any product. The brand found micro-influencers and photographers were the best way to market its products and test designs. Cofounders Mark and Emily Stallings looked for influencers who reflected the brand’s vision and style. “We basically got our business off the ground through Instagram,” Emily said.
Casely now has amassed more than 200,000 followers on Instagram and made just over $10 million in sales in 2019.
Compensation: How much you should expect to pay influencers.
Courtesy Plant You
The cost of influencer marketing varies widely across industries. For example, luxury or fashion influencers generally charge more than yoga or health and wellness influencers, considering they have the same number of followers.
Beganovich said reputation and location are just as important as an influencer’s following when determining compensation. Brands will pay an influencer with an audience mostly in Texas differently than they pay an influencer with an international reach. If the influencer has been featured in the media and major magazines, that adds to their reputation and demand.
“Is it somebody who’s considered a serious industry insider or just somebody who locally is followed by people within a certain area,” Beganovich said.
Influencers who work through an agent or agency will likely cost more than those who work solo.
That said, Beganovich gave a general metric for cost per post:
Every 100,000 followers ≈ $1,000 per post
Beganovich said a brand should think about how to get the maximum amount of impressions in its relevant target demographic. For example, an annual marketing budget of $50,000 could pay for a group of 10 macro- or mid-tier influencers for concentrated impact, or a brand could “flood the market” with hundreds of micro- or nano-influencers.
Some brands may think they don’t need to pay lower-tier influencers, but Beganovich advises against that if you want to maintain a clear brand image and have timely content. “For micro-influencers, if you want guaranteed coverage and to have control over the campaign, it has to be paid,” she said.
Brand ambassador: The customer becomes an influencer.
Courtesy of LIVELY
Brand ambassadors are essentially a hype squad for your brand. They post photos of your products on social media, participate in special launches and events, and may even collaborate on a limited-edition collection. Ambassadors can be unpaid customers who get perks like event access and free gifts. They can also be paid influencers who require a contract and special terms, like attending events, photoshoots, and speaking to the press.
Lingerie startup LIVELY found major success through more than 100,000 loyal customer ambassadors who not only helped the company gain customers through social media, but also gave feedback on new products and drive foot traffic to retail locations.
CEO and founder, Michelle Cordeiro Grant, said LIVELY unofficially started its ambassador program before launch with focus groups, while developing its first underwear line. After launching in 2016, LIVELY’s customer network quickly grew through social media. “It really crystallized once we realized that their word of mouth and their sharing was converting into sales,” Cordeiro Grant told Business Insider.
The company now has more than 200,000 followers on Instagram and four retail stores. “Instagram was and still is the biggest billboard out there,” she said. However, algorithms have changed and social media is much more saturated than when LIVELY launched, so she said brands today have to be more creative and strategic. The ROI may be lower, but it’s still an important space for consumers to discover your brand. “Now you fight a little bit harder to get that billboard exposure on Instagram,” she said.
Start small: It takes time to reach Kardashian-Jenner level influencers.
Getty Images
Beganovich’s biggest advice to startups is to work your way up to the big leagues. Most businesses don’t get to Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid overnight.
She used ecommerce clothing brand Revolve as her case-in-point, which was founded in 2003 and now has more than three million followers on Instagram. The company went public in 2019 and had a nearly $1.5 billion valuation. “They started with gifting, events, forming relationships with influencers, and it really carried them a long way and they continue to be very influencer focused,” she said.
If you’ve used social media or influencers to grow your brand, Business Insider wants to hear from you. Please email your story to this reporter at jortakales@businessinsider.com.
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