First of all, let’s figure out what YouTube influencer marketing is all about and why it is so popular among different brands.
YouTube influencer marketing is a term that brings together different opinion leaders: celebrities, bloggers, and video bloggers.
Influencer marketing helps organically communicate with your audience about a product through a leader’s opinion without just shouting, “buy me!”.
Where to look for YouTube influencers, what to look for, and how to analyze a channel are described in this article.
Youtube Influencer Marketing: True Value
Advertising by influencers is not only accepted by subscribers but approved and appreciated. Behind a native recommendation in a blogger's YouTube video, there are hours of negotiations with the influencer, analysis of channel analytics, and the target audience.
The basis of sales is the loyal target. When promoting a product, you need to present it the way customers would like to see it. You need to feel their needs and satisfy them. This is where influencers come to the rescue. What can they do for your business:
- build a reputation for your brand;
- form a loyal attitude of the audience to the brand;
- attract additional customers;
- promote the product in unconventional ways;
- generate unique content specifically for your target audience;
- increase impressions.
How to Get YouTube Influencers to Promote Your Brand
Before hiring a YouTube influencer for your channel, you should know exactly who you are seeking. When choosing an influencer for cooperation, answer these questions:
- Who is your target audience and who else would you like to attract?
- What is the detailed portrait of your target audience?
- Which communication channels does your client prefer?
- What is the purpose of the advertising campaign?
- What is the promotion budget?
These questions are your checklist and the main tool to get max results from working with YouTube influencers.
Choosing a Sponsor for Your Brand: What's Worthy of Special Attention
Number of unique users
Here we turn to YouTube Analytics. The blogger provides reports about the unique visitor, impressions, and traffic sources over a period of about 3 months.
It is risky to take data for only one month. There is a chance that the blogger held a competition or a giveaway that attracted a much larger number of followers to his blog than usual.
Demographics (age, gender, and place of origin)
This is important data that directly influences campaign results. Thanks to this info, you will know if this group of people is in your target audience. If your business is local, look at the number of users from your specific city, and you can also estimate how many people might be interested in your campaign.
Influencer style
Every creator represents a brand. It has its audience, market, subject matter, communication style, speech, recognizable features and traits, and individual tone of voice. You need to analyze the blog in detail for a clear understanding of whether that style is suitable for your type of advertising.
A micro-influencer is also an Influencer
When choosing a YouTube creator to promote your brand, you should pay attention not only to promoted and well-known influencers. Their content is not focused in one direction, which complicates the classification of target interests. The main goal is to reach out to your target audience. For this, it may not be necessary to order advertising from top creators. Here’s one situation that didn’t turn out as expected: - “I ordered an advertisement from a millionaire, but the effect is not encouraging.” Remember that advertising on a small but narrowly targeted channel can show efficiency many times more, thanks to a clear vector of content.
Finding the best influencer is not as easy as it seems. Many factors need to be taken into account to reach the desired results. To protect yourself from unnecessary worries you can contact AIR Brands that specialize in influencer marketing, social media, and video production.
At AIR, we have already collected opinion leaders. You just need to indicate your request, and we will select the best bloggers for your niche.
Another way is to look for a blogger on your own and analyze trends and the social media market in your region. You can get the prices directly from the blogger or his manager. Each influencer takes into account several factors when calculating the price of services:
- Time of ad creation
- Props, advertising equipment, and rental locations
- A team of advertising creators (a blogger works independently or with a team)
- Cost per thousand impressions
How you can cooperate with YouTube Influencers
Let’s figure out the main ways to work with influencers:
Integration. The blogger will briefly talk about your brand and product.
Mentioning. The influencer will mention your brand in his video, but will not urge viewers to buy the product.
Exclusive video. An expensive advertising format — exclusive videos dedicated to your brand and product.
Insert. As an advertiser, you prepare a short ad to insert, and a YouTube creator will mount it in at the beginning/end of his video.
Native format. The most inconspicuous advertising, indirect. For example, a blogger eats a cake from your bakery, shares how delicious it is, but does not urge viewers to buy it.
How to measure the success of campaigns
It is hard to single out any universal success indicator for YouTube influencer marketing. Before you start working with opinion leaders you need to define the purpose of your particular marketing campaign.
ROI
The goal of influencer partnerships is to increase sales and conversions for your brand. Therefore, do not forget the click-through rate and traffic, and be sure to determine the relationship between sales and your collaboration - only then will it be possible to determine the profitability of the effort.
Cost per Click
When users go to your site from different sources, it’s important to monitor engagement and audience behavior, but now this will be part of your funnel. CPC, on the other hand, allows you to see how various influencers and their audiences have performed during the campaign.
Clickability or CTR
CTR helps you determine how many people clicked on an influencer ad. These people understood that your company and your product were presented in the advertisement.
Referral traffic
You may have a well-optimized landing page, but if there is no traffic coming to it, conversions will remain low. Google Analytics makes it easy to track how effective a campaign is for driving traffic to your website.
Subscriptions/registrations growth
If influencers are promoting your ebooks, guides, webinars, and other events, then you can directly measure success in terms of new signups or subscriptions.
Engagements
Here are some things to look out for when determining engagement:
- Clicks
- Likes
- Number of shares
- Reactions
- Comments
- Brand mentions
Engagement tracking starts long before the campaign because this metric shows how significant the influence of a blogger is on the audience.
Impressions
Your goal is to reach as many people as possible. How can this be achieved? Choose the right influencer. To correlate success with this goal, you need to track how many people you reached with your campaign, how many new leads have learned about your brand, and how much the campaign has leveraged your brand.
The most important metrics are determined by the goals and strategy of a particular campaign. If your goal is to spread brand awareness, then keep an eye on reach and video views. If your goal is to drive traffic to your landing page, then pay attention to click-through rates. If your goal is to drive direct sales, your main KPI is conversions.
An AIR Brands Success Story
We would like to share at least one of AIR’s successful influencer-marketing stories of working with a YouTube influencer. The main goal was to change the idea of a slider package's purpose and to show its multifunctionality.
We chose YouTube and Instagram because the target audience of social media is mass direct consumers. The most popular publications include: lists, useful life hacks, and personal experience. Therefore, it is easy for bloggers to natively integrate brands into their lifestyles. We also wanted to target a segment that was previously unavailable: unmarried women and men from 20 to 40 years old.
The best way to promote this idea is a native format — bloggers decided by themselves how to introduce the product most naturally.
We also launched a giveaway of a year's supply of slider packs for commenting and subscribing to a brand account. As a result:
Watching Video on YouTube
Plan: 137,500
Actual outcome: 258,000
CPV (cost per view)
Plan: 0.19 UAH
Actual outcome: 0.08 UAH
The average ER for Instagram is 10.56%, and for YouTube 4.86%
For the brand we got 6800 likes for the video on YouTube, and 624 comments on the video that mentioned slider packs.
In total, the campaign reached 313,008 users and collected 25,477 likes and 2,121 comments.
To Sum Up
The popularity of YouTube blogs means more and more businesses are choosing to partner with influencers. These people have many loyal viewers to whom they become role models. The blogger's opinion about the product encourages recipients to buy this product or use the services of the advertised company.
Cooperation with an influencer is very beneficial both for the company offering cooperation and for the blogger who receives income from it. But it’s important to choose the right blogs for promotion — preferably thematic ones with high conversions. It is also important to determine in advance the details of cooperation, the format of the advertisement, and the period of the advertising campaign.
