Including an influencer in your brand strategy is an opportunity to reach a specific audience, especially here in Peru where 44% of users on social networks follow an influencer, according to a survey conducted by the multinational market research company and consulting firm (Ipsos) in 2019. But adding them to your marketing strategy cannot be taken lightly. There must be a prior investigation of possible collaborations that a certain influencer could have with your brand. 

Influencer marketing has an objective for brands and that is that through these people they can become human, especially with brands that still do not make up a community on social networks. It helps a lot with the engagement of the brand and allows you to take your content in a more organic way to other platforms. All the strategy behind should be based on a planning of the message and its objective, the rest is put by the influencer. 

Do you want to apply influencer marketing to your brand? First there are some points that should be clarified on how to choose the right influencer, country regulations and how to direct a strategy from this third party without sounding like a sale. Because sometimes there are people who confuse the great organic potential that an influencer can have for the brand and make wrong content with very commercial messages. So let’s define: 

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is advertising that is done through collaborations with people who influence a certain community on social media. The content that is transmitted with an influencer will be motivated by the recommendation of a product or service without moving away from the idea of ​​telling the story of the brand from their voice, a mixture of what is known as Unboxing. 

An influencer manages a number of followers that must be sponsored by the level of interaction of that community. For a few years now, influencer marketing had to become more rigid to be able to consider a useful social network account. The reason? Many followers and few interactions It is important that when choosing an influencer you take into account the commitment your community has with him or her. So that you can identify the influencers we will divide them into:

Micro Influencers: 

They are the influencers who have a close, participative and faithful community. Created from the trust that person generated in users, they usually have less than 10,000 followers. This group includes: fans of a topic, specialists, bloggers and all those people who have a very specific range of content, that is, they focus directly on something like: makeup bloggers, doctors, chefs and fans of a lifestyle like veganism. Normally, to contact them, the treatment is personal and they answer their comments and interactions themselves. 

Micro influencers generate a lot of empathy and trust because their content is very “homemade” and they tend to share their lives to a great extent. These are the ones if you want to reach a fairly specific community. 

Influencers: 

For a character to be considered Influencers, the number of followers does not matter, but the convincing power that a certain community has. Normally these people manage with more than 50 thousand followers, whose interaction and engagement is very high. Sometimes they usually have representatives and in some cases they handle their accounts themselves. 

The National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property of the Peruvian State (INDECOPI) also defines it as: “a person who has a certain credibility on a given topic and who, given their ability to convince or reach their followers, without necessarily taking into account their number, can become a determining component in the decisions that consumers make in the market ”.

Celebrities: 

Celebrities are public figures who have become famous for great achievements in music, sports, and television. They are the characters that already have a credibility for considering themselves an artist and therefore have a greater probability of being recognized globally and regionally. In general, a character of this size has a team that helps him manage his networks and his level of engagement can be even higher than the others above if the personality exercises it frequently. 

Here you can download the INDECOPI guide on digital advertising and recommendations for influencers.  A guide whose main objective is: to guide the correct exercise of digital advertising practices, with a special focus on influencer advertising in Peru.

Types of digital content that an influencer can make

The formats can be varied, but the most used by influencers are video as it allows them to be closer to their followers. However, there are ways to show or talk about your product to empathize from the experience they have had, which can be very helpful during the content strategy. For this, social media formats such as Instagram Live, stories and Facebook Live can be very helpful. But these terms can also be referred to:

Unboxing , a term that began to be used since 2006 according to Wikipedia and that refers to showing a product with a video that reveals the entire journey to take it out of its box and show the product from the moment the influencer receives it to showing their ways of use. They are usually continuous and name the brand or how it has worked for them according to its use. 

According to the INDECOPI Guide, unboxing is defined as follows: “share on social networks the process of unpacking and / or revealing products, services and / or experiences offered by the brand / advertiser and that have been sent by the latter to an influencer, in the framework of an advertising strategy ”.

In such a way that to make this type of content the influential person must have previously tried the product and have made sure as a collaborator of the brand that it is something real. The genuineness of this act is paramount, to prevent it from becoming a kind of misleading advertising. 

Record using the product: Short videos that show the person using a certain product or service for a good period of time. Where, in addition, brands are usually tagged so that the people captured can go directly to their main page. In the case of services such as specialists and restaurants, short videos, photos of the dishes while attending the place and content with fun activities are usually added.

The key to these contents is creativity, which although sometimes they leave it in charge of the influencer, it is necessary that they have an allied marketing agency to help them plan the influencer marketing strategy. 

How to advertise for influencers in Peru?

According to INDECOPI, influencer advertising “are practices carried out by the influencer aimed at promoting, directly or indirectly, the advertiser’s brands, products or services, as long as they originated as a result of the advertiser’s prior contact in exchange for payment or benefit of any type”.

In such a way that the activity must be discussed before with the person in order to have a reference of what can be achieved through their account. Brand influencer collaboration can depend on several factors: the amount of content to be produced, the frequency, and the estimated reach it will have. And how an influencer marketing strategy can help you increase the engagement of your brand, define the channel or the type of participation of the influencer. To advertise influencer you must:

Choose the influencer that best suits your brand, product and service.

2. Study your audience, reach and level of interactions in the post.

3. Make sure that Influencer shares the same values ​​of your brand.

Investigate if your community has the majority of your buyer persona or ideal client. 

5. Create natural content, not too far removed from what he or she already shares on their networks.

Influencer Marketing: Does It Really Work?

Influencer marketing is a reality that has been growing for years and that also, according to campaign results, generates a lot of interaction, but before giving you the final yes, let’s talk about results and statistics that you can take into account to add influencer marketing to your strategy:

1. According to BrizFeel in 2018 more than 50% of internet users affirm that they follow celebrity or influencers accounts on social networks.
2. A 2019 survey conducted by The Influencer Marketing Hub, Viral Nation, and NeoReach revealed that: Businesses earn $ 5.20 for every $ 1 spent on influencer marketing.
3. According to data from Statica, the evolution of the investment made in influencer marketing on Instagram worldwide between 2013 and 2020. Global spending on Instagram influencer marketing forecast for 2020 amounts to 8.08 billion dollars, which represents an increase of more of 2,400 million compared to the figure registered in 2018.

In addition, brands such as Coca-Cola have used celebrities, influencers and micro influencers for several years to boost the reach of their campaigns. An example of this is reflected by Hubspot on its blog: Well, in 2012, for the Olympic games in London, Coca-Cola launched a campaign in Colombia for which it requested the collaboration of 20 influencers from their country, through a contest where they they told why they wanted to attend the Olympics. 

What was the reward? The person who would win would not only go to the Olympic game, but would share that journey with one of those 20 influencers who drove the campaign. They managed to obtain in this campaign more than a thousand participants and more than 350,000 visits on their YouTube channel. The contest allowed three participants and an influencer to travel with all expenses paid to live the experience.

Conclusions on influencer marketing

Influencer marketing can be used to a great extent, especially in Peru, but the correct choice of the influencer or celebrity is key to carrying out the strategy, in addition to the freedom of organic content that the influencer can create. In order not to transform the strategy into something purely commercial. In addition to that, Peru has 104,368 influencers on Instagram, according to Statica, and although it occupies the last position in Latinoamaerica, it is a trend that is growing and is worth taking advantage of.