Let’s face it: there’s no way around influencer marketing. Over 60% of marketers are looking to increase their influencer marketing efforts this year, and marketing budgets have steadily been moving towards influencers over the last years. Influencer marketing is, however, not reserved to multinationals or corporates with huge marketing budgets. If you own a startup, it might be just right for you.
Growth Hacking
For a lot of companies, including a fair share of startups, growth hacking is also growing in relevance. Simply put, growth hacking is a form of rapid experimentation to try and grow a company as fast as possible. Working with influencers should be considered a growth hack by marketing departments, especially considering the low costs and high reward. In this article, we’ll focus on 3 characteristics that make influencer marketing a proper growth hack.
Experimental growth hacking
As mentioned earlier, the basis is growth hacking is experimental. Naturally, a great deal of theory proceeds the experiments, but the eventual focus of growth hacking is always based on experiments, AB-tests and instant reports/results. Due to the variety of applications of influencer marketing, and the variety of influencers themselves, influencer marketing is a natural fit for an experimental programme. Based on experience with hundreds of brands and campaigns, we advise brands that start with influencer marketing to launch a first campaign based on assumptions and ideas – and evaluate and enhance along the way.
Based on experience with hundreds of brands and campaigns, we advise brands that start with influencer marketing to launch a first campaign based on assumptions and ideas – and evaluate and enhance along the way.
Scalability
An important aspect of growth hacking is identifying the right factor to realise growth, and to scale that as fast as possible. Once you’ve found the right angle, group of influencers, promotion or idea, it is thus necessary to find a way to scale. Join’s platform provides brands and agencies with the right means to do exactly that. Brands can choose to work long-term and repetitively with the same group of influencers, as well as provide new suggestions instantly. Moreover, the technical support makes it easy to find relevant influencers and launch campaigns – thus saving a lot of time. Scaleable influencer marketing efforts will evidently lead to exponential, organic growth.
Metrics for growth hacking
Perhaps you may believe that influencer marketing is effective, but only for general branding – something reserved for bigger companies/brands. Unmistakably, the results of influencer marketing are an area of discussion. Influencer marketing barely ever focusses on direct sales only, making it more difficult for brands to calculate ROI. Difficult – but far from impossible. In this article we published earlier, we asses a number of techniques to measure your influencer marketing efforts. Learning from these measurements, influencer marketing can help you intensify your growth.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is a lean, dynamic and agile marketing strategy. Logically, it fits very well with similar characteristics of growth hacking and companies applying it. Influencer marketing can help startups improve their marketing efforts, and learn on the project.
