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Is Influencer Marketing the Same as Social Media Marketing?
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has been rising in popularity in recent years. If you’re interested in getting started with influencer marketing, you may wonder if it is the same as social media marketing or how it fits into a social media marketing strategy.
This article will provide details on influencer marketing and social media marketing, along with some tips on developing an effective influencer marketing strategy on social media.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing involves brands promoting products or services, interacting with customers, building authority, or sharing resources on social media platforms. Social media marketing can have many purposes or strategies that are used to promote branded content.
Social Media Marketing Examples
To better understand social media marketing and how it can be used, here are some examples of brands that have used influencer marketing effectively.
Example #1 – Red Bull
Red Bull is a company that is known for its social media presence, along with many other marketing strategies they use to promote their energy drinks. What Red Bull has done is they have aligned their brand with the extreme sports niche.
Their social media content typically consists of footage from extreme sports events they sponsor or their sponsored athletes representing the Red Bull logo.
Red Bull’s social media content gets good engagement rates because their content is interesting and exciting for viewers. Since they have such engaging content, they have built great brand reach and awareness.
This social media strategy is one of the key marketing techniques that has kept them as one of the top energy drinks on the market for such a long time.
Example #2 – Zoom
Another example of successful social media marketing was Zoom’s virtual background competition, where they encouraged their followers to submit photos and videos of creative backgrounds they used on their video conferencing platform. These monthly virtual background competitions using their platform encouraged engagement and free trial signups.
This example shows how a company can get an audience involved through social media while encouraging the use of products or services they offer. Many people on social media were highly receptive to this competition, which led to Zoom seeing growth in brand name mentions, social presence, and user-generated content.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing involves brands partnering with social media influencers to promote their products or services. Promoting through social media influencers helps companies get their brand name in front of highly targeted audiences on social platforms in a way that feels more natural than traditional advertising.
Is Influencer Marketing the Same as Social Media Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a niche type of social media marketing, but the two terms don’t mean the same thing. Social media marketing is a broad term that covers many different types of marketing and promotion on social media platforms. One of those strategies is influencer marketing, which has become an increasingly popular way for brands to promote themselves on social media due to its effectiveness.
Influencer Marketing Examples
Examples of influencer marketing will help you better understand how it works and its effectiveness.
Example #1 – Levi’s
Levi’s used influencer marketing to promote their brand and raise awareness of their sustainability initiative. The company partnered with actor and singer Jaden Smith and popular influencer Emma Chamberlain for this campaign.
Levi’s had these two influencers create social media posts where they talked about mindful consumption for the planet and wearing Levi’s products, since they are highly durable and last for a long time, which is beneficial for sustainability.
The campaign successfully generated millions of impressions and views across Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter to promote the Levi’s brand and sustainability.
Example #2 – Honey
Honey is a coupon browser extension that has used influencer marketing for quite some time to promote its brand. In 2020, Honey worked with 56 influencers and sponsored 63 videos.
Their most popular promoted video came from PewDiePie, whose video promoting Honey got 59 million views. Another popular post from MrBeast promoting Honey also reached over 2 million views on YouTube.
Overall, Honey’s influencer marketing efforts have been highly successful, and their continuous use of influencer marketing shows that it has been an effective strategy to grow their brand.
How to Develop an Influencer Marketing Strategy on Social Media?
There are steps you can take to create a successful social media influencer marketing strategy, just like Honey and Levi’s were able to do with their influencer marketing campaigns. The steps to creating a successful influencer marketing strategy are:
- Set goals for the results you want from influencer marketing.
- Outline your budget, how many posts you want to create, and how long your influencer promotion will last.
- Do market research to learn about your target audience.
- Find the right influencers to work with who will represent your brand positively.
- Collaborate with influencers to create effective promotional content.
- Track data from promotional posts to see what performed well and which areas could use improvement.
- Optimize for success as you go.
If you would like additional resources for all these steps in the influencer marketing process, Lionize can help.
How Lionize Can Help You Build an Influencer Marketing Strategy
Lionize is an influencer marketing platform that simplifies how brands connect with influencers for marketing promotions. Lionize does this through artificial intelligence software that learns about your company’s needs and marketing goals to efficiently recommend the right influencers. This helps take the guesswork out of finding influencers to work with and saves time.
Along with finding the right influencers, Lionize will also help you track data from promotional posts, provide recommendations to improve your influencer strategy, and help automate parts of the influencer management process. Lionize’s streamlined platform makes it easy to manage all these aspects, even if you don’t know much about influencer marketing.
Book a Discovery Call today for more information about how Lionize can help your brand tackle influencer marketing.
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