Breweries and Instagram Influencers
Do Influencers Benefit Brewery Sales?
Influencer marketing is certainly not new. Celebrities have been raking in additional income for decades by posing with everything from cigarettes and alcohol to designer dresses and jewelry. Many brands have even seen an unintentional boost in revenue simply from a celebrity being snapped by paparazzi visiting their place of business or holding their product while out on the town. But what if your business isn't lucky enough to be able to land a celebrity endorsement?
Enter the world of Instagram Influencers.
With an estimated market size of $2.38 billion in 2020, Instagram influencers can have a major impact on breweries' brand awareness campaigns and should be a priority. Ultimately, Influencers can benefit brewery sales if we understand how to find the right influencer and some of the potential pitfalls to avoid.
What is Influencer Marketing
At its most basic level, influencing involves specific social media users who endorse your brand, product, or service to their group of followers. As part of your overall marketing strategy, influencer marketing is an extension of your social media marketing campaign and a vehicle for delivering marketing content to your potential customer base.
Influencer marketing is an especially good way for new brands to get introduced to new consumers, because influencers are typically either viewed as experts or are highly trusted by their group of followers. If properly aligned to their messaging, these influencers in turn serve as proof to the validity or authenticity of your brand or product.
Successful companies know that having the right influencer linked to their brand can lead to a huge increase in followers, which typically translates to an increase in revenue. Having grown exponentially over the past 5 years, Instagram is by far the fastest growing and most relevant social media channel for influencer marketing with Twitter pulling in a distant second.
When you ask any random person to name three influencers, they will most likely throw out the name of a celebrity like one of the Kardashians. But the truth is you might not even recognize the names of some of the top Instagram influencers
- Huda Beauty — 41.9m followers
- Amanda Cerny — 26.4m followers
- Zach King — 23m followers
- King Bach — 19.2m followers
- Lilly Singh — 9.2m followers
- Cyprien — 5.9m followers
- Jenna Marbles — 5.7m followers
- Eva Cannon — 209 followers
In today's world of influencer marketing, it’s not just about the size or clout of the influencer but the engagement they have with their audience and the market that their followers are interested in. So even the 209 people that follow Eva Cannon's Instagram could be very impactful in the right marketing strategy (plus she's my wife so this gets me some bonus points).
Creating An Influencer Marketing Strategy
There are a lot of good capable influencers that can help drive your revenue, but you won’t find much success just sending out free stuff to everyone and seeing what sticks. Just like any other program or campaign in your marketing arsenal, developing a successful influencer marketing program takes a lot of planning and research.
01 Understand Your Target Audience
One of the first objectives your marketing team must accomplish when looking for an influencer for your brand is to decide who your targeted audience is. Creating and understanding buyer personas is the foundation for any good marketing campaign and sales strategy. Influencer marketing takes it a step further, because this can often impact your choice of influencer by the social media platform you deem most important to your brand.
Are you selling to other businesses or directly to consumers? While Instagram influencers have a much higher overall engagement rate than other platforms, most marketers agree that LinkedIn, Twitter, and to some degree Facebook are better for engagement in B2B influencer marketing campaigns. Do you sell to a specific age group or gender? Some social media platforms, like TikTok or Twitch, often cater to a much younger audience.
02 Set Clear Achievable Goals
Generating general brand awareness and increasing revenue are typically the overarching goals of most marketing plans. When creating an influencer marketing strategy, it is often more beneficial to drill down a little further and understand what specifically about your brand that you want to communicate. Additionally, it’s helpful to understand any micro-goals that your company would like to achieve, like reaching a new type of audience or introducing a new specific product line.
03 Create Concrete Messaging
As I said earlier in this post, influencers are an extension of your social media strategy and essentially a vehicle for your content marketing. Detailing and understanding the specific goals of your marketing strategy will help you narrow down your influencer pool which gives you much more control over the specific messaging you are hoping to deliver. Be specific and consistent with your messaging to avoid consumer confusion, especially as you begin to cross multiple social media channels.
Unlike general advertising that might be seen by thousands of people, your influencers will have the ability to reach a very specific audience and deliver your message directly to them. These influencers have a legion of very loyal fans, and if done correctly, your influencer marketing campaign will successfully transition them to loyal fans of your brand.
04 Set Your Budget
Narrowing down your audience, goals, and messaging will play an important part in determining your specific influencer targets and setting an influencer marketing budget. Do you need to go after major celebrities with a massive online following, or will you target micro-influencers and nano-influencers? With influencer marketing being a relatively new industry, there isn’t a standard when it comes to actual compensation. Some micro-influencers and nano-influencers, especially the newer ones, will accept product in exchange for services while other might actually be represented by a 3rd party agency.
Naturally your company's budget will define the type of influencer you work with, but it will also affect the engagement that you will see on Instagram as oftentimes engagement rates can actually fall with an increase of followers.
It’s estimated that about 63% of businesses not only plan on using influencers but plan on increasing their influencer budget in 2020, spending anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 per year on influencer marketing campaigns. Obviously, influencer marketing is just one part of your overall marketing campaign, and most brands are spending at least 20% of their overall marketing budget on influencer marketing.
05 Select Your Influencers
After outlining your influencer marketing strategy, you are finally ready to narrow down your choices and find the right influencers for your brand. You might find that several influencers across multiple social media networks will work for your strategy, so choose the channel that you feel fits best and focus there with the intent to expand to more social media channels later on.
It’s important to note that your company, brand, or product needs to have a presence and be somewhat active on that social media channel before implementing your influencer marketing plan. As your chosen influencers engage with their followers regarding your brand, these same followers will want to check out your channel to fully buy in to your brand.
If you are just starting out adding influencer marketing to your overall marketing strategy, you will most likely want to target the Nano-influencers. These influencers usually have a few thousand followers or less but still have an engagement rate on average of 7.2% which gives you a very good return on investment (ROI). Nano-influencers generally stick to a very narrow niche making it much more likely that their followers will find a connection to your product. They typically work for product exchange, becoming loyal advocates of your brand, which is more likely to be perceived as authentic testimonial instead of a branded endorsement.
Managing Influencers
Adding influencer marketing to your plan can certainly bring additional time restraints and stress on your marketing team, but done correctly it can be rewarding and drive additional revenue to the brewery.