Advertising with niche influencers is rapidly becoming a crucial tool for businesses and brands looking to expand their reach and conversion rates. The influencer marketing industry has seen rapid adoption since 2016, when it was only worth $1.7 billion, and it is projected to reach over $22 billion by 2025.
It is even more telling that up to 23% of brands dedicate more than 39% of their marketing budget to influencer marketing. All of the above beg the question: Why is niche influencer marketing gaining so much attention?
This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about social media influencing as a marketing strategy, highlighting key reasons why you need niche influencers for your business. Let’s get right into it.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
In recent years, conventional marketing approaches have become less effective due to shifts in consumer attention and behavior. Today, people are more likely to trust and make purchases based on recommendations from influencers they follow, whether celebrities or relatable figures. This shift in consumer trust led to the rise of influencer marketing as an effective solution.
In influencer marketing, brands partner with popular online personalities with large loyal followings. They capitalize on the visibility of these influencers to reach target audiences. For example, popular content creators on YouTube have multiple sponsorship deals to promote select brands. An excellent example of this is MrBeast’s $100 million deal with Amazon Prime Video.
That said, although influencer marketing is undoubtedly an excellent approach to improving brand visibility, it is important to mention that there is a way to go about it if you’re going to ensure you get the best for your brand. Consumers’ purchasing behavior tends to lean further towards recommendations made by “experts” within specific niches and as such, influencer marketing strategies have to be designed with this in mind. This is where niche influencer marketing comes into play.
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What Is Niche Influencer Marketing?
Niche influencer marketing takes the highly successful influencer marketing model several steps forward. It is a type of social media niche marketing that focuses on leveraging influencers who specialize in a particular niche. These “niche influencers” are experts or enthusiasts in a particular domain and have built a large, devoted following around that interest. This makes them the perfect plugs for connecting businesses with specialized market audiences, thereby boosting the potential for increased engagement and conversion rates.
In recent years, more brands have used niche influencer marketing to reach their intended audience on social media. Top-tier brands, for instance, are consistently partnering with creators in some of the most profitable YouTube niches like gaming, fashion, and tech. A notable example is luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, which collaborated with Allyiah Gainer, a popular beauty and lifestyle YouTube influencer, in a sponsored fashion haul video. In the video, Gainer showcased Neiman Marcus’s latest fall collection and encouraged her audience to explore its offerings. This strategic partnership seamlessly blended her authentic content with the brand’s promotion, resulting in increased engagement and heightened brand visibility.
So, if you’re a business owner looking to expand your reach into a specific market area or increase your dominance, social media niche influencers are a no-brainer investment option. Unlike broad influencer campaigns, this strategy ensures you’re connecting with a smaller, more engaged audience that resonates with your products or services.
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Benefits of Niche Influencer Marketing On Social Media
There are several benefits to opting for niche influencer marketing over the general approach. Some key ones include the following:
1. Cost Efficiency
Influencer marketing can be very expensive and oftentimes, the bigger, more established brands usually have no problem shelling out funds for it. However, if you own a startup or small business, you may not be able to afford hiring a celebrity influencer. But the thing is, with social media niche marketing, you won’t even have to.
The reason for this is simple: social media niche influencers often have a smaller profile than celebrity influencers, and as such, they are much more affordable to hire. This, in turn, makes them the ideal go-to option for businesses of all sizes.
2. Targeted Conversion
Another reason that makes social media niche influencers better than their celebrity counterparts is their higher targeted engagement metrics. This makes sense, considering that these influencers are often creating content for and engaging with a specific audience with similar interests. By using marketing tactics that drive growth, such as niche influencer marketing, brands stand a much higher chance of increasing their lead generations and conversion rates than with a generalized approach.
AirWick is a brand that was able to cash in on niche social media marketing to achieve this outcome. The fragrance brand partnered with lifestyle influencers to create content showing the effects of its products. As a result of this, AirWick was able to gain increased brand recognition and trust while simultaneously boosting its engagement rate by close to 40%.
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3. Increased Credibility and Trust
Niche influencers are regarded as experts by their audience. As such, when you partner with them, the target audience gains a lot of faith in your product because it comes from the recommendation of a trusted expert. This, in turn, helps you build an extensive following of loyal customers, enhancing your brand’s reputation.
4. Expansive Reach
For business owners with a new line of products or services, social media niche marketing serves as an excellent tool for expanding into new markets. By partnering with these niche influencers, you’ll also be able to increase your brand awareness and increase product attention.
A perfect example of this is Daniel Welington’s targeted marketing approach using micro and nano influencers in the fashion and lifestyle niches. Because of this strategic decision, the brand was able to achieve over 2 million Instagram posts, making it the most popular accessory globally.
Now that you’re all caught up on what social media niche marketing is and the benefits of partnering with niche influencers, let’s talk about how to find the right ones.
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How To Find Social Media Niche Influencers
From tech to lifestyle, there are numerous niche influencers on social media with strong reputations in their communities. So you won’t have much problem finding one to partner with your brand. However, there are quite a number of things to consider when you’re looking to partner with an influencer for niche marketing. These include the following:
- Define your target niche or audience: Clearly identifying your target audience and niche is the first step to locating the perfect niche marketing influencer for your brand.
- Identify leaders in the niche: You’ll want to look closely at content in the niche to isolate accounts that seem to wield a lot of authority and respect among other viewers on your target social media platform. When you find them, conduct a thorough analysis of their account looking out for engagement metrics like shares, likes and comments, follower counts, and so on.
You’ll also want to compare the rate of interactions with the influencer’s number of followers. This will tell you how well they’re doing.
- Compare Values: You’ll want to be sure that any influencer you’re aligning your brand with represents all that you stand for. If you choose niche influencers that don’t share the same value as you, it’ll hurt your marketing outreach, and it could even damage your brand reputation.
- Build Relationships: When you identify niche influencers that you want to work with, engage with them and get them to notice you before you finally hire them.
- Set Clear Targets: Finally, once you’re convinced about your choice of influencer, set clear targets for what you want and your deliverables so there is no miscommunication about what you want.
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How to Use Influencers For Social Media Niche Marketing
When it comes to influencer marketing strategy for niche outreaches, there are several different ways you can go about it. Some common strategies include the following:
- Product Reviews & Tutorials Sponsorships: If you have a tool or product for which you want to enhance visibility, consider sponsoring niche influencers to create content that showcases your product in action. This content could include tutorials on how to use your product or reviews highlighting its strong points and unique features.
- User-Generated Content: You could take a page out of Amsterdam-based watch manufacturer CLUSE’s books by focusing on user-generated content. Here, all you’ll have to do is use your niche influencer to set off a trend of getting people to post about how much they enjoy using your product. You could also create a special event for it like Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign.
- Co-Created Content: Another excellent way of using niche influencers is to involve them in the creative process. For example, Noisy May, a fashion sub-label of Vero Moda, collaborated with 6 key influencers and had them co-create a capsule collection. The result of this campaign approach was over 4 million impressions and a 6.3% increase in engagement rate.
That said, one thing you should note when using niche influencers for your marketing campaigns is that the only way to get the most out of them is to give them artistic freedom. This is because they know, by experience, what type of content their audience is most likely to respond to. So, instead of imposing a specific demand on them, it’s much better to co-plan what approaches to use for niche marketing.
Beyond Choosing A Niche Influencer For Marketing
Choosing a niche influencer and designing the perfect marketing campaign is only the first step to gaining more business dominance for your brand. You’ll also need to work on setting clear campaign tracker metrics, especially with respect to sentiment analysis. This will make it a lot easier for you to verify how well your current strategies are working and identify what you need to tweak for better performance.
However, what is immediately clear is the impact social media niche influencers can have on your brand is immense. As such, it’s a marketing no-brainer to not bring them on board.
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