The Rise of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing continues to rise with over 80% of marketers considering it an essential part of their marketing strategy. Despite this reliance, nearly half of them express frustration when it comes to measuring their campaign effectiveness and determining key performance indicators against their competitors.
Further resource constraints indicate a lack of clear benchmarks for measuring influencer success, limiting creativity and leaving companies struggling to catch up with industry trends. The problem lies in the attempt to replicate successful influencer campaigns without considering other factors, such as your target audience, your product or service and your industry.
Determining Your Influencer Strategy
Before designing your influencer strategy, you need to consider several factors that help you connect the dots between what actually works & what doesn’t. In one word, the secret is “Alignment”.
Zooming into your audience demographics and industry benchmarks, you will find interesting insights into what type of content & stories your customers engage with and which potential partners already align with those preferences. You might even find yourself collaborating with “unexpected” influencers.😉 As such, you need to consider your:
Audience Preferences
Influencer content resonates differently across demographics. In general, the most influential content globally involves Food & Drink, Beauty and Fashion but as you look in on different age groups and genders, interesting distinctions in preferences arise.
For example, Gen X prefers content about Food & Drink while Millenials and Gen Z lean more toward Fashion & Beauty. The same pattern applies to genders, as Beauty influencers dominate the female audience while Sports & Music content creators appeal largely to the male audience.
Industry Maturity
The maturity level of influencer marketing varies significantly across industries. The Fashion, Beauty and Fitness industries have established a powerful status in influencer marketing over the past decade, whereas sectors like Education and Finance are still exploring the landscape.
For example, while Beauty has an impressive average of 25.8M posts across all social media platforms with an engagement rate of 1.95%, Finance posts are way below 1.08M and a 0.89% rate of engagement per post.
Engagement & ROI
A good metric to measure the effectiveness of influencer marketing can be extracted from the audience’s engagement rates and the total earned media value. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok often yield higher engagement rates, indicative of their algorithm’s effectiveness in content distribution. However, it’s important to consider all of the above criteria to “match” the type of content and influencer style to the right social media platform.
For example, Gaming posts perform better on platforms such as X, Twitch and Youtube which offer live streaming capabilities while Beauty & Travel categories are better suited for the visual “nature” of Instagram & TikTok.
💡In all cases, it’s important to consider your brand’s voice, your industry’s maturity & your audience’s key demographics and content consumption in order to collaborate with influencers that align with your strategic objectives.
10 Top Performing Industries (+Examples)
The following 10 companies are leveraging influencer marketing to increase engagement and maximize the ROI of their marketing campaigns in the most common industries for influencer marketing.
Beauty
Beauty influencers were one of the first groups to establish what we today call “Influencer Marketing” way before it reached this level of popularity on social media. From how-tos, tutorials and product reviews in the early 2010s to the post-pandemic “clean girl aesthetic”, beauty-related posts dominate TikTok and Instagram with an average of 2% engagement rate.
Fenty Beauty stands out with a higher-than-average engagement rate of 4.3% and a $205M media value due to positive product reviews that align with the influencers’ authentic style.
Education
The average user turns to social media to educate themselves about topics of interest in a fun, interactive way. Consumers nowadays want more than just information to form their academic decisions but real-life experiences and testimonials, from posts about higher ed institutions to student hacks. Education influencers are gradually increasing – especially on TikTok – with an average engagement of 1.21%.
Canva has gained significant popularity amongst educators and students as a presentation tool with an engagement rate of 1.67%.
Fashion
Gen Z’s search for outfit inspiration skyrocketed the Fashion category to the most viewed one across all social media platforms, with an impressive count of 1.21 impressions. The most popular platform for engagement purposes is TikTok with an engagement rate of 2.26%, rather than 1.53% on Instagram. As the industry is highly saturated with thousands of competing brands, influencer marketing can be a valuable asset to fashion marketers in attracting younger audiences and raising brand awareness.
Adidas collaborates with athletes-turned-influencers to attract fitness enthusiasts and sports lovers with a central theme of inspirational stories that raise engagement rates and attract new viewers.
Finance
The emerging trend of “talking openly about money” was normalized by #FinTok or Financial TikTok, in the midst of an uncertain time for the global economy. Financial influencers became a credible source for entrepreneurial tips and money management advice, with an average engagement of 0.89% – especially on TikTok & Instagram.
Shopkick, an app that rewards users while they shop, follows an instructional & educational content strategy by employing influencers to showcase the app through long-form YouTube videos, earning $1.95 million in total media value.
Food & Drink
Influencers in this category continue to engage audiences with visually appealing content as viewers share the same desire to share their meals on their personal channels. Instagram has become synonymous with food and drink inspo, however, TikTok appears to have the highest engagement rate among social media platforms, at around 3%.
Nutella collaborates with influencers that already share food-specific content with engaging posts such as comparing American sweets with Italian ones (like Nutella) or trying out new Nutella recipes, a strategy that earns them higher-than-average engagement of 3.38%.
Gaming
Gaming influencers leverage lively platforms like X, Twitch and YouTube to interact with their viewers through live updates, gaming streams and immersive content to raise engagement and include their audience in the game’s “fantasy lore”. They also create social media “hype” (conversations) around new video game launches or pre-releases to urge gamers to try them out.
PlayStation collaborates with influencers that already share gaming content to raise conversations around popular brand products such as PlayStation’s “Last of Us” franchise, which makes their engagement among the highest in the industry.
Health
Consumers seeking health advice and product recommendations are turning to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram as health influencers are gaining audience trust around giving health advice. The rise of these influencers is evidenced by the substantial engagement rates of their posts, with 8.57 million influencer posts about the health industry, averaging a 1.07% engagement rate.
Invisalign stands out as a highly mentioned health brand, with its #SmileSquad influencers showcasing smile transformations and treatment processes. Over 4,000 influencer posts for Invisalign have generated an impressive media value of $2.12 million.
Music
Social media is the new “hub” for discovering music with artists of all levels strategically releasing their songs to become “trending sounds”. While Instagram and X host the biggest percentage of music influencer content, TikTok music showcases the highest engagement rates of 2.18%. (Although, new copyright restrictions might change the field of music content!)
Spotify raises the visibility of music aficionados and up-and-coming artists by urging users to share their customized music lists and new song discoveries on social media and connect with other fans. There are over 35,000 posts about Spotify on social media platforms with an impressive media value of $398 million.
Sports & Fitness
Fitness influencers have gained immense popularity over the last year with people searching for fun workout ideas, gym gear or looking for their favorite sports game highlights. The most popular platforms for #Fitspo are X, Instagram & TikTok with an average of 1.6% engagement.
Gymshark quickly transformed its brand from an unknown startup to a household name by leveraging influencer marketing. They collaborate with athletes who have achieved aspirational feats and urge the audience to “shoot for the stars”, raising their engagement to an all-time high, at 6.12%.
Travel
Influencer marketing is a dynamic asset for the hospitality industry as it gives tourists a chance to get a first look at hotels, resorts, restaurants and theme parks before their arrival. More than that, the audience immerses themselves through travel content on YouTube & Instagram which increases their interest in visiting that destination.
Airbnb offers a wide variety of travel experiences, from humble accommodations to customized destination packages (such as “Shrek’s Swamp”), showcased through real-life influencer content. Unsurprisingly, this strategy works too well, garnering double the industry’s average engagement at 4.83%.
Focusing On Industry Benchmarks
As Influencer Marketing becomes increasingly popular for raising engagement and creating compelling content about your product or service, it’s important to remember that a “one-size-fits-all” approach isn’t the most effective in capturing the nuances of your industry and audience demographics.
Professional marketers should first establish their industry benchmarks by observing audience behavior and collecting valuable insights in order to collaborate and invest in influencers that best align with their brand’s voice and maximize their ROI through data-driven decisions.
Crafting a successful influencer strategy is more than “copying-and-pasting” what works for others- it’s about finding the right people for your brand and audience’s needs. ✨
Want to learn how to leverage Influencer Marketing to increase engagement & brand awareness for your organization? 🤔
Get in touch with Growthgirls founder, Effie Bersoux
