Influencers are social personalities who develop large colonies and social coteries online. Influencers have certain social worth and as a lot of people follow these personalities it becomes easy to establish or change opinions or set new trends. Influencers are thought leaders who can rouse their followers and other users to purchase from a specific brand. The affluence of Influencer Marketing originates from building connections and giving out benefits to users. Influencer marketing has lately come in vogue especially in the styling and beauty care. More and more firms are utilizing these social personalities to generate awareness, visibility, and increase brand sales. When Influencers promote certain products, they are paid with charges or commission per conversion and at times gift coupons too.

Partnering Influencers for Market Research

The first thing you should do is qualify the audience reach to match with your research requirements. It's smarter to work with an influencer who has fewer followers that match closely with your target respondents than to engage with someone who has a huge crowd that doesn’t include your ideal respondent. So, don't qualify influencers dependent on the size of their followers. Pay close attention to whether influencers have your right target respondents. Always align your research needs with your partner influencer. Choosing micro-influencers can be a better helping hand than influencers with over 1 million followers. This helps in reducing costs as well as higher surveys are done.

Influencer marketing is not new. Celebrity endorsement has been going on for decades. But influencers are able to recommend products more subtly to their large follower base. Cost-effectiveness is another crucial point. As per the Business Insider Influencer marketing report, the influencer marketing industry is speculated to be at $15 billion marks by 2022, against its valuation of $8 billion in 2019 based on Mediakix data. Each social media platform somewhat gathers influencers, but Instagram is the winner in this race. Influencer Marketing Hub reports about 4 out of 5 brands tap Instagram heavily for influencer campaigns. Facebook is preferred by 46% of brands followed by YouTube at 36%, Twitter at 24%, and LinkedIn at 12%.While choosing your influencer partner for market research make sure you study their number of views, followers, their engagement metrics and the cherry on the cake would be historical data on past purchase performance. Influencers can boost your research by blending attractive photos or videos about your research to get more respondent inflow. So, deliver meaningful messages to gain that respondent's attention. Typically, some research might work more effectively than others to get the response.

Is influencer marketing suitable for your research?

You have to analyze whether your research subject will really fit into social influence easily or not. Remember that people come to most media platforms to spend their time to get entertained or to just to keep an update. Research on subjects like - brand essence, concept testing, competitive analysis, brand messaging, psychographic research, millennial insights is likely to work better than others. You may ask the audience to respond through polls by encouraging them to share their thoughts and feelings. The polls you create should not necessarily have an academic tone, as this might discourage the respondents. Facebook polls particularly get more likes than any other type of post on the platform.

If you are working on brand research or consumer behavior towards a product then you should first define your data needs, what kind of data do you need – Quantitative or Qualitative, what are your measurement metrics, and how you plan to mine the data. The advantage of market research through social media is you can monitor your respondent at a granular level. Let’s say you are researching for a Playschool and Kindergarten, and you need to gain insights as to what kind of games or activities do parents expect to see in your facility. Initially, you might concentrate on the quantitative amount of data related to keywords, in this instance keywords can be scrapbook activities, art, and craft, indoor slides etc. and then parse through it to get more of qualitative results. On platforms like Twitter, social listening can be used to gather data through using the hashtag are a compiler for the responses.

Social media influencers can particularly help to know behavioral insights. For example, surveying about pain points faced by women between 20 to 35 age group in terms of body image. Your quantitative data may come from likes, shares, comments, mention volume, and reach. Depending on which media platform you are using for research various metrics can be used to compile your quantitative data. Qualitative data can be viewed as sentiment analysis. Choosing the right platform to partner with influencers is quintessential to get the best responses for your research. Conducting research on careers in dance will yield much better inputs on Twitter or Instagram than you will get on LinkedIn. The kind of age group you want to survey will also fluctuate as per the social media platforms. Younger millennials dominantly use Instagram whereas people upwards the age of 35 are more likely to use Twitter or LinkedIn. These demographics play a significant part in pivoting your market research goals. Instagram can be surveyed through emoji sliders, question stickers on stories. Since the stories are present on the platform for a limited span it creates fear of missing out FOMO in users and increases response rate.

Disclaimer

The information provided through the above Content is for informational purposes only. The Content is not intended to be, and does not, constitute financial advice or any other advice. You should consult with a financial professional to determine what may be best for your individual needs. We do not make any guarantee or other promise as to any results that may be obtained using our Content. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim any and all liability in the event any information, commentary, analysis, opinions, advice, and/or recommendations prove to be inaccurate, incomplete, or unreliable or result in any investment or other losses.

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