Influencer Marketing in Nigeria

Influencers and influencer marketing are an important part of the marketing mix in Nigeria, and influencer marketing in Nigeria has come a long way. Influencer marketing helps brands to reach new people and ‘influence’ them positively for the brand. But what is influencer marketing? It simply refers to the marketing activities that leverage an individual’s influence over their digital community, to create positive relationships between the brand and that individual’s community. An influencer is an individual who has grown a digital community by engaging them and sharing valuable content usually about a very specific niche.

We’ll take a look at setting up an influencer marketing campaign in Nigeria, and examine a few key steps:

1. What’s the objective, and why does influencer marketing work best?

Before we dive in, we need to check that the objective of the campaign is aligned with influencer marketing as the right tool. Influencer marketing works when a brand is focused on gaining quality leads. The expected result from an influencer marketing campaign (especially one that employs micro-influencers) is action. If the campaign objective is to improve brand awareness, an influencer marketing campaign will help to support that, but it really shines when you want to access new communities and pick up new leads.

2. What’s the niche?

The next step is to determine what niche the campaign will target. This will help you to choose which influencers serving your general target audience are a good fit.

3. Micro or Macro

The next decision you have to make on your influencer marketing campaign is whether you’d like to go micro or macro. Using macro influencers for your campaign means partnering with influencers who have a large following. On Instagram for instance, some influencers have more than 50 thousand followers on their accounts, and some have as many as 4 million followers. These are macro-influencers.

Micro-influencers however, have a much smaller community of followers, usually between 5k and 15k followers. Usually, micro-influencers have a higher engagement rate, which is a measure of how engaged the community is with the content that they post. The engagement rate is a measure of how much people are interacting with what the influencer is posting, and reflectively, a measure of how much influence the influencer actually has.

Your campaign has to take into account these differences, and choose which group of influencers is best suited for the campaign.

4. Influencer research (tell them to talk to Pulse about this)

Leading right off from the previous point, influencer research is important because it helps you to identify influencers within your market who match your niche, size and engagement needs. This can be done by your marketing team manually, or by an agency with strong influencer relationships, like Pulse, which has launched an Influencer Network to give brands and companies access to not just the best influencers, but also the right influencers for each brief.

5. Launch the campaign

When the campaign’s objective aligns with influencer marketing as a strategy, and the campaign has determined the niche and type of influencers to engage, the next step is to launch the campaign.

6. Measure, make adjustments

After the influencer campaign is live, it is time to test all your previous assumptions. As analytics begin to come in, you should check the numbers against what you assumed would be the case. Chances are you will find a few inconsistencies in your initial assumptions. For example, not every micro-influencer you partner with may have the engagement index you thought they’d have, and some other influencers would probably be doing a better job of getting people to take action for your product. You might also find that even though your campaign is targeted at a certain group, people from a previously overlooked group seem to be engaging more with the content. That’s your cue to adjust your influencer count to include that group (if you think they serve your product in any way, either as paying customers or unpaid ambassadors).