Facebook Ads vs. Influencer Marketing

Still stuck wondering how and why influencer marketing works? Feeling a bit hesitant to stray away from old-reliable, Facebook ads? We’re putting influencer marketing and Facebook ads head-to-head in the ring to help you decide which of these marketing tools you should add to your brand’s digital marketing strategy.

If you’ve been in the digital marketing game for a while you’re probably well acquainted with Facebook ads, but for all our newbies, let’s break down the basics.

The benefit of using Facebook Ads

There are a lot of users on Facebook, 1.96 billion daily users as of early 2022, which means there’s a lot of people for you to target with ads. Regardless of who your customers are, they’re probably on Facebook. Using Facebook ads is an effective way to drive brand engagement and website traffic through targeting these active users.

Facebook ads also offer great flexibility when creating custom audiences. Meaning you can create custom audiences based on age, location, hobbies, interests, and more, and reach your exact audience. The customisability of Facebook ads makes it easy to trial different combinations of audiences and ad placements to help you pin-point the most effective combinations that work for your brand.

Facebook Ads Manager also makes reporting easy. Facebook really takes out all the guesswork when it comes to campaign performance, with measurable results produced in real time. You can track conversions, clicks, impressions, and gain valuable insights into the performance of your Facebook ad campaigns.

So why choose influencer marketing?

Facebook ads sound pretty great, right? While Old-Reliable can be a useful tool within your brand’s marketing strategy, trends are showing influencer marketing is on the rise.

So we might be biased – but influencer marketing is the way to go.

It’s impactful, authentic, memorable and trackable. Influencers also have an audience of ready-to-go nurtured leads that are warm and ready to convert. This means less work for you. Partnering with an influencer as a brand means you can have audiences convert faster than if you had to nurture them with tons and tons of ads. And everybody is already sick of ads.

Tracking conversions with influencer marketing

‘But how can you track the performance of influencer marketing?’ we hear you say. Yes, Facebook ads give you the opportunity to measure performance, re-target warm audiences and scale campaigns, however this can also all be done through influencer marketing.

Using affiliate codes

Affiliate codes make it easy to track the performance of influencer campaigns. For example, using a code attached to the influencer’s name such as “Sophia10”, allows you to easily track which sales are coming from which influencers, and feed more money into the influencers and as an extension, the audiences who are really converting.

‘But are people really going to remember these affiliate codes?’ Yes, yes we hear you loud and clear.

Influencer affiliate codes or links aren’t simply a one hit wonder. We can promote these codes and links over and over again, because we can give influencers commission which is a solid incentive for them to keep feeding that code to their audience who will remember the code, convert and purchase your product.

The more the influencer shares your code, the more beneficial it is for them and you too. Each time the influencer reminds their audience of their affiliate code, their audience is then incentivised to go forth and convert, the influencer earns a lil’ commission for their efforts, and you get to reap the rewards of all those beautiful conversions.

Using UTM Parameters & Google Analytics

UTM parameters are less scary than they sound. They are short text codes that are added to URLs or links to help you track the performance of campaigns. When you’re sending traffic to your website from multiple sources (like multiple influencer accounts) using UTM codes can help you track individual performance by giving each influencer account a unique tag.

Here’s a normal URL without any tracking:

http://www.sticki.com.au/

And here’s the same URL, now with UTM parameters added:

http://www.sticki.com.au/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=influencername

These unique UTM tags will help you identify where your site traffic is coming from, and again, feed more money into the influencers – and their audiences – who are driving the most traffic.

And when someone clicks on each URL, it can all be tracked in Google Analytics.

Choosing the right influencers

While Facebook ads allow us to find audiences and target them by interests, demographics, financial behaviour, age and more, we can achieve this same result through using influencers.

There are thousands and thousands (and thousands) of influencers around the world, all with different niches and different audiences. All you have to do is find the influencers who fit into your niche. You can also test different audiences by partnering with influencers that specialise in a few different niches to see who’s willing to purchase your product. This can yield some unexpected-but-positive results. For example let’s say you’re selling pet toys, why not try targeting fitness influencers?

‘But Facebook ads are reliable. You can start small and gradually increase your budget over time, influencer marketing simply sounds like an expensive gamble.’ We get it, you can’t fly blind with an influencer, that’s where we step in.

The Sticki solution

Don’t get us wrong – we’re not Facebook Ad haters. The key to a successful campaign is finding what works for your brand. If you’re selling garbage bin hinges, you may not find all too many influencers within your niche – but you never know. We recommend trialing both strategies to see what resonates with your audience, and drives conversions.

At Sticki, we’ll connect your brand with the most suited creators to deliver impactful and memorable content. With access to over 133 million creators from around the world in our database, we will connect you with creators to perfectly suit your brand, your product and your niche. No generic copy and paste content or strategies here, we’re all about finding your brand the perfect match.

People scroll past ads. We’ve done it, and we’re almost certain you’ve done it too. Audiences are becoming more and more exhausted and fatigued from spam content from brands, and will simply scroll right past. Marketing trends are leading towards authenticity, and what better way to make sure we’re being authentic than using influencers? Put simply, they’re real people, sharing their real lives, with real influence over their audience.

So leave the hard work to an influencer marketing agency – like us 😉.

Sticki will connect you to the most suitable content creators to deliver compelling content, drive brand awareness and grow your audience. And we’re ready to work with you right now.

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