Is Influencer Marketing better than Paid Ads?

Short answer? It’s like comparing tiramisu with a sweet glass of Moscato.

In the sense that they’re both different, serve multiple purposes, and go especially well together. In our expert opinion, we wouldn’t replace one with the other – but we also know that brand budgets have their limits and campaign objectives often vary.

So, read this blog to find out which might be most apt for your business.To preface: Neither is better per se. Just more suitable depending on your situation.

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 still break down the basics.

Why should I use Facebook (or Meta) ads?

There are a lot of active users across Meta’s products daily. Including Facebook, Instagram, Threads even, 3.14 billion people used at least one of Meta’s core products daily – which means there’s a lot of people for you to target with ads. No matter who your customers are, they’re probably on the Meta apps, making this Paid Socials marketing mechanism an effective way to drive brand engagement and website traffic.

Meta ads also offer great flexibility when creating custom audiences. You can create and reach custom audiences based on age, gender, location, hobbies, interests, and more, to then communicate directly with your exact target audience.

Targeting aside, Meta ads further extends its flexibility to advertising elements like budgets, campaign objectives, ad creatives, dynamic shopping experiences, and content testing. They make it easy to trial different combinations of audiences and ad placements, to help pin-point the most effective strategies for your brand specifically.

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

Why choose Influencer Marketing then?

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

So we might be biased, but aligning with principles of keeping up with the times and not against it – Influencer Marketing is the way to go, especially in this day and age.

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 might get audiences converting faster than if you needed to nurture them (and their trust) from ground zero with tons of ads.

You’ll also open your brand up to new users previously untapped and untargeted, via influencers’ own follower base which may fall outside of traditional Meta ads targeting.

And let’s face it: Loads of people are already sick of ads.

Tracking Conversions With Influencer Marketing

‘But how can you track the performance of influencer marketing?’  Great question.

While Meta ads do give you the opportunity to easily measure performance, retarget warm audiences and scale campaigns, something a lot of people don’t realise is that this can also be done through influencers.

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, 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’re able to give influencers commission. That’s a solid incentive for them to keep feeding that code to their audience, who will then remember the code through repeated exposure, click-through, and ultimately purchase your product.

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 performances 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 respective 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.

The Sticki Solution

Don’t get us wrong – we’re not Meta Ad haters.

The key to a successful campaign is finding what works for your brand. If you’re selling garbage bin hinges, it’s possible 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.

More of a numbers person? Our experience with influencer partnerships have revealed that CPMs generated through influencers are comparable, if not cheaper, than Paid ads.

At Sticki, we’ll connect your brand with the most suited influencers to deliver impactful and memorable content. With access to over 133 million creators from around the world in our database, we’ll connect you with creators who 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 capitalising on influencers’ voices? 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.