In the era of banner blindness and high competition for audience attention, advertising from bloggers has become an important tool for promoting goods and services. Let’s figure out how it works.
Who is blogger advertising suitable for?
Pros and cons of advertising with bloggers
Types and formats of advertising
Payment options and cost of placement with bloggers
How to choose a platform for advertising
Where to find a blogger
Analysis of the effectiveness of advertising from bloggers
Expert advice
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Who is blogger advertising suitable for?
Table of Contents
Advertising with bloggers is suitable for all types of businesses: small, medium and large. You can find a suitable influencer for any product or service – there are almost no restrictions. The main thing is that the blogger’s subscribers are interested in the product, and the blogger himself knows how to talk about it.
Advertising experts say that the determining factor is resources. If the company has enough resources, turning to a blogger is a good idea. To make a decision, it is worth looking at three points:
✔️ Money
Advertising with bloggers is often more expensive than contextual or targeted advertising. If the advertising budget is small, it is better to choose other promotion channels.
✔️ Creativity
Advertising with bloggers requires a creative approach. It is not enough to just say: “We have discounts!”, you need to come up with an unexpected twist, make the integration natural and interesting.
✔️ Time
Working with a blogger is working with a person, not a machine. The integration scenario will have to be discussed, and the deadlines may change for unpredictable reasons: he got sick, went on vacation, or simply forgot.
To summarize, the main feature of this type of advertising is a non-standard approach. The integration should look appropriate. If it is a text blog, the text should captivate subscribers; if it is a video, the advertising insert should not differ much from the main content. Therefore, the decision to buy advertising from bloggers should be made taking into account your needs.
Sometimes it is more effective to choose a more understandable and familiar format: billboards, TV advertising, radio advertising, digital banners, mailings. All this works too. You just need to understand where the target audience of the advertising campaign spends time.
Pros and cons of advertising with bloggers
✅ Advantages
Inspires trust
Advertising from opinion leaders is based on the “person-to-person” approach and resembles word of mouth. People have become accustomed to advertising banners and have learned to ignore them. But they still listen to the opinions of other people. A publication that has a specific person behind it attracts more attention.
Bloggers have a clear audience
A billboard on a highway will be seen by thousands of people, but the ad will not be relevant to everyone. Targeted advertising may not hit the target: too high a frequency of contact will scare off new customers rather than attract them. And a blogger’s subscribers can be assessed: see what content they like, read the comments under the posts and focus on real people.
Advertising from bloggers has viral potential.
People rarely forward contextual or targeted advertising to each other. Mainly if it is provocative or contains a typo. But a blog can be interesting to many. If the integration is resourceful, a subscriber is likely to watch it to the end. And someone can send a post to friends. If the blogger is popular and the integration is native, advertising coverage grows.
Such advertising can be reused
If we are talking about videos or photos, such advertising can then be added to landing pages, posted on the company’s social networks. You need to agree on this with the blogger in advance, but most are not against it. For example, a video from TikTok can be posted in Shorts, a Telegram channel or in VKontakte stories, and the text of the post can be posted on your website.
❌ Disadvantages
Human factor. A blogger may not post an ad on time or simply forget about it. Some approach integration routinely: they talk about the product reluctantly, deviate from the brief, forget to mention important details. Sometimes agreeing on placing an ad with a blogger is a whole epic. It will require long negotiations, agreeing on the script and publication dates. Sometimes bloggers get into scandals, and this reduces the level of trust in the products they advertise.
Unpredictable result.
Yesterday, a blogger’s post was read by a million people, and today – only 200 thousand. It is impossible to foresee all the nuances here. Targeted advertising gives a clear result: the ad will be seen by a certain number of users with a certain frequency of display. Advertising from bloggers is not so predictable. The audience may differ from post to post or from video to video, and this should also be taken into account – focus on the blogger’s average indicators, slightly understate them.
Non-transparent pricing
Bloggers with the same audience and the same number of subscribers may have very different advertising prices. And since the result cannot be predicted 100%, there are no generally accepted ideas about expensive and cheap advertising
among bloggers
In one case, 200,000 ₽ is a good price for a post, in another – too high. But this can only be understood after the fact.
Types and formats of advertising
All advertising from bloggers can be divided into two large groups:
1. Reach-oriented advertising
Its goal is to make as many people as possible aware of the brand or product.
2. Action-oriented advertising
The user must buy a service, sign up for an event, download an app.
For example, a popular journalist in his latest post says that he took a course on content marketing at Yandex Praktikum and now understands how to properly place channel ads with bloggers. And to support his statement, he provides statistics on new subscribers. He may not even provide a link to the service — his subscribers will still understand the main message: the Praktikum course works.
But the same journalist can write another post. It will be entirely devoted to the importance of online education, and at the same time the author will recommend specialties that are currently popular on the market. At the end, he will offer to follow the link and take a test that will help choose a new specialty on the Praktikum website. This is a different type of advertising, its goal is to encourage the user to follow the link.
Any advertising integration falls into one of these groups. The rest is a matter of creativity of a particular person. Reviews, unboxings, feedback, interviews, roasts — there are many options for how to tell about a product. The channel author can offer a promo code, raffle off the customer’s products among subscribers, or invite readers to a closed event. It is worth focusing on the goals of the advertising campaign and its audience.
Advertising formats depend on the platform where the blogger is popular. On YouTube, you can post videos and shorts, write short posts. In Telegram, you can record circles, post text posts, photos or stories. Each platform has its own set of unique functions, you can use any of them.
The cost of advertising for bloggers often depends on the format: a post in the feed can cost more than a story. A link under a video without mentioning it in the video itself is cheaper than full integration. The blogger and advertiser should decide together which format to use. It is better to rely on the results of previous posts and campaigns.
Payment options and cost of placement with bloggers
You can pay for advertising with bloggers in standard ways:
1. Through an agreement with a self-employed person.
2. Through an agreement with an individual entrepreneur.
3. Through an agreement with an influencer agency or another legal entity.
4. Barter.
The cheapest and most common among niche bloggers is barter. For example, a restaurant owner agrees to feed a blogger for free, and the latter writes a review of the establishment. Most often, this payment option is suitable for businesses that specialize in providing services: beauty salons, amusement parks, coffee shops. Barter bloggers can review products that are sent to them for free: cosmetics, books, food.
Barter advertising can cost a business owner pennies if you negotiate correctly. This is a big plus, since the cost of advertising from bloggers is difficult to predict at the planning stage. It depends on the popularity of a particular influencer, their ambitions, and the product that needs to be talked about. The average price per view on the market is two rubles.
You can calculate it this way: if a post in a Telegram channel is seen by 10,000 people, the price of such placement is approximately 20,000 rubles. But before you include this amount in your media plan, you should request the cost of placement from three or four bloggers in one segment and focus on the arithmetic mean.
At the same time, pricing in this area is unstable and can depend on various factors. If a blogger quickly gains popularity, the price of placement in his channel will be higher than average. Bloggers mark up “goods” that can affect their reputation: food additives, bets, political parties. Some ask for an additional payment for alienation of rights, that is, for the opportunity to reuse their content.
Usually, bloggers set a price for a publication, but there are other payment options: for views or for clicks on a link. For example, the author of the channel names the cost for a thousand views and guarantees that there will be 50,000. If the post does not collect that many, he can publish something else. Ultimately, the price depends on the agreement with a specific influencer.
How to choose a platform for advertising
First, you need to understand where the brand’s target audience spends time. If we are talking about a consumer product, you can look at any popular platform: Telegram, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, YouTube. If you need to talk about a more specific product, you should focus on the features of the platform.
For example, Instagram* emphasizes visual content. It makes sense to place ads there for products that you want to look at before buying: flowers, clothes, jewelry. It’s worth placing ads on YouTube and other video hosting sites if you need to show how the product works. This could be an ad for a gadget or a bright show. You can tell about a service in a Telegram channel — text posts are well received there.
Some platforms have a “smart” feed: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, TikTok, Zen, YouTube. Here, the probability that a post with an ad will be shown to a large number of users increases, but you shouldn’t rely on algorithms. This can be a nice bonus, but not a determining factor when choosing.
The general advice here is this: almost every famous person has accounts in all popular social networks, so it is better to first choose a blogger, and only then decide on a platform. You can tell an interesting story about a product or service anywhere. What is more important is that the advertisement is seen.
Where to find a blogger
There are three main ways to find an influencer to promote your product:
1. Survey the target audience
Such research will help to understand which bloggers potential buyers follow: what they prefer to watch, read or listen to. This will allow to limit the circle of bloggers for advertising to several names.
2. Explore specialized sites
On such aggregators as Getblogger, Telega.in and similar, you can choose a blogger and order advertising from him. This will save time and limit the choice. At the same time, part of the advertising budget will go to paying for the services of the site itself. There are also specialized sites that allow you to evaluate the “quality” of bloggers. For example, trendHERO.
3. Look at ratings and research
One of the most authoritative resources is Mediascope. This is a research company that publishes interesting research about bloggers and social networks. Another option is the Medialogy rating. You can use simpler options: watch competitors, study the subscriptions of the target audience
, search for bloggers by tags or geotags. Thematic channels in Telegram will also tell you how to find a blogger for advertising. And sometimes it is enough to simply enter a specific request in the search engine.
Some marketers rely on their preferences and turn to bloggers they follow themselves. Here, everything depends on the product and content of the blogger. The most famous influencers have their advertising contacts listed in their main accounts.
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Analysis of the effectiveness of advertising from bloggers
The metrics that you should pay attention to depend on the goal of the advertising campaign. There can be three of them: leads, views, and awareness.
✅ Leads or applications
In this case, you can evaluate the effect of placement using UTM tags and promotional codes.
UTM tags are parameters embedded in a link: the name of the advertising campaign, the source of the transition. If you use UTM, analysts will be able to say exactly how many transitions there were from a specific blogger. Promo codes work in much the same way, only the user himself indicates how he ended up on the page. For example, if a blogger’s personal promo code gives a discount, then everyone who used it saw the post.
The option with a promo code has its advantages. The UTM tag is embedded in a specific link, so only transitions from a specific page can be counted. And the user can remember the unique promo code and apply it later. In other words, UTM does not allow you to evaluate the full effect of advertising: a person could remember the brand, but visit the site later. A promo code removes this problem.
✅ Views and subscribers
Sometimes the goal of an advertising campaign is to increase views on a website or the number of subscribers in a channel. Here again, UTM tags will help, they will show the source of traffic .
Understanding where new subscribers come from is more difficult. You can conduct a survey among them, but the results may be erroneous: not everyone will take the survey, not everyone will remember how they first learned about the channel. Experts recommend spreading out advertising campaigns over time and monitoring the influx of people after each new publication.
✅ Recognizability
Assessing recognition is the most difficult. First of all, it is worth paying attention to the reaction of the blogger’s subscribers: look at the comments, the number of likes and dislikes. An important metric is reach: how many people saw the post, how many shared it. All this indirectly indicates how many people got to know the brand. It also makes sense to monitor brand mentions on the network. After a strong advertising campaign, their number should increase. You can track mentions through Wordstat or paid monitoring systems.
