In the past, the field of influencer marketing was limited to only celebrities and some popular bloggers. Today, we have several social media influencers who saturate the market.
A good influencer marketing strategy should enable you to increase brand awareness, build authority in your industry, and effectively connect with prospective customers. It brings traffic to your website and increases sales.
Influencer marketing is now a reliable method of online marketing. Even though the term has grown in popularity and the mainstream media always refers to it, there are still people who have no idea what influencer marketing is all about.
Who is an Influencer?
You might come across several definitions of an influencer, but the common consensus is that an influencer is someone who has grown a loyal audience by using blogs, social media, or other platforms, and they can use content creation to influence that audience. Influencers can affect buying decisions of others because of their position, knowledge, authority, or relationship.
What is Influencer Marketing?
This refers to a technique that identifies individuals who have a strong influence on an industry or a target audience. During an influencer marketing strategy, a business partners with the influencer wherein he or she agrees to expose their audience to the content or message of the business.
Usually, influencers have a large and engaged audience, so businesses can benefit when the influencer shares or mentions their message or content to the audience. This exposure makes it possible for the brand to get in front of a target audience in a natural, positive, and meaningful manner.
Although celebrities are often considered to be influencers, influencer marketing doesn’t always have to depend on celebrities. We now have niche market influencers, industry experts, and non-competing brand influencers that can successfully promote your campaigns.
Unlike celebrities, brand influencers can be anywhere. What makes them influential is their large audience. An influencer can be a famous fashion designer on Instagram, a professional cybersecurity blogger who tweets, or a well-known marketing expert on LinkedIn. There are influential people in any industry who have developed a reputation for being experts in their industry – you just have to find them.
The process of influencer marketing may include:
- Unboxing videos
- Product reviews
- Product placements
- Creating content such as videos, blog posts, and social media ads
- Sharing the campaigns or product launches
- Providing unique coupon codes
- Giveaways
- Promoting events
Creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy
It is important to go through these steps if you want to create a successful influencer marketing strategy for your business.
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Know your goals
Just as it is with any smart marketing campaign, you need to outline the goals you intend to achieve with your campaign. Determining your goals early on will help you have a consistent strategy throughout your influencer marketing campaign, and it will also help you know the metrics to track and monitor to measure your success when the campaign is over.
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Select the type of campaign
After you’re sure of your goals, you should consider the type of influencer marketing campaign that will most likely help you achieve your aims. Usually, influencer marketing campaigns have to do with three forms of relationship triggers, which are inspiring, hiring, or a combination of both.
You can inspire an influencer to share your content with their audience, pay them to promote your products or services or create a situation that uses both triggers.
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Know your audience
Before you can determine the influencer that’ll help you connect with your target audience, you should know who your target audience is.
Spend time defining particular details about who you want to connect with through your marketing campaign. Make a buyer persona that includes both psychographic and demographic segmentation.
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Get the right influencers
After you’ve clearly defined your target audience, you can now begin looking for the influencers that’ll help you connect with your target market.
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Create quality content
If your influencer marketing strategy involves guest posting or creating content for the blog or website of the influencer, you’ll achieve maximum success if you present content the influencer can’t refuse.
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Track your outreach
As you begin influencer marketing, you must organize your correspondence. It will be bad to lose opportunities to work with influencers because your process was unprofessional. For instance, don’t have a lot of people on your team reaching out to the same influencer, and don’t send the same email repeatedly.
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Analyze your results
At the end of your influencer marketing campaign, it can feel like a victory just seeing your brand mentioned on social media. But just getting an influencer to promote your content doesn’t mean that the campaign is successful. The only time the campaign will be successful is if you’ve achieved your marketing goals. Analyze and measure your results to determine if you’ve reached your goals.
Benefits Influencer Marketing
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Builds trust
Influencers have built trust and credibility with their audience. Their fans respect their content and recommendations. Influencer marketing helps to put your message in front of an actively engaged audience, thus gaining their trust and loyalty.
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Improves brand awareness
Influencer marketing can increase your reach. Social media users will get to know more about whom you are, your business, and what you offer. Ensure that you provide valuable content that adds value to their social media presence.
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Helps you reach your target audience
Relevant influencers can place your content in front of users who are interested in your products or services. You’ll not spend extra testing and finding your target audience – the influencer has already grown this audience on social media. You can therefore get hold of your target group when you use the influencer.
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Provides value to your audience
A major factor of marketing is to deliver content that solves problems, educates, and inspires an audience. Influencer marketing uses this concept because influencers are already in tune with the demands of their audience.
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Increases conversions
Influencers can direct their followers to your products or services. Because the audience sees them as being trustworthy, they look up to them for recommendations. Most consumers depend on influencer recommendations before making a purchasing decision.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing can be very useful for businesses, especially those that have been struggling to gain traction in their marketing campaigns. With a clear knowledge of how influencer marketing can help with your online goals, you can see great results in your business.