Influencer marketing
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing collaborates with social media marketing to reach your target audience through an influencer to present your brand with authenticity. Influencer marketing can be teamed up with social media marketing or content marketing to bruit your brand message to people. An influencer is a buzz builder who has the ability to influence the buying decisions of their followers.
Influencers are committed to share content on the brands they work with in their personal social media platforms such as Facebook, Blog, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter etc. People trust and admire their influencers; hence it is at utmost importance for the businesses to track the right influencers to share their brand, product or services to reach the right target audience.
Since influencer marketing is coupled with social medial marketing, businesses should focus on approaching there customers on the right platform through compelling and authentic content. You should be smart enough to convince people that your brand, products or services are worthy for their spending.
Here comes the role of the influencer to build a discussion on what you sell. The content created by the right influencer not only influence the people, but your brand is talked about and shared by them. This can create an intense effect on your followers. It is important to understand that social media marketing campaigns or content marketing campaigns are not always similar to influencer marketing campaigns, but only two ends of influencer marketing.
The key importance of Influencer Marketing strategy for your business goals
Conventional digital marketing tends to create a platform of ‘ad-fatigue customers’ as its main focus is to present many ads to their followers. This can bring the horror of people boycotting your brand as they are fed up with your excessive marketing efforts. Influencer marketing is the key solution to this problem as you can approach people with different means and tactics not to overflow them with your marketing efforts. The ideal way is to reach your target audience via different influencers, at different time intervals and on different platforms to maintain ongoing conversation about your business, brand, product or service. When your influencer marketing campaign is formed strategically, you will be benefited with more customers, promising retention of existing customers, increased engagement, enhanced customer loyalty, increased brand awareness followed by maximum ROI.
Key components of the best influencer marketing Strategy
- Recruit and select the right influencers
- Content collaboration
- Automate the campaign
- Obtain Analytics
- Optimize for the best
Recruit and select the right influencers
The key is to recruit and select qualified influencers. One major thing to keep in mind is that your influencers should represent your target consumers. Given below are few ways that marketers can recruit ideal influencers for their campaigns.
- Find influencers organically on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Linkedin etc
- Find influencers by subscribing to a web scraping platform
- Find influencers with the help of an agency
Selecting the best influencers is a time consuming, manual process. So to have the best output from your effort, learn the tips below.
- Find and categorize influencers based on different criteria such as demographical features, reaching possibility, intended skills, their niche audience etc.
- Find and categorize influencers based on your products, services, budget, nature of the campaign and their active social media platform.
- Maintain a one – time database of all the qualified influencers as it’ll make you hassle -free to find influencers for recent future campaigns.
Content collaboration
Influencers will be naturally inspired to work with marketers to spread the word about their brands, only if they see a great value of the business one way or the other. For example, it will encourage the influencers to post great content on your requirement. Check the quality of the content posts based on the compelling and convincing factor, suitability to the audience and the platform whether its’ Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, a blog or other. The best content will help your audience to recognize the unique value proposition of the brands in no time. It will also help the consumers to learn how you outsmart competitors. There is no other best way to increase user engagement other than authentic, compelling content. Think about this before you post your content.
Automate the campaign
Businesses may work with different influencer marketing campaigns at the same time. Dealing with every campaign manually is a time consuming and a hectic job for marketers. There are many paid and free tools available to solve this problem. The tools to be used may vary based on the platform, but they still would help marketers a great deal in following needs.
- Help influencer assignment as a matter of a button click.
- Help direct communication with influencers via in-app messaging services..
- Help to produce parallel programs with multiple projects (blog, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook etc.) enabling parallel tracking.
- Help facilitation with editorial calendars (instant creation, managing and editing)
- Help influencer status checking. For example to check if they are invited and assigned a job, posts are shared, if the influencers are paid etc.
- Help to analyze the audience to recognize the best type of content for the campaign.
Obtain Analytics
Content impressions and post click through rates are not sufficient to fully gauge the success of an influencer marketing campaign nowadays. If marketers can track the real time content engagement regardless of which social media platform the campaign is hosted, then it’s ideal. Marketers can make use of the analytical tools available to fulfill above goals. For example marketers can analyze the statistics with the help of these tools to,
- Track real time performance on post reaches, post views and post engagements.
- Evaluate the engagement based on the total media value.
- Evaluate ROI based on each platform
- Determine which influencer’s strategy influence the people most based on the reaches, views, engagement and total medial value of published posts.
- Generate hassle free, real time reports in various formats
The following tools help tracking almost all the functions discussed above other than ROI.
- Paid tools – SoTrender, Brand24, Social Bakers, Rival IQ, Unmetric,
- Free tools – Facebook Insights, LikeAlyzer, Agorapulse, Cyfe, Quintly,
To track ROI on Facebook you can use Sprout Social.
Optimize for the best
Influencer marketing strategy is not just about using influencers to create your brand or product a wider audience on social media platforms. Incorporate your influencer marketing strategy to traditional media campaigns. For example, you can include the testimonials of influencer in your newsletter or other marketing materials. Through optimized distribution, marketers can predict,
- Which type of content that serves the best?
- Which influencers create the best ROI?
- Which social media platforms are the best to reach a wider audience?
The beauty is you can make use of these statistics of optimized distribution for future campaigns to save time.
Goals of today’s social media marketing campaigns are to direct towards promising consumer engagement and to increase brand awareness through sustainable engagement. We can see ample amount of brands and products that can influence consumers positively on social media platforms. Your social media marketing strategy should be formed in a way to promise that the influence potential of your brand is able to outsmart competition.
Misconceptions about influencer marketing
Influencer marketing can’t be automated
There are tools to make you free from 90% of manual work in many social media platforms for influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is only for big brands, not for small or micro businesses.
With the right recruitment and selection strategy, businesses can find influencers to work for them regardless their business is big, medium, small or micro.
Influencer marketing impacts can’t be measured.
With right tools, you can obviously measure the success of your influencer marketing strategy to learn nearly how user engagement is lifted on your product or brand in no time.
Influencers are only celebrities.
Influencers are passionate people who can place your brand or products in the minds of the followers to influence purchasing decisions who are not essentially celebrities.
Goals of influencer marketing are always advertising oriented.
An influencer will not advertise features of your product or brand, but shares his/her personal experience with the product or brand. This is what attracts your target audience.
Brands can only find a wide audience through influencer marketing campaigns
What really matters in modern social media marketing campaigns is not just a wide reach to customers, but increased engagement.
Influencer marketing is same as digital media advertising
Influencer marketing has a great cost advantage than traditional digital media advertising. Your influencers will simply create the posts and share them so the followers reach the posts in no time. On the other hand, traditional digital media advertising is a time consuming and complex process.
