Influencer marketing has become a reckoning force in recent times with the growing popularity of social media platforms. Experts in the industry have observed that people are more open to recommendations from third-party sources or influencers than the brand itself. This played a huge role in the sudden explosion of influencer marketing in marketing campaigns across the world. And social media agencies, are now playing a big rule in this.
By hiring influencers to promote your brand, you get a chance to improve your online presence and introduce your products or services to a larger audience. Influencers are constantly interacting and engaging with their audience, helping your brand grow at the same time. Interestingly, in some cases, influencers do a better job of selling products than the brands themselves.
Influencer Marketing In A Nutshell
Influencer marketing is made of three vital steps:
- Identifying influencers
- Targeting the identified influencers
- Marketing through influencers
An influencer can be described as a person who has the ability to affect another person’s actions. Influencer marketing harnesses this power to promote brands and their products. There are several famous influencers across social media platforms, who have turned this into successful careers.
Different Types Of Influencers
There are several different types of influencers, like analysts, experts, celebrities, decision-makers, trendsetters and so on. Ultimately, there are five main types of influencers that businesses tend to focus:
- Sector Influencers: Influencers who belong to this category usually have a large following and are often considered as experts in the target market.
- Brand Advocates: Brand advocates create a positive aura around your brand and help influence potential customers to try your brand without even being on your payroll.
- Brand Ambassadors: Brand ambassadors usually represent your brand on social media platforms. They may or may not work for the brand directly.
- Brand Influencers: Brand influencers have a direct influence on the brand itself or on how the brand influences other people.
- Brand Detractors: This category of influencers tends to have a negative influence on your brand and even have the power to take away potential customers from your network.
Identifying Influencers For Your Brand
In order to find the perfect influencers for your market, you need to have your ear and eye on social media and understand how industries like food, transportation, fashion, and travel have been changed since the introduction of the sharing economy. And if we take the travel industry as an example, influencers are pushing people to enjoy their lives and to discover new places in unique and original ways.
You can use different queries to find out who has been talking about your brand. A sector influencer generally talks about your target market, your competitors, and about similar products or services that your brand offers.
A brand influencer, on the other hand, talks mostly about your brand, your products and also shares your content regularly.
Ranking Different Influencers
Once you have identified possible influencers in your industry, it is essential to rank them based on the following points to find the ones who will be able to help improve your online presence significantly. Portlynn Hart from SocialBook says that the most important thing to look at when deciding on an influencer to work with is their engagement rate.
- Relevancy
- Reach
- Impact
Partnering With Influencers
While partnering with influencers, the following ways can come in handy:
- Talking with influencers about new products or new features on an existing product.
- Offering influencers an incentive for creating content. This is a popular option chosen by many top brands and influencers across different fields.
- Encouraging content creation for any kind of social platform like YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter and so on.
- Meet with the influencers offline to help them understand your brand and products better.
At the end of the day, you need to make brand influencers feel special. This encourages them to talk about your brand positively on social media. Brands need to be very careful while dealing with influencers, as they can turn into Brand Detractors if they are not satisfied.
Compensating Influencers
There are several different ways to compensate your chosen influencers for the content they create.
- You can choose to pay them based on the content or engagement per post.
- Some brands offer discounts or special giveaways to influencers. The influencers often wind up talking about the brand on their social platforms, creating a positive vibe around your brand.
- Some brands promise to share the influencer’s content on their network, thereby helping the influencer expand their network at the same time.
Once you have chosen your influencers for your brand, they have plenty of ideas to get started on influencer marketing. Several brands have discovered that relying on influencer marketing to reach out to a larger audience is cost-effective and more convenient than traditional marketing techniques. In fact, influencer marketing has allowed small brands to create a large online presence by partnering with the right influencers.
