A successful strategy for influencer marketing is key to help your business grow rapidly, along with increasing brand exposure, build authority in the market, and reach out to new audiences and engaging them. Influencer marketing is all about focusing on key leaders and influential people to drive the brand’s marketing campaign, instead of marketing directly to a large group of consumers. Using influencer marketing, you promote, inspire, and influence your customers to buy or consume your products or services.
Influential people and celebrities run this campaign; hence, influencing consumers is much easier. In this marketing, the brands collaborate and share a partnership with the influential people and celebrities, who agrees to promote the brand’s message and market the products on behalf of the company. Influencers and celebrities usually have a large and engageable audience, who are already his or her followers. Hence, the brands reap the benefits when these people promote the products and services of the company.
Influencer marketing has an array of benefits to offer to your business as well as boost up your sales. However, to reap the benefits completely, it is important to run influencer marketing perfectly. This complete guide helps your brand run a successful influencer marketing campaign, with tried and tested strategies.
Need for influencer marketing
How many of us look at advertisements on the Internet or banners ads? Yes, we look at them just to block the pop-up ads or skip them. Since the world-wide click-through rate is 0.19%, you cannot claim that the display ads of your brand are successful.
Image Source: http://www.richmediagallery.com/learn/benchmarks.
In a recent survey, it has been seen that more than half of the Internet users never click on online ads and more than 35% of the users click on less than 5 ads per month. On the other hand, social media ads are gaining popularity, since most people are connected through social media nowadays. With influencer marketing, the engaged audience of the influencers and celebrities form a major part of the target audience. This endorsement from influential celebrities makes it easier for brands to spread their message and promote their products through influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is very much different from conventional marketing. Here the establishment of relations, with the customer has a major role to play in the success. Successful influencer marketing is a win-win situation for both, the rand as well as the influencer. If the marketing wins, the brand wins and success becomes a success story for the celebrity as well, as he/she is seen as the face of the particular brand.
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Checklist to follow, before running the influencer marketing campaign
1. Find your target audience
2. Define the goals
After the goals are set and understood, it is important to define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the campaign. For each goal you set, you should define the KPIs differently. For example, if your goal is to enhance the brand awareness of your brand, then you should consider the customer engagement rate or social media following as your KPIs.
3. Choose the right platform
For example, if you choose Instagram, it is more about visual content and aesthetics. Hence, the marketing approach should be Instagram friendly. However, if YouTube is selected, influencer marketing needs to be videos. Each of the social media has an audience from various demographic backgrounds and ages. Hence, it is recommended to choose social media, where the target audiences are most active.
4. Find the appropriate influencer
For example, an influencer or celebrity who is not a fashion icon is not suitable for promoting luxury fashion brands. Thus, the public image of the celebrities needs to match the promotional products and the message of the brands. It has been seen that most brands face difficulties while choosing the most appropriate influencers for their brands. Hence, in-depth research needs to be done beforehand.
Checklist to follow, after running the influencer marketing campaign
1. Track the success
2. Ask for testimonials from influencers
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Types of Influencer
The influencers in influencer marketing can be categorized into three types:
1. Celebrity influencers
However, celebrity influencers are expensive. A report highlights the fact that the celebrity Kim Kardashian charges $250,000 for a single post on her social media account, on behalf of the brand, promoting their products. Businesses often find it difficult to work with celebrities as they charge an extremely high amount of money for influencer marketing.
However, the fans and followers are maximum in the case of celebrity influencers as they are popular faces across the world, irrespective of their field of expertise.
2. Macro influencers
3. Micro-influencers
How do influencers add value to your business?
The level of benefit and value add that the influencers have on your business, depends on the type of relationship you share with the influencer or celebrity. For example, in the case of a very formal and strictly professional relationship, you might expect to pay him/her only for the campaign they are assigned for.
However, in case you share a positive and friendly relationship, they can create blogs and articles featuring your products and services. They can also share promotional articles for your goods and products in their social media accounts. In a much closer relation, the celebrities might also give you access to their sites, where you can post and promote your brand on their behalf. Your target customers can read and share the posts, thus getting influenced by their recommendations, ending up buying your products and services.
Benefits of influencer marketing for the brands
1. Builds trust faster
The credibility of the brand is already created, with the influencers being promotional about the brand and people respect their content and prefer their recommendations. Hence customers and common people gain trust in the brand faster, thus buying them or availing the services.
2. Enhances brand awareness
Increasing brand awareness increases the likeliness of increased customers, thus a major boost to the revenue. The key to maximize the benefits of influencer marketing is to ensure that quality and promotional posts are being posted in the influencer’s social media.
3. Reaches the target audience effectively
After your brand’s message is reached to the target audience, your job is more than half done. Following the success of the campaign, the customers will come pouring in.
4. Builds mutually beneficial partnerships
5. Offers value to customers
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Final Words
Influencer marketing has great importance in business. To start with you can send free samples of your products to bloggers and influencers active in influencer marketing. While they are happy to use the products, get a testimonial from them. The unboxing videos on YouTube are a new trend and you can start with such video requests from micro-influencers, with good payment for the video on YouTube.
If the influencer likes the products, you can request them for a social media post with recommendations. Thus, with small and planned initial investments, you can start the journey of influencer marketing for your brands.
This kind of marketing is usually taken up by small brands with micro-influencers. As the brand grows, it moves towards celebrity influencers. Follow the steps as described here to explore and unveil the world of influencer marketing. It helps gradually growing your business and increasing brand awareness among potential customers.
Analyze the needs, set your goals, target the potential customers, and choose the most appropriate social media. And finally, look for the most effective influencer for your business and you are good to go.
Additional Resource (Infographic)
As an additional resource, please check the following infographic elaborating the pros and cons of influencer marketing for your brand:
Infographic source: shanebarker.com.