A Brief Introduction To Influencer Marketing
Nowadays, it is next to impossible to scroll down through social media feeds without seeing some form of influencer marketing. It might seem that influencer media marketing is a new thing in the market that just became popular recently. It began 15 years ago, and Pay per Post was the first marketplace to pay bloggers for branded content.
Managing influencer marketing strategies as a brand is harder than ever, but we have a guide to help. Before we dive into the effective strategies to grow your brand’s reach, let us first understand influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing – What Does It Mean?
Influencer marketing is an approach by brands that can promote their products or services through endorsements from influencers and content creators online. Mostly, this type of marketing is a part of brand awareness campaigns, but it can also result in plenty of leads, conversions, and sales.
The goal of influencer marketing is to boost a company’s profile and to stand by using the influence of one individual within your organization. This marketing successfully works because of the high amount of trust social influencers have developed through their following and recommendations that serve as social proof to your brand’s targeted customers.
How To Build A Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy For Your Brand?
Here we have compiled a few influencer marketing strategies that will increase your presence in the industry, create brand awareness, and generate conversions and sales.
1. Create a document that outlines your goals and KPIs
Any Good and powerful strategy always begins with a firm goal. When you are looking for influencer marketing, there might be several goals you could have for your campaign. While one of the apparent reasons is making sales, working with an influencer can do more for your brand than just creating sales. Some of the top goal ideas include:
- Generating brand awareness.
- Identifying new target markets.
- Increasing lead generation.
2. Gain a better understanding of the influencers and their influence
Before you start working with influencers, you might want to actually take time to understand their landscape. Gain knowledge about different influencers such as micro, macro, and celebrities. Take enough to observe and see how they endorse brands before you approach your brand to anyone.
3. Identifying and Discovering Influencers
In addition to Instagram influencers marketing, many other networks for influencers are growing. Social media is one of the easiest ways to find and locate influencers. It is best to focus on one platform at a time; you can always expand. But if you are just starting, prefer to stick with one.
If you are unsure where to begin, social listening can help you identify the most influential voices in your industry on every platform.
4. Decide on a budget and management strategy
Running a successful influencer marketing campaign is not a set-it-and-go approach because it will involve careful monitoring and follow-up. In contrast to a more automatic ads strategy, influencers manage multiple partnerships while balancing their workloads. So they may fall behind in commitments to post on time or make changes to your requested call to action. Also know about google ads bidding strategy.
To cultivate these relationships, you need to invest more time in them and refine your approach through experience about what is working for your brand and what is not.
5. How to get in touch with influencers: Outreach Process
With a planning strategy around your network, goals, and what types of influencers you want to focus on, move on to step 2, which is research actually to find the right influencers to work with. During the research, always focus on a few things, such as:
- Does the influencer already post about similar topics relevant to your brand?
- How reliable are they? Do they seem legit?
- Have they already worked with similar brands before?
You can also use some tools available in the market to identify potential influencers that will fit best for your campaign. Once you are precise with the research work, determine how you will be reaching out to them.
If you are looking for micro-influencers, you can reach out directly in a private message on the platform. For macro-influencers or celebrities, you will easily find a link in their profile and contact information for business inquiries in their bio.
Make sure that you review and refine your strategy even if your influencer marketing campaign is in progress. Put simply; people trust people more than brand names or entities. So, influencer marketing allows you to grip that trust to create goodwill towards your brand. The strategy mentioned above will help you start building a powerful strategy, but like other social strategies, it’s essential to be ready for change with time.
Simply put, influencer marketing is a powerful tool in today’s competitive digital marketing world. All you need to do is willing to try new things and see what works and what doesn’t in your particular niche.