Over the last few years, influencer marketing influenced a lot of marketers. It has changed the market to a great extent that marketers don’t even need to produce content, yet they get exceptional results.
Yes, you read it right. In influence marketing, the influencers are your content producers. They will create native ads and promote your brand, product, or services personally, which tends to resonate better with the customers. It ultimately boosts your reach, exposure, and engagement. In fact, when planned carefully, an influence marketing strategy to bring your leads and boost conversation.
If ‘influence marketing’ is an alien to you, read out this post. In this, we will talk about what influence marketing is, its benefits, and, more importantly, how to use influence marketing for your business to grow your reach.
Let’s start with a quick brief on its definition.
What Is Influence Marketing?
Simply put, influencer marketing is about a brand collaborating with an online influencer to market its products or services. In some cases, influencer marketing collaboration just focuses on improving brand recognition.
A fresh example of influencer marketing is the YouTube celebrity PewDiePie. Online content creators one Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other channels to boost brand credibility and value using their vast audience base.
It works similar to persuasive marketing, but as the term suggests, the creators have to influence their audience in influencer marketing. In the coming years, 76% of the marketing will be turning towards influencer marketing. It has a broader reach and low cost.
While influencer marketing, in the easiest term, is a process to capitalize someone’s image to build credibility, it is a perfect way to gain leads, sales and expand reach. However, the success lies in a strategically formulated marketing strategy. Do you know how to build an influencer marketing strategy for your business to grow your reach? Look below to check out result-driven influencer marketing strategies leveraged by professionals.
Here’s How To Build A Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy
If you are ready to reap the benefits of influencer marketing, here is a step-by-step guide on building a successful influencer marketing strategy for your business to grow your reach.
Identify The Influencers For Collaboration
Today’s market is crammed with influencers, and more & more people are becoming influencers every day. This means you will have tons of options—but can you partner with all of them? Or, are all of them right for your brand? Of course, not. So, how would you find the right influencers for collaboration? Try this three-tier strategy to pick the right influencer for your brand.
- Choose from the most prominent voices in the area you want to target. If you work in the food industry, for example, look for the foodies and mark the people who talk about the food all the time.
- Check each influencer’s post, values, and background, plus previous marketing campaigns, if they have any. Their overall experience, image, and audience must be around your industry.
- Calculate the engagement rate by dividing the average number of interactions by their followers. It will give you a clear idea about conversion and leads (if any).
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Decide The Right Platform To Target
Most successful influencers promote their content across multiple channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and more. Each platform is designed and best suited for different approaches and audiences. How would you find the platform for an influencer marketing strategy that boosts your reach and overall campaign value? It is tough though, ask yourself a few questions for a clear idea.
- Why would you target YouTube creators?
- What does your audience expect to find on Facebook?
- Where will your campaign reach a wider audience?
If you simply want to target one platform, Instagram is perhaps the best tool for influencer marketing strategy. But, if the idea of growth and brand success appeals to your hyper-brand techniques, you can leverage the combination of YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
Boost Authority With Micro-influencers
While hiring influencers, you tend to look for those with million followers, but many brands-not just small ones, prefer to partner with micro-influencers.
How would you identify micro-influencers for your brand? Micro-influencers have anywhere between 1,000 to 10,000 followers, which is, of course, not a lot. But many studies have found that they often have a higher engagement rate than others. They bring a sense of trust, which is, perhaps, the most critical aspect of brand credibility.
So, micro-influencers must be a part of your influencer marketing strategy, whether you want more reach, followers or build brand credibility.
Turn Brand Loyalists Into Influencers
Capitalizing on existing brand loyalists is considered the best approach for influencer marketing strategy. Your loyal customers are perfectly primed to promote your products or services.
If you’re already enjoying a good number of followers on social media, you don’t need to hire influencers-your next brand ambassador could be right there under your nose. You just need to track your social media posts, mark potential brand ambassadors by identifying their strengths based on their activities.
Studies have found that people believe real people faster than those with an ‘Influencer Title.’ To maximize the benefits or streamline the search, you can simply start a referral program across social media or start a review writing campaign among your existing customers.
Make The Virtue Of Each Influencer Relationship
Once you’ve found a valuable influencer and are ready to grow, don’t miss out on any chance to collaborate, rather than sticking to the typical approach where influencers simply post an image to promote your product or services.
If you want to grow faster and get an edge over your competitors, you’ll have to go beyond the four walls. Ask them to create reels, record short videos, share micro-reviews on their story, or incorporate an interactive poll.
The stronger a relationship with the influencer is, the stronger a brand will become. Though no one can predict what the future will hold, we can lay a bet that influencer marketing will continue to grow and evolve, not just in the coming years but even after two decades.
Read Our Blog for More Information: How To Grow Your Small Business With Marketing
What Are The Benefits of Implementing An Influencer Marketing Strategy?
The best thing about influencer marketing is that the audience is already there; you just need to influence them with amazing values. Here are five benefits to implementing an influencer marketing strategy.
- It quickly builds trust
Influencers have built relationships and trust with their followers. They love, trust, and believe their recommendations. Thus, leads from influencer marketing strategies are more likely to convert than any other medium.
- Increase Brand Awareness
As explained above, an influencer marketing strategy can significantly boost your reach and online presence. The key to maximizing the reach with influencer marketing is that you’re providing the influencers with valuable content.
- Enriches Your Content Marketing Strategy
Having influencers sharing content about your products and services dramatically helps fill the gaps in your content schedule.
- Reaches Your Target Audience Effectively
This is the big one. With the right influencers, your services & products are promoted to the right audience who is already interested in what you do. It minimizes the hassles to test & find targeted audiences.
- Creates Winning Partnership
Collaborating with influencers brings you possible joint ventures, live events, and other opportunities to grow your brand significantly.
The Bottom Line
Influencer marketing can be highly beneficial for startup brands, especially those struggling to gain traction among social media users. However, a clear understanding and precise influencer marketing strategy are required.
