Several surveys and researches show how the usage of social media is affecting all our life decisions. In fact, almost half of the world’s population is consuming and engaging with social media. With free public internet, fiber internet with excellent speeds and AT&T home internet services, we are spending more time than usual on our smart phones. Consequently, social media has also started to influencer our purchasing decisions, as it is the new way of socializing in life.
If you use Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest, you must be following a couple of influencers who interest you. They sometimes bombard their posts with sponsored content, while other content seems paid but is quite genuine and honest. These highly credible and authoritative influencers have become the best form of digital marketing for most brands and companies. Here are some tips to follow so you can also make the most out of influencer marketing.
Who Are Influencers?
Before we can go ahead and help you decide which influencer you need to make a part of your marketing campaign, we will tell you who are actual influencers. Anyone with a huge following count or a reach is not automatically an influencer. The right ones use a whole lot more effort and strategies used that make them influential for the right audience.
So, lets define who is an influencer.
If put in simple words, an influencer is someone who has the capability to motivate, encourage and even persuade its audience to do something. This means that a real influencer can make their viewers and followers make a purchase, or avail a service because of the way they promoted it.
There are some key aspects that ensure influencers are able to do that, including
● Sufficient knowledge in their field
● Credibility
● Lots of personal experience about a product/service that they are promoting
● Experience in a distinctive niche
● Healthy relationship with audience
In terms of the following count, influencers are segmented into various categories such as:
● Mega influencers: Follower count in millions, extremely pricey services and very much like celebrities
● Macro influencers: large following count, between 40k to 1 million, often like b-grade celebrities or public figures
● Micro influencers: 1K to 40K followers, regular individuals with great following
● Nano influencers: work in a very specific, specialized niche, 1K to 10K followers
5 Tips You Must Follow For Effective Influencer Marketing
- Engage with influencers
Just sending out a PR package or running a campaign in collaboration with an influencer alone is not enough; you need to be a part of the online community, and for that you must become more engaging and interactive. Keep the influencer in loop even when the job is done. Comment on their posts, like their content and share it too. You can also try featuring the influencer’s content about your brand or product on your main profile. As a result, you will create an association between your brand and the influencer.
- Give up some control
Influencers, whether bloggers, vloggers or podcasters, know their content better than anyone else. They have a pattern they follow, and also tend to understand their audience better. Hence, it is better for companies to give some creative control and let influencers handle the creative part. Of course, you can monitor the type of content from afar, and raise appropriate questions when you are concerned about something.
- Influencer marketing tools
There are several platforms like IZEA and Buzzsumo that provide essential services that assist in managing your influencer marketing campaigns. These platforms also have huge databases that act as a match-making medium between influencers and brands. Some of these tools also provide you analytics and reporting.
- Find the most suitable influencer
This is perhaps the most difficult and time consuming task in the whole cycle of influencer marketing. Marketers often fail to identify the correct, most suitable influencers for their brand and end up investing in an influencer that does not create the right content.
There are some ways you can avoid making this mistake, and choose the most suitable influencer for your brand. One way to ensure that the influencer you are choosing is right for you is to see how much sponsored and paid content do they post. If someone’s profile is bombarded by paid content, it is likely that they will create lesser sales for your brand. This is because their content is saturated with paid growth, and will not get you close to organic brand awareness and sales.
Another way to avoid an inappropriate influencer is to study their audience thoroughly. Make sure that their existing audience is the one that you really want to target. Study their audience in terms of gender, location, age, interests, income and so on.
More followers do not always mean organic growth and more credibility. There is a bunch of so-called influencers on social media who have actually bought their followers. So, don’t dodge accounts with lesser follower count. It is likelier for such smaller communities and accounts to generate more organic leads for your brand.
- Make the most out of analytics and reporting
You can’t just rely on how much sales you are making, or how many people are liking the influencer’s post about your brand to track the campaign’s success. Instead, you need to put use to all available analytics and reporting tools such as Google Analytics and even HubSpot. These will help you keep track of your campaign’s success by giving you detailed reports of lead conversions, reactions, and valuable data of potential customers. By using such metrics, you will also be able to make instant changes and improvements in your campaign.
Wrapping It Up
Summing it up, we can all agree that influencer marketing has become an essential for most businesses. If you really want a credible and popular presence online, influencers are the fastest and most effective way to do that. The best part about influencer marketing is that it does not require you to do the creative work, engage with the audience and is also much cheaper than celebrity endorsement. It also uses a mix of several marketing methods and techniques, such as discount offers and word of mouth to raise brand awareness.
Baldwin Jackson is a successful digital marketer with expertise in search engine optimization and content marketing. The perfect balance of his analytical ability and creative thinking is what sets him apart from other practitioners in the digital marketing realm. He has helped a lot of small and medium-sized businesses in crafting their digital marketing strategies that are not only cost-effective but delivers results as well.
Baldwin is also a proud father of two kids and a Sports enthusiast. When he is not working, you will find him watching ESPN and NFL network. He has been able to get an amazing package on his favorite channels from Buytvinternetphone.com.
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