Influencer Marketing: Strategies and Types
Have you ever wondered what are these influencers and how do they earn money? Well one way is through Influencer Marketing.
Brands approach influencers to promote their products or review them.
These are the new marketing techniques of the social media age. Want to know more about Influencer Marketing? Let’s find out below!
1.
Influencer Marketing: What Does It Mean?
This marketing strategy recognizes people who are able to influence a particular brand’s target audience and their industry.
Hence, the brands reach these social media influencers to spread awareness about their brands and promote it.
Influencer Marketing is rapidly gaining heat as according to research, 1 percent of millennials trust ads but 33 percent trust influencer reviews. That is a huge difference!
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, Snapchat and Youtube have set new trends for marketing and advertisements.
Celebrities are good for testimonials but people tend to trust influencers who are normal people like themselves just with a larger fan following and influence.
Their followers consider them experts in their particular niche hence their endorsements and recommendations are considered authentic.
They can co-create with your brand and support is on the basis of their reputation and influence which can help promote your brand and products.
And it also works.
About 40 percent of people buy products after they see an influencer’s review or see them using it.
Hence, the benefits of influencer marketing result in it driving sales.
With the rapid rise of social media networks across populations, influencers are not only celebrities but people who excel at their niche and have a good enough following that regards them highly.
Moreover, they produce more relaxed content that resonates with people rather than make their audience feel that they are out of reach like celebrities.
Therefore this connection drives people to trust influencers.
Therefore, you can also be an influencer by starting to post your content on different online platforms.
The influencer marketing strategy of the brand with the influencer can be of several types.
Types of Influencer Marketing
In order to make an influencer promote your brand, you can either hire them to do so or even inspire them to promote it.
How does that happen?
Brands can sponsor influencers and their work while they explicitly announce or mention their sponsor in product placement style.
An example can be by giving discount codes and URLs.
For instance, if a brand sponsors an influencer’s content they can also give them their discount codes and URLs from which their followers can buy the brand’s products at a discounted rate and that affiliate code gives the influencers a share of the sales.
Moreover, brands can give free gifts in the form of PR to influencers.
If you send your products or services an influencer’s way they will probably unbox it and mention it.
If they like or dislike the product, they may even review it.
So, you don’t necessarily have to hire them to do it.
You can also sponsor the influencers to create content for your brand and partner with them to do so.
Furthermore, you can arrange giveaways with the influencers.
Giveaways are also a way to attract new influencers.
Giveaways contests can include recreating a look with the brand’s products or suing the brand in your content.
Moreover, it can also include partnering with other brands to give a gift but allowing on conditions to like, share and invite friends to like.
This can increase the reach of your brand moreover, trustworthy influencers can also share it to spread it to their followers.
This will also give your brand an indirect social media mention which will lead to your social media marketing.
Furthermore, you can give your social media handles to the influencers for some time and let them run them to attract their followers and target their audience.
For instance, influencers may live stream your brand’s products so that their followers purchase too.
It can also go the other way around when the brand can create content and guest post for an influencer’s blog.
You can also make them your permanent brand ambassador if you form a good relationship with them in return for special gifts and exposure.
Hence, in these types, you may either hire them or inspire them to promote your brand.
But first, you will need a strategy to realize what are your goals and how to achieve them.
2.
Influencer Marketing Strategy
In order to start the promotion of your brand on influencer marketing platforms, you will first have to devise a strategy.
Lay out your goals and find your target audience.
Also, understand the influencer landscape to selectively choose the influencers who are in line with your brand’s goals.
Identify Goals and Audience
Goals are what you want to achieve from this marketing campaign and how you will measure them.
Basically, everyone wants a Return on Investment after a marketing campaign but how will you achieve that?
Focus on your goals and your first goal should be to increase brand awareness through this campaign.
If the influencer is successful in targeting their audience then you may build brand awareness which will show in the form of likes, content curation, followers and comments.
Furthermore, it is important to build a brand identity that your buyers will associate you with.
They can see your brand values and relate with those sentiments which can attract them to purchase your products and services.
This leads us to:
Building more audience and attracting a new audience for different products.
In case you want to promote a new product that is different from your usual ones, you will have to target an ew audience and relevant new influencers.
Having a new audience will also lead to more engagement and sales.
Hence, lead generation is a brand’s ultimate goal.
You can set landing pages for each influencer to find out how many conversions and sales they drive to your website.
Furthermore, your goal may be to retain a loyal audience as well as to get more links back to your site.
Once you have defined your goals, you can choose the type or types of marketing you want to follow.
Next, you need to do the most important thing i.e. find the right influencers for your campaign.
Find Your Influencer
There are tremendous social media platforms with a huge number of influencers.
Hence, finding the right influencer for your brand’s marketing isn’t an easy task.
There are divided into types as well.
You can reach out to bloggers, video content creators, celebrities, thought leaders, social media stars as well as other unrelated brands.
You would want to reach influencers who share similar values and audiences.
Audience Overlap Tool by Alexa can help you find out similar audiences and the target audience you want to reach.
Enter the website or brand that posts similar content to yours and check for their brand audience and influencers they target.
You can also use a backlink checker to identify the backlinks to sites similar to yours and find out the influencers that drive those backlinks to the websites.
Moreover, you can also look for influencers who focus on similar niches and topics.
In fact, your ideal influencer will be an expert in your brand’s niche and a topic finder can help you find that particular influencer who blogs or posts in that niche.
Furthermore, experiment with platforms.
When you first hear of Influencers, you may think of Instagram.
After all the term is mostly associated with that.
However, in recent years Tik Tok has seen a huge rise.
If the influencers who align with your brand’s values and niche are more present on Pinterest or blog separately then you should reach out to them instead.
Keep your options open for different platforms as this will increase your brand’s reach.
Tip: Do to go blindly after numbers!
The 10 million followers are very lucrative.
But unfortunately, a larger number of followers do not indicate larger engagement.
In fact, influencers with 1000 followers will get 8 percent likes while those with 10 million will get 1.6 percent likes.
Therefore, a bigger influencer cannot guarantee that they reach all of their followers.
Hence, in order to see good results, you may want to target micro-influencers with fewer followers that target a specific niche.
These usually lie in the range of 10k to 100k followers.
These are not elite influencers but their audience engagement may even be higher than elites.
Audience engagement is important as it determines to reach.
If their huge number of followers are inactive then they won’t bring any good results.
Lastly, once you have decided on the influencer, keep a check on their content.
It should align with your values, and beliefs.
Moreover, it should be of high quality as well as relevant to your services.
You can also use tools to check ROI to understand the effectiveness of your campaign.
Pro Tips
You can also use certain tips while carrying out influencer marketing. These include:
- Content Creation not Ads
With the changing media and internet landscape, people do not prefer salesy ads rather interactive and relatable content.
Use effective content marketing tips to reach out to your audience but avoid atypical ads which can put people off.
- Select Video Influencers
Make your influencers talk about your brand in their videos and use your products there.
Video has higher retention than image hence, you should reach out to influencers who are willing to make videos.
- Be Transparent
You should make sure that when you sponsor content it should be mentioned.
With brand regulations are getting stricter, paid content and sponsorships should not be hidden.
Instagram helps brands and influencers by tagging the branded content.
Conclusion
Once you have an understanding of the popular techniques of Influencer Marketing, you can dive into it to generate sales.
However, if you are still unsure about this form of digital marketing, you can always avail our Influencer Marketing services to get your work done.
Our marketing agency can tap into your potential customers with an effective Influencer marketing campaign.
Contact us to know more.