What is Influencer Marketing & How to Create a Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign
With all of the competition in the digital marketing space, savvy marketers must come up with even more ways to capture their target audience’s attention amidst all of the other competition. One way to do that is with influencer marketing. It can be a very strategic way to stand out from other digital marketers and create a lasting, memorable impression in the minds of your target audience. You may be asking, “What exactly is influencer marketing and how do I create a successful influencer marketing campaign”? Well below is more information about what it is the best approach to take for developing in influencer marketing campaign.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a technique used to create advertising, marketing and promotional strategies whereby the use of a person of influence is used to promote a company’s brand’s product or service.
Since the person of influence typically already has a large audience and a large following, when companies utilize their services, they are in a sense tapping into the influencers target market.
Tapping Into an Old Marketing Strategy to Expand Your Reach
Influencer marketing is not at all that new. In fact, it’s been a strategy that’s been around for many years. It’s an effective way to create memorable advertisements while expanding your reach. It’s also a great way to:
- Have a person of influence to validate your product or service
- Get other people to soon follow suit
How Influencer Marketing Takes Place?
Influencer marketing takes place when a person of influence, such as an athletic, celebrity, model, spokesperson or a politician promotes a company’s product or service by saying how pleased they are with it and the benefits that they provide. To promote your business, Have to know about the importance of influencer marketing. As well as, this technique has been known to drive sales through the roof by immensely increasing the conversion rate much more effectively than traditional advertising alone.
How to Put Together an Influencer Marketing Campaign?
Before diving in, it’s important to first perform some research to make sure you use an influencer who is the right fit for your product or service. Not all influencers will represent your brand well. By doing a little homework, you can see if there are any red flags that you should be concerned about.
How Social Media Can Help?
With the use of social media, it’s easy to see what’s trending about various celebrities and influencers. You can see what’s trending concerning them specifically and follow their reactions, by visiting their Facebook page, Instagram Twitter or other social media sites.
By doing your homework, you can get a good idea of
- What they stand for
- Some of their values, beliefs and their philosophy
- How they treat other people
You should ask yourself some questions such as, what are their values, beliefs, and philosophy? Are they similar to mine? Will they deliver the right message? Do what they stand for parallel with the things that I stand for? Not until this information has been verified should you consider moving forward with a particular influencer.
Part of your research should also include making note of the influencer’s followers. However, it’s important not to assume that an influencer with millions of followers will provide you with the outcome that you desire.
It’s much more important to look at their engagements that are taking place as opposed to just the number of followers alone. Also, be sure to pay attention to the engagement rates and the type of engagement that is being made as well. That’s an indicator of the impact that the influencer has on their target audience and will likely have on yours too.
Taking Marketing Cues from Influencers
Since influencers have already reached a certain plateau due to their popularity and their ability to win over many people within their niche, don’t be afraid to allow them to be creative with respect to how to best go about representing your brand. They know the best way to engage with your audience while promoting your product or service. Remember that they’ve been interacting with their own audience for years and have a great deal of sensitivity to what they may or may not respond to and what could potentially drive them away. Taking cues from them concerning the best route to take in this regard may be one of the best things that you could do for your marketing campaign.
Allowing them to take the wheel in the creative vehicle will compel them to be free to develop a more organic approach and ultimately achieve better results.
Budgeting and Taking Care of Business
Remember that at the end of the day, working with influencers requires you to set aside a certain amount of your marketing budget to cover their cost. Pay close attention to the fine details with respect to their role in relation to their compensation. Also, keep in mind that you can negotiate other means to compensate influencers as well. For example, you can offer them part of the products or services in conjunction with a monetary compensation to reduce cost. Additionally, keep in mind how long your campaign will be and how frequently you will need to cover the cost to keep the influencer on board.
It’s important to consider all opportunities that could be on the table concerning your influencer marketing campaign. For example, you can work with one major influence her for a larger fee or you can work with multiple, smaller (B or C list influencers) who would be willing to accept a lower price. In fact, what you could pay multiple influencers could equal the same amount or less than what you would pay one major (A list) influencer.
You may also find that when working with multiple influencers that they engage better with their audience which is good for high conversions.
Monitoring, Measuring and Tracking Results
Working with an influencer should bear some kind of fruit and provide you with certain results, right? Or why else would you take the time to involve an influencer in your marketing campaign in the first place. As you’re running your campaign, don’t forget what you hired them for. Don’t get lost in the excitement and let it steer you away from what’s important – delivering a successful marketing campaign with measurable, effective results. Including things such as increasing brand awareness, receiving more likes and shares among other things.
Lastly, don’t forget to continue to implement other parts of your marketing campaign while launching the influencer component of your marketing campaign.
