Out of curiosity, did you ever ponder over a product and give it a thought that why consumers like it that much? There is a possibility that the particular products could be an essential for their daily routine, or even some famous person has promoted it for a good reason. This concept revolves around influencer marketing and give this article a thorough read to know amazing impact of influencer marketing.
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What is Influencer Marketing?
After so many research and analyses, it is said that the influencer marketing is fundamentally a strategy of businesses in which a partnership takes place between brand and famous social media persons, bloggers and celebrities. It all becomes possible by setting a bigger sample of your targeted population having the aim to sell them your products with a great influence (word of mouth of the endorsed person).
Why Influencer Marketing?
The consumer behavior is driven by the influence of famous people; thus, a business should incorporate influencer marketing. Below are the convincing reasons to follow influencer marketing.
- It is useful in generating leads.
- It enhances and maintains the social media flow.
- It routes more traffic to website.
- It is beneficial for businesses in reaching to a greater chunk of audience.
- It develops a sense of trust in customers.
- It enhances the business sale and benefits in generating the ROI.
- Make a Best Influencer Choice for Your Brand Representation
For your brand representation, your very first task is to select an influencer who could properly show your brand image to your targeted audience. Therefore, it is quite important that the influencers are capable of conveying the brand’s message in a right way to the right audience. Moreover, this decision would be totally yours whether you’d like to promote your brand/product with micro-influencer or with the famous persons having great followings.
First of all, set up the key objectives before starting the marketing campaign of your business as it is beneficial in choosing the appropriate influencer considering your business image. You need to be very careful while setting these up as the objectives should be defined, achievable, measurable and time-bound. Proceeding with first step, here comes the time to be specific while selecting the influencer that you have been searching. Outline the specifications of your business’s required influencer such as influencer’s number of followers, fan base, location, branding, gender and age etc.
The moment you determine all these mentioned specifications, next step is to look for the best-match (influencer) to represent your brand image appropriately. The influencers could be searched through several ways, which are following:
- Search Influencer Manually
Keep the social media in mind on which you would like to promote content through your influencers. It is mentioned by Mediakix, that a business gets increased leads by selecting the popular and appropriate channel to promote campaigns of influencer marketing. In this regard, the most popular channels are Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Blogs and Twitter with the popular rank of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively.
- Keep an Eye on Competitors
Regularly take follow ups of the social media pages of your competitors to know the influencer they are incorporating in their branding. This is to avoid the clash of endorsing same influencer as of your competitor, instead you could select the influencer of the same niche to match the work pace.
- Use the Tools
Search for useful tools that could help in getting the right influencer as the contact person of your brand for promotion. There are some popular social media tools for digital marketing which are Upfluence, Klear, BuzzSumo, Awario, and Traackr.
- Get Your Story Promoted by Influencer
The brands that have just took a start or trying to measure their business using influencer marketing, this key point should be considered. You will be required to collaborate with the selected influencer to promote your business, this is the chance to win trust of your audience, it will eventually benefit in enhancing the efforts of customer acquisition.
Calmly be seated with your chosen influencer and talk about your business’s product and services. Clear the communication gap by asking the important questions e.g. are they capable of promoting a business? Which medium would be suitable to promote your business in right way. This is one-time task, but it should be done carefully, after this the rest of the task can be done with influencer.
- Conduct Contests and Offer Giveaways
Offering the giveaways and conducting the contests are the useful way to get large number of followers on social medias and more website traffic. This is how people would get your brand image in their minds for a longer time, and it eventually helps in measuring the business growth.
For this, simply conduct a contest and put a prize over the right answer or conduct an activity to offer giveaways. Collaborate with your influencers and ask them to define the rules for all such engaging activities.
- Prepare Budget and Strategy for your Branding
Preparing an appropriate budget for your influencer marketing is quite beneficial in selecting the right influencer. It needs to be advantageous for the influencer and your business as well.
Following are the ways for payment set up:
- Cost per click
Also called CPC, in which the influencer’s payment is decided after having the count of clicks that directed customers to website landing page.
- Free of Cost Services or Products
FOC or Free of cost products is also a way to get your products promoted, in which company gives free products or voucher / coupons for promotion.
- Pay per post
There are many influencers who gets their payment over per post, it usually is possible in the case of celebrities.
- Cost per engagement
This method is more or less similar to CPC, in which influencers get paid after the count of social media engagements or directing links to website.
- Cost per acquisition
Cost per acquisition is more like cost per click and also called cost per action. In this method the influencers get pain according to the number of actions on your page guided by them.
While making a management strategy, there are some factors that need to be considered including plan, partnership, its execution, and the review by others. Usually influencers are already committed with so many businesses and end up forgetting the scheduled session, therefore it is recommended to make a calendar in which the date along with time and content would be mentioned for both the parties.
- Take Help from Influencers for the Content
The role of influencers is to guide you about the content for the branding considering the company image in mind. They have good knowledge of trending content, engaging posts and the material to make you stand out of the digital crowd, therefore avail this experience to its maximum.
Below are the types of content that influencers generate usually:
- Videos
It has been a long time that video marketing is present, and there are still chances of it to survive for a longer time. Most influencers choose to create content with video especially the influencers of Instagram and YouTube channels.
- Stories and Posts (Instagram)
Most of the influencers choose Instagram among all other social media platforms as their core medium for influencer marketing. These influencers generally post a picture on their timeline or news feed and media’s story having company’s product and they tag the brand they are advertising. They also typically take in the link to the brand’s official website, which enhances customer acquisition.
- Blog posts
Blog post is usually used by the bloggers, where they publish a blog endorsing the brand that they are promoting and direct them with links to the website’s landing page.
- Wisely Make Hashtags and Let Influencer be your Digital Advocates
The influencer or blogger that you will select, will be the front person of your brand, this is the reason choosing the right influencer is important for your business. Furthermore, you can collaborate with these bloggers or influencers who trust the brand and help in promoting your brand on their own page. Following the step by step guideline, a community will be created for your brand that will help in promotion as well as beneficial in spreading brand awareness.
Also, it is quite essential to make hashtags which are brand or company specific, which will be used in every post that influencer will generate or use, thus eventually increase the reach, it also helps in enhancing the visibility of your brand.
- Bottom Line
Conclusively, it could be said in the bottom line that influencer marketing keeps on evolving and changing timely. Being the owner of the business or brand, you have to study how to acclimate to these variations and implement them in your company.
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