If you are in web marketing for a while, then you have heard of influencer marketing. If not, it’s probably the first time you are hearing about this term and still wondering what it really means.
Influencer marketing defined as a “form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole.”
Who are these key individuals?
Who are these key individuals?
With the social media booming and their power in spreading information, customers start to rely on others’ recommendations to make different decisions including purchasing. With this trend, some people have built reputation of giving insightful advice.
These people are followed by large number of audience and they have a kind of influence on their decisions including where they make their purchases. So, those are what are referred to as “influencers”.
Though social media is their major platform, but influencers are available everywhere in the web including on their websites and blogs, forums…etc.
For their incredible influence on customers, it becomes inevitable for companies to include influencer marketing in their overall online marketing strategies.
If one of the influencers with thousands of social media fans share your products or recommend your company to this large audience, it would certainly generate great results for your business and boost your sales.
Do you really need influencer marketing?
A lot of studies have asserted that customers are likely to accept other’s opinion rather than brand’s. This is in human nature! People tend to get advice from someone they trust and feel close to them. They are hardly convinced by company’s marketing and advertising messages, but easily persuaded by a friend’s recommendation.
These influencers manage to build a relationship with their audience based on trust which is one of the main elements on which every purchase decision is made. So, when your products or services are recommended by an influencer they are likely to be convincing more than you do it yourself.
The network of influenced people is not limited to the influencer’s followers, but goes beyond to these followers’ networks and communities. For their great impact, influencers can generate positive success for your business. They can for instance increase website traffic, build brand awareness, and most importantly can boost sales.
Certainly, influencer marketing has become one of the important marketing channels that can help businesses increase customers and sales.
But, before thinking to invest in any influencer, remember that these influencers are not ready to risk their reputation for low quality services or products.
What niches that use influencer marketing?
While some businesses haven’t got convinced of the power of influencer marketing, some markets have taken it into account and invest in it such as fashion businesses. They started targeting influencers and famous figures in fashion like bloggers.
They send them their products including for instance clothes, accessories for review. Then, the influencer recommends the products by writing posts and sharing them with audience. Of course with a link back to the business’ website where the purchase can be completed.
What to start with?
When you are convinced of good results that can influencer marketing generate for your business, you should know first what to begin with.
Before reaching out to influencers, you need to have a strategy. This means that you need a list of things to be clear so as to reach what is expected.
Know What Audience You Target: Like any marketing plans, you should first know what audience you are targeting. It is quite important that you understand your audience and know its needs and interests.
You can collect such valuable information about your audience by investigating social media or sending surveys and questions via email. If you don’t know your audience you’ll never reach the right influencer and your influencer marketing plans won’t reach any success.
Know Your Objectives: When you want to start your influencer marketing campaign, you should know exactly what the objectives you want to accomplish. Mainly, influencer helps businesses increase website traffic or social media followers, have people try your products, build awareness for your brand, and increase sales.
But, you can’t reach all these goals at once. So, you need to focus on one or two to get significant benefits out of your campaign.
How to Plan Your Influencer Marketing Strategy?
In order to reach success with your influencer marketing strategy, you need to make necessary plans.
Set Budget: Money matters. Before moving on and implement any strategy, you should set a budget you can bear. This depends whether you are a small business or big or a corporation. Setting a budget isn’t a choice but a must.
Several factors may affect your budget such as costs of content including graphics and all marketing materials you will need. Also, costs of tracking systems you would use to measure success of your campaign, in addition to costs of the influencer.
Several factors may affect your budget such as costs of content including graphics and all marketing materials you will need. Also, costs of tracking systems you would use to measure success of your campaign, in addition to costs of the influencer.
Small influencer s can accept some gifts or services in exchange, but top influencers require monetary payment.
What Matters in Influencer Choice?
When you are looking for influencers to help you in your marketing strategy, you need to consider if the influencer is in the market similar to yours. For instance you may find big influencers in music field with large audience, but you may not get any sales if you share products about construction materials for instance.
That’s why you need to be selective while choosing influencers because what matters is not just how much audience they have, but is that audience relevant for your business.
If influencers with huge audience are perfect, you can also invest in mid-stage influencers. The latter doesn’t have large numbers of followers, but they have enough audience to generate good results. Above all, they are less expensive than top level folks.
Also, before picking an influencer you need to make decision what interests you the most. Is it the influencer’s website or blog traffic or social media followers? This will define what presence required for your influencer.
While you are narrowing your list and taking out influencers that don’t perfectly fit for your business, you will finish picking the most relevant and appropriate influencer to reach and collaborate with to launch your campaign.
Where to Find These Influencers?
Social Media
Social media is the best place where to search for your influencers. They will positively affect your brand by advocating your brand to their audience and recommend it. So how to find the right influencers that would help you.
Twitter
You can directly search on twitter. But to make your search more precise, follow hashtags. You can search hashtags that these influencers are using. Then follow their conversations to determine the active users.
When you find these influencers, you can collect them in a Twitter list. This way you’ll be able to follow them and keep an eye on what they share and talk about.
To effectively organize your twitter account, there are several tools out there that can make things easy. For instance, you can use Hootsuite or TweetDeck.
Facebook
Like on Twitter, you can search for people who are talking and sharing items you are interested in. Then follow and like influencers with high fan base. Make sure that you check statistics of people talking about them to know how high their engagement rate is.
Google+
You can also search Google’ social media channel Google+. Similar to Facebook, you can search for relevant people and follow them. Check also for groups discussing topics related to your market and make users under your radar to find top talkers.
Before picking any influencer, make sure that you visit insights to learn more about the profile and how engaging the profile is.
You can also search other social media channels for influencers including LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram…etc, depending on what your business is about and what can work better for you.
Social Influence Metrics Tools
Instead of searching directly on social media networks, you can use social influence metrics. These tools crawl through social media networks and offer you insights of social media influencers’ rate of their engagement and rank them depending on their influence.
There are large lists of these metric tools you can use among them:
Klout: a tool used to show a person’s authority on social media. It can be a good tool to search for influencing people on social media to connect with. You can search by keyword, topic, and make comparisons between influencers concerning followers, number of views and shares…etc.
Kred: Like klout, it provides insights about social media users’ score. This tool gives also information about likelihood of a user to share others’ content.
Social Crawlytics: This tool can help you find influencers based on search features. It also provides information about the influencer’s most shared content. So, you can have an idea about what kind of content they are likely to share.
Topsy: It’s a great tool you can use to find terms related to your market and find tweets, photos, influencers, most popular posts...etc.
There are many other social influence metric tools you can use to reach out to right influencers that can help you boost your business including for instance buzzsumo, Radian6, Social Mention, Twello, Tweepi, Buffer, Followerwonk…and more.
Search Engines
Unlike detailed information you can get when you search on social media or on social influence metrics tools, search engines also can be used to search and find influencers. You can find websites related to your market and people associated with these websites.
When you find those people, you can search for them on social influence metrics tools to get more data about their interests and how influencing they are.
Google Alerts or Bing Alerts: You can set email alerts for keywords that interest you on Google or Bing to receive updates related to your topic. This way you can determine people who write frequently about your keyword.
Blogger Outreach
You cannot target only social media influencers, but you can also reach to bloggers that have also a great impact on audience. Bloggers are mostly active on different social media channels.
To reach out for influencing bloggers, you can first start by searching for blogs in your niche and read their blog posts and find out how relevant they are for your topics.
When you find bloggers that interest you, then you can move to compare them based on their social media and SEO stats to determine which you can choose to collaborate with.
There are a number of tools you can use in the process including for instance BlogDash that offers free and paid plans, or Inkybee available only for paid plans with a free trial. If you have big business, you can use Buzz Stream or GroupHigh.
Influencers’ Payment
Though some influencers may recommend your brand for free because they like products and services, but most of the time they require a compensation to it. It might be financially or other sort of reward. Influencers need to be offered something in turn for the favor they have given.
It depends on the influencer profile, but you can reward them for instance financially or just share their posts and turn traffic to their website, or offer gifts or discounts for your products. In some cases, if you notice that some influencers are highly committed to your brand and generate great sales, you can offer them commission and make it win-win collaboration.
Conclusion
Collaborating with great influencers has become one of the flourishing marketing strategies. They can help enhance businesses’ awareness and boost social influence, and most importantly increase your customers and sales.
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