What is influencer marketing and how does it benefit today’s market?
Trust plays a vital role in the success of any business. A majority of consumers get influenced by the people they trust. These people could be their peers, celebrities they follow, brand ambassadors and many more. These people basically carry out word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing. As the testimony comes from a trusted source, it is very much valuable. Social media has tremendously escalated the trusted-source value, resulting in Influencer marketing.
An influencer is a person who influences others face-to-face, on social media platforms, on television or any other platform with exposure to a large number of audience. In influencer marketing, the focus is on influential people rather than the market.
Instead of marketing to the world, brands locate influential people who can be current customers, paid influencers, brand ambassadors, celebrities, or athletes. The peers or known figures are more impactful on the consumers than the traditional marketing advertisements.
All consumer brands must consider influencer marketing rather than advertisements because, nowadays, consumers feel advertisement content is unauthentic.Since we are familiar with influencer marketing, now, we’ll see how to incorporate it.
You need to pick the right influencer in the first place to inspire your audience. Before approaching a probable influencer, you need to keep following 3 things in your mind-
Relevance
See to it that the influencer is sharing content relevant to your brand on social media. For example – if your brand product is related to sports, you must reach out to a sportsperson or an athlete for better marketing.
Reach
Make sure that the potential influencer has a good fan base and is capable of influencing a decent number of people. The person with a large number of followers is an asset for your brand publicity.
Resonance
How much engaged the influencer is with the audience is also a matter of concern for brand publicity. Suppose he/she has many followers but is not very much active on social media, in such a case you must try and look for another influencer.
Earlier, celebrity endorsements were the form of influencer marketing. But all brands cannot afford celebrities to market their brands. In today’s world of the digital era, regular people have become celebrities by gaining followers on social media. Many consumer brands approach influencers like Instagrammers, Youtubers, bloggers for online marketing of their brand. This is very much convenient and less costly than celebrity endorsements.
Now, when you have identified the right influencer, how do you reach out to him/her and build a long-term relationship?
It’s all mutual
Come with a plan that benefits not just you but the influencer too. You can easily give a check and bid farewell after his/her job is done, but this will not lead to a long-term bond. You need to add value to your relationship by assuring an equally important partnership.
The mutual value will be a key driver of a long-term relationship. The benefit of a long-term relationship with the influencer is that the audience will know that your product is trust-worthy and will stick to use it for a long time.
Creative freedom
You must give creative freedom to the influencer. The influencer must feel free to write or post about your brand on social media. Combined efforts work a charm on social media. It is a fact that the brand tweets create a 2.5 times lift in purchase intent while brand tweets combined with influencer tweets lifts it 5.2 times.
It is a fact that nowadays, every person next door has an account on social media sites. Keeping this in mind we can easily conclude that influencer marketing is an amazing opportunity to connect with customers online, who are in turn in direct contact with the influencer. So search for a potential influencer and give your business or products a larger audience for exposer. The more exposure means the larger opportunity to add new and secures the existing customers.
Recommended article :
- The complete guide to Optimizing SEO Article
- On page SEO checklist
- Off-page SEO activities
- Steps to Increase Website Traffic
