Influencer Marketing

Introduction

Influencer Marketing is a hybrid of old and new marketing tools. It takes the idea of celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign. The main differentiator in the case of influencer marketing is that the results of the campaign are collaborations between brands and influencers. But influencer marketing doesn’t just involve celebrities. Instead, it revolves around influencers, many of whom would never consider themselves famous in an offline setting.One of the biggest mistakes that traditional media makes is a failure to see the difference between celebrities and online influencers.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing involves a brand collaborating with an online influencer to market one of its products or services. Some influencer marketing collaborations are less tangible than that – brands simply work with influencers to improve brand recognition. Influencers, unlike celebrities, can be anywhere. They can be anyone. What makes them influential is their large followings on the web and social media. Some will have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of followers. But many will seem more like ordinary people. They may only have 10,000 followers, less in some cases. Yet, they will have developed a reputation for being the experts in their field. They are the go-to people who provide the answers to people’s questions. Depending on their sphere of expertise, they are the people who make the most engaging social posts on their specialist topics. They share the best pictures, make the most entertaining videos, and run the most informative online discussions.

What works in Influencer Marketing

Carefully consider your approach to influencer marketing

- Be organized, put together a strategy, plan, and budget, spend time on research.
- Decide on your approach to finding influencers – find them organically, subscribe to a platform, or work through an agency.
- Be patient and be human – people talking to people, not companies talking to companies.

What Influencer Marketing is Not?

Influencer marketing isn’t just about finding someone with an audience and offering them money or exposure so they can say good things about you. That’s what viral celebrities are for. Influencers are people who’ve spent time building their own brand and cultivating their audience; they will be naturally protective of their reputation and the people who trust them. They’re people who have the patience and focus to succeed in social media, one organic follower at a time—people like this aren’t interested in doing influencer marketing solely for the money.

Influencer Marketing is also not about quick results. It’s the same kind of slow-and-steady approach as Social Media and Content Marketing, where your campaign isn’t about directly selling your wares. Instead, it’s about demonstrating your authority, credibility, and thought leadership within your industry. It’s about becoming synonymous with whatever it is that you offer, like when people say they’re going to Xerox a document instead of photocopying it, or to Hoover the floor, rather than vacuuming it.With Social Media Marketing, it’s a slow game of acquiring the kind of followers who are going to be loyal and engaged. So it’s tempting to think that joining forces with an influencer is going to be an easy way into the hearts and minds of his or her followers—it’s not that simple, though. Because to ally yourself with influencers, you’ve got to earn their trust and respect. But how?

What doesn't work in Influencer Marketing

Generalizing your approach to finding and making use of different influencers. One size doesn’t fit all influencers: tailor your approach to the specific influencer.Simply looking at the popularity of the influencer. Influence does not only mean popularity. Remember that your goal is to elicit a particular action from your customers. Don’t automatically assume that the people with the most followers are the influencers of a niche.

One Simple Rule: Influencer Marketing is Marketing to Influencers

With traditional social media marketing, a brand can set up its identity on whatever platform it chooses, and as time passes and its follower bases grow, it can see who its brand champions are. These are the customers who like and share content or mention the brand itself in a post. Followers like these can be further nurtured through personal attention and as part of a highly segmented group of all the brand champions. Efforts to market to this group focus on ways to keep them spreading the word.

One problem with this approach is that some of a brand’s followers just don’t have enough followers themselves to make much impact. In fact, most ordinary people on social networks don’t. Most people have a small network of maybe a few hundred friends and associates representing all kinds of tastes and preferences. Meanwhile, brands struggle to curate and create content that they hope will resonate with their followers in some meaningful way while staying engaged with day-to-day interactions.

This scattershot approach to social marketing yields predictably erratic results. Instead of blindly trying to grab likes and followers or throwing various bits of content out to see what sticks, influencer marketing tells us that our time is better spent marketing directly to influential people whose likes and dislikes we already know — they align well with our own. This means engaging with these people across social accounts—not just following and liking but commenting and demonstrating knowledge and a personality. It can also mean curating or creating content that’s hand-picked to get the attention of influencers. So, while it’s the influencer’s audience that’s the ultimate prize, the target market for brands includes the influencers themselves.

By laying this groundwork, you can achieve two things as a brand:

The first is that by merely interacting in positive and constructive ways on influencers’ social pages, you gain early access to their followers. You’re not promoting anything to them; you’re showing your face as a member of their community, adding to your credibility down the line.

The second achievement is that, eventually, when you do propose some kind of influencer marketing collaboration, they’ll already know you. Influencers aren’t celebrities, per se, but their online life can look a lot like a famous person’s real-world one: lots of interruptions from people they don’t know, wanting a piece of their time, either to praise them or to pitch them. You need to be able to stand out from the noise of attention they get in the form of emails and tweets. This means that when you finally reach out to them, they’ll already know what you’re about, and they’ll know whether you’re a good fit for their audience.

Conclusion

In conclusion, influencer marketing provides brands with an efficient and focused approach to reach their target audience through multiple social media platforms. Effective and business-driven influencer marketing strategy can influence opinions, increase brand loyalty, and generate sales.