How Influencer Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Brand
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing done by publicizing the endorsements obtained from the influencers, which may be people or organizations possessing an expert level of knowledge and great social influence in that business.
How to create an influencer marketing strategy?
Follow the following steps to create an effective influencer marketing strategy:
- Define your goals – Improve your brand identity, if required. Think about who would be your right audience, how to enhance your brand awareness among them, and how to engage them with publicity campaigns through likes, comments, and shares. Prepare your team to handle the generated leads, present their products and services concepts properly, close deals, and be ready for after-sales support.
- Choose your type of influencer marketing campaign – Once your goals are fixed, you must identify the type of influencer marketing you need, which can be based on inspiration, payment, or a mixture of the two. In the inspiration-based type, you can inspire the influencer to share content with the audience. In the payment-based type, you pay the influencer to share your content. And in the mixed type, you can create a situation where goodwill and money matter.
Here are a few types of methods that you may consider for carrying out your ad campaign:
- Gifting: Giving free products and services to an influencer in exchange for a positive review or mention of the brand.
- Guest Posting: Creating and contributing engaging content to be posted on an influencer’s blog.
- Sponsored Content: Paying the influencer for posting articles about your brand on their blog or social channel. The influencer may even create the content for the post.
- Co-Creating Content: You can collaborate with the influencer to prepare the content published on your website, their website, or a separate third-party website.
- Social Media Mentions: You can agree with the influencer to mention your brand or share your content on their social channels.
- Contests and Prizes: You may run a contest and ask an influencer to give the prizes to the winners.
- Influencer Takeover: You may allow an influencer to take a free hand on your social channels for a definite amount of time, suggesting what to post, and you are acting likewise.
- Affiliate Marketing: You may go for an agreement with the influencer whereby you may give them a percentage of every sale due to them.
- Discount Codes: You can give an influencer a unique discount code for your product or service that they can promote and offer to their audience.
- Brand Ambassadors: You can form relationships with your fans so that they get free products, exclusive offers, and featured by your brand in exchange for promoting your brand.
- Create a list of qualified influencers – After deciding on the type of campaign, you need to list influencers who will help you reach out to new people, improve your brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and increase your sales.
An influencer is an online authority with a following of people listening to what they say. Their followers are loyal and frequently shape their interests based on what the influencer says. An influencer can be a:
- Blogger
- Social Media Personality
- Celebrity
- Industry Expert
- Thought Leader
- Lifestyle Brand
You can start searching for influencers in your trade with well-known figures in your industry. They will help you spread your message and build brand awareness in your target market. To support this type of searching, set up a Google alert for industry-related terms to see who regularly writes content about important topics. Then, browse forums to see who regularly answers questions about your industry.
Find influencers who promote your competitors:
Search for influencers working with your brand to see which influencers are interested in mining with your competitors. They will be likelier to share content about your brand than those who haven’t publicized for other brands in your industry. Navigate through the industry-related hashtags on social media to find out who is regularly shares content and promotes your competitors. These influencers would be good to reach out to.
Influencer analysis is an important part of finding the right influencers. While deciding on the influencers, consider their authority to identify whether that will be helpful for your campaign to accomplish its goals. The factors that are taken into account for judging the authority of the influencers are:
- Their number of followers
- Engagement rate of followers
- Alexa Rank of website
- Quality of content
- The depth of niche coverage
Influencer Database Providers:
Suppose you don’t want to search for qualified influencers manually. In that case, you can use the services offered by the influencer database providers GroupHigh, Cision, TapInfluence, Influencity, etc., to manage your campaigns:
Influencers don’t need to be from your industry. Those who share your audience can provide as much value for the purpose. Influencers from an auxiliary industry may help reach more target audiences even further.
- Brainstorm content ideas – Next, you have to imagine and table the probable ideas for creating influencer marketing content that will create a positive impression on the audience. Analyze the audience to understand their needs and interests fully. This will enable you to identify influencers not from your trade but followed by your audience. This strategy will help you to connect with that part of your audience that is not crowded with messages from your competitors.
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- Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool: Find the type of marketing content shared by the websites that are also visited by your type of audience using Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool.
- Alexa’s Audience Interest Tool: Look for the topics and sites that are preferred by your audience using Alexa’s Audience Interest Tool.
- Alexa’s Site Overview: To check if a website can be connected with an influencer marketing campaign, use Alexa’s Site Overview Tool.
- BuzzSumo: Use BuzzSumo’s Influencer Marketing Tool to search for the influencers related to your industry and the topics they are campaigning about.
- Keyhole: Use Keyhole to review the relevant topics and find the brands regularly covering your industry.
- Followerwonk: You can use Followerwonk to find out the influencers on Twitter and follow their audience to see if they are right for your campaigns. You can enter any topic and find users with those terms in their bio.
- Plan and track your influencer outreach – You can find which sites are linked to your competitors’ websites by Alexa’s Competitor Backlink Checker and share your content with those sites. As your campaign progresses, you can track the marketing metrics to determine the number of leads. After the campaign, you can review the results to conclude if the outreach of the influencer marketing campaign is a success.
Author Bio:
Gaurav Agarwal is the founder of ImaPRO – a Digital Marketing Agency in Bahrain, providing 360° Digital Marketing solutions across the globe for the last 16 years. With years of experience and expertise in Digital Marketing, he serves businesses from various industries, including Retail, Fashion, and E-commerce.
