The Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing also known as also influence marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on influential people rather than the target market as a whole.

Influencers are those people who are active on social media and blog sites who have a lot of influence on the general public.

These people act as niche promoters and brand advocates. You should always keep in mind that true influencers will not only drive awareness but action too.

You may get an instance where a person has quite the social media following that could really expose your brand to so many people but they may not be a contextual fit thus their tweet or post does not drive leads and conversions.

You have to ensure that you choose someone who meets your business’s needs.

Why Does Your Brand Need Influencers?

Most customers will usually trust the recommendations that they get from a third party more than the ones you give them yourself as a business.

The brand influencer acts as a connector between your prospective customers and your brand. When you start working with influencers, they will bring both their audience and their audience’s network as well.

The influencer has the ability to generate traffic to your site thanks to the loyalty of their audience.

These influencers can also increase your exposure to social media and even sell your products by recommending it or writing a story about their experience using your product.

In recent times influencer marketing has really gained popularity as one of the most effective methods of attracting clients and customers.

Most of the consumers today have become blind to the traditional methods of marketing such as billboards and commercials.

They now prefer to research about a brand all on their own or hear about it from a trusted source/person.

It is important that you take that extra step to stay ahead of your competition by enlisting influencers to promote your brand to his/her following and help with increasing your conversions.

Influencer Marketing : Think About the Audience

As a marketer your first job is to come up with an audience that you want to specifically target for your brand.

You should take it upon yourself to think about the type of blogs, tweeters and topics that your target audience is likely to follow so as to know the right influencer to works with.

Many companies have not yet adopted this kind of inbound marketing and have decided to cling to their old ways except for fashion e-commerce sites that are really utilizing influencers to promote their clothes and accessories.

These companies send samples of clothes and accessories to reputable fashion bloggers so they can review the items and then these bloggers will link their audience to the site where they can buy the reviewed items. So what defines an influencer for your brand?

Context

This is the most important influencer characteristic you need to consider before choosing an influencer to work with.

You may find that a particular person has millions of followers but the demography that he/she attracts would probably not be interested in what you are selling so be very careful when making your choice.

Reach

After you have already decided who would be the best contextual fit for your brand you should start considering what their following looks like.

It’s important to get an influencer who has a very large following so that he/she can share information about your brand to as many people as possible.

Actionability

This refers to the influencer’s ability to cause an action to be taken by their audience. This will happen naturally once you target individuals that are contextually aligned with your brand and have a wide enough reach.

Since influencers are an “opt-in” network for their audience and this audience chooses to freely follow their twitter handle or blog, it means the audience stay engaged and is actually there to hear what this individual is talking about. This actually emphasizes the need for a contextual fit.

A lot of market research recently has been focused on mid-level influencers who are people that have a decent following of people and can nurture relationships with their audience and harness loyalty.

As you well know, a loyal audience will soak up recommendations easily.

Give your Influencer an Image

• Personality type

This is a very important aspect and you should decide what kind of influencer you would like. Do you need an informer, an activist, an authority etc, so as to best promote your brand?

• Genre

Decide which genre best describes your brand. Is it technology, marketing, fashion etc.

• Niche

You can decide to pick one niche or two. A niche is a specialized area of marketing for a particular service or product.

• Topics

You should pick a topic that your chosen influencer usually talks about on their blogs or social platforms this will help when you reach out to him/her because you will have something in common.

• Type of reach

You should clearly explain to the influencer the type of traffic you would like to get. Is it social media followers you are looking for or are you looking for site traffic.

You should narrow down the channels you want and also the number of followers on those chosen channels. Where do you look for your ideal influencer?

Influencer Marketing : Social Media Monitoring

The best influencers you could ever get for your brand are brand advocates. These types of influencers not only have a loyal audience that follows them because what they write aligns with your brand but they are also quite loud in expressing how much they love your brand.

When you tune into your social media platforms and blog posts you will be able to identify those brand ambassadors that you never even knew you had.

You can also find influencers who advocate for the niche or genre you have outlined for your business through social media.

Influencer Marketing: Research Hashtags

You should identify the hashtags that your target influencers are using on social media.

When you tune into conversations surrounding hashtags you are able to discover who are the active talkers in particular categories and also identify blog topics that would be appealing to these influencers as well.

Influencer Marketing:  Google Alerts

You should set alerts for keywords pertaining to your brand so as to identify people who are actively writing on topics related to your realm.

Influencer Marketing:  Social Mentions

You can use these to type in the name of your company so as to discover mentions on different social outlets.

Influencer Marketing: Blogger Outreach

Bloggers are almost always active across numerous social media networks and thus are the strongest spoke in the wheel of influencers.

You should start by searching for blog posts in your genre and then finding the niche(s) by reading the post and determining whether they write about relevant topics for your company.

If you decide to do this task manually it can take you quite a long time but luckily there are many great blogger outreach tools that help to make this process easier for you. The good thing is that there is a tool out there to cover every aspect of the spectrum.

I hope that you found the Influencer Marketing information provided in this article to be very helpful. Thank you for sparing the time to read this article.