Create.
Post.
Hope.
Too many aspiring entrepreneurs, marketers, and small business owners take this approach to digital marketing…
All they see are tumbleweeds.
But it’s not necessarily your fault.
You’ve been led down the garden path by big promises and ambitious estimates of what social media can achieve for your business.
Unfortunately… the powerful world of social media that has revolutionized the way we live our lives is not solely dedicated to helping grow your business. People aren’t out there waiting with bated breath for your next post just so they can hand over their credit card.
With more and more businesses breaking out into the digital sphere, competition to get your target customers attention is fierce.
If you give them a reason to ignore you… they will.
You see, social media is just a platform. It’s not a magic bullet or masterful new employee that is going to turn your business around overnight.
With the right mindset, advice, tools, and testing, it does provide an ecosystem that is custom-built for scaling your message. It’s the fuel to your fire. The playground for your entrepreneurial dreams.
It’s a platform to find your tribe, talk to them, understand their wants, needs, and desires, and grow a business of meaning and passion.
But if you’re just getting started and your budget and following are small. Or your resources are already stretched thin. How do you reach new customers on social media, at speed, without breaking the bank, or much of a sweat in the process?
Did you know that there’s a way to take advantage of someone else’s hard work – their years of cultivating a legion of fans who hang on their every word?
What if we told you there was a legitimate, mutually beneficial way for you to get in front of someone else’s audience, and fast?
I’m talking about influencer marketing.
While this may sound like the type of digital marketing strategy that is reserved for the big brands, well-connected wheelers and dealers, or Kardashian-like celebrity stars, it’s not.
In fact, anyone can get started with influencer marketing right now…
- What is Influencer Marketing?
- How does influencer marketing work?
- Crafting a successful influencer marketing strategy
- How effective is influencer marketing?
- What are the different types of Influencers?
- What does an influencer actually do?
- How do I find and work with influencers?
- What is Influencer Marketing?
- How does influencer marketing work?
- Crafting a successful influencer marketing strategy
- How effective is influencer marketing?
- What are the different types of Influencers?
- What does an influencer actually do?
- How do I find and work with influencers?
What is Influencer Marketing?
So, what is it?
Influencer marketing is a strategy that orients itself around an influential person, a mouthpiece, or someone with a bit of online fame and an audience in a given industry. Instead of focusing marketing efforts and strategies around a target audience, a business owner using influencer marketing will focus their energy on a particular person, an influencer.
An influencer is someone with the collective ear of a large audience that is a group of potential buyers in your market. Typically, the influencer has cultivated a large following on social media. Sometimes, they may have a huge blog following, or an engaged, lengthy email list.
How does influencer marketing work?
You may be asking, what does an influencer marketing campaign look like?
The process of influencer marketing is about finding an “influencer” who has accrued a following that closely aligns with your ideal audience. Then, establishing a relationship with that influencer, and subsequently finding a mutually beneficial way to promote your business to their audience.
For example, you are the proud small business owner of a company that designs and manufactures a line of eco-friendly, vintage-inspired make-up products. You find an influencer in that domain – a blogger with an Instagram following numbering in the tens of thousands.
This person tries new makeup styles and products, and reviews them and models them for their followers in an engaging professionally-edited video. Their followers, in turn, are highly influenced to buy and try these products for themselves.
Instead of taking the time to woo many different prospects separately, you instead target this influencer with a marketing strategy. The influencer, if you’ve managed to market your products to them successfully, will tell their followers about it. They influence them to buy.
Your target influencer knows the audience much better than you do. They interact with them on a daily basis, and already know what’s going to resonate with the audience and what will turn them off. With influencer marketing, the guesswork is taken out of the marketing strategy. Someone has done the hard work of cultivating a relationship with the audience for you already. Less pivoting, tweaking, and guessing is going to cut down on your marketing overhead.
In the internet age, the majority of online consumers, 84% to be exact, trust online reviews just as much as recommendations from friends and family. Furthermore, they want to hear from people that they idolize and respect (influencers). Consumers trust a recommendation from a person more than they believe in advertising from brands or businesses.
It’s much easier to get inside the head of one person, than thousands. This is the beauty of influencer marketing; it’s laser-focused and efficient. The more efficient something is, the cheaper it’s going to be. For small businesses and people with a constrained marketing budget, influencer marketing will get you a higher ROI than traditional marketing strategies which cast a wider net.
Crafting a successful influencer marketing strategy
Simply launching an influencer marketing campaign is not enough. To truly succeed in this space, it is crucial to set clear goals and develop a comprehensive content strategy with your chosen influencer.
Setting Clear Goals for Your Campaign
What do you hope to achieve with influencer marketing? Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, or boost sales? Defining your goals will not only give you a sense of direction but also allow you to measure the success of your campaign accurately.
For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might want to focus on collaborating with influencers who have a large following and a strong presence in your target market.
On the other hand, if your objective is to drive website traffic, you could work with influencers who specialize in creating engaging content that encourages their audience to click through to your website.
By setting clear goals, you can tailor your influencer selection, content creation, and performance metrics to align with your desired outcomes.
Developing a Content Strategy with Your Influencer
Effective collaboration with your chosen influencer is crucial to the success of your campaign. While influencers are experts in creating engaging content, it is essential to work together to ensure that the content aligns with your brand’s messaging and resonates with their audience.
One way to develop a content strategy is by conducting thorough research on your influencer’s audience demographics, interests, and preferences. By understanding who their followers are and what type of content they enjoy, you can create content that is not only visually appealing but also relevant and valuable to their audience.
Collaborating with your influencer can involve brainstorming ideas, discussing the best platforms to reach their audience, and determining the most effective content formats. For example, you might decide to create engaging videos that showcase your product or service in action, informative blog posts that provide valuable insights, or visually appealing social media content that captures attention.
Remember, the key to a successful influencer marketing campaign is to create content that seamlessly integrates your brand’s message with the influencer’s personal brand and style. By working together, you can ensure that the content resonates with their audience and drives the desired results for your brand.
In conclusion, crafting a successful influencer marketing strategy requires careful planning and collaboration. By setting clear goals and developing a comprehensive content strategy with your chosen influencer, you can maximize the impact of your campaign and achieve your desired outcomes.
How effective is influencer marketing?
So, just how useful is influencer marketing, and what benefits are you going to see when you employ this strategy?
Organic reach on Facebook is way down and continuing to slide for businesses. This means paid reach is getting increasingly more expensive. Your influencers, on the other hand, have had years to build up their following and get them to interact with their content, so their organic reach is much higher.
Blog posts, for example, crafted by influencers and shared on social media see on average 11 times the ROI of banner ads. Also, studies show that a group of target customers who are exposed to influencer marketing will buy, on average, 10% more of a brand’s products than those who aren’t exposed to influencer marketing at all. And, businesses that spend $1 on influencer marketing typically see an ROI of $6.50.
These influencer marketing stats not enough to convince you?
Here are just a few of the ‘hard’ benefits you’ll get with an influencer marketing campaign:
- Increased conversions on your website.
- Growth in your brand awareness.
- Access to an already cultivated, highly targeted audience of buyers.
- An expansion of your organic reach on social media, without paying a cent to Facebook.
Even better, there are a number of ‘soft’ benefits to influencer marketing. Your influencers are the ones who make the content, so, they’re the ones shouldering the creative costs. Often, the content they make for your brand will be evergreen, meaning you can reuse it again and again.
What are the different types of Influencers?
Now, let’s get into the different types of influencers, how to find them, and how to work with them to craft a budget-friendly influencer marketing strategy that’s mutually beneficial.
There are 3 characteristics to look for when on the hunt for an influencer: relevance, reach, and resonance (trust).
- Relevance means how aligned the influencer’s platform is with your brand. If you sell only organic products, you might want to look for an influencer who has built fans that are eco-friendly.
- For Reach, look for how many followers or fans the influencer has. What’s their domain authority? And their ability to reach the target audience?
- Resonance is how well the audience receives the influencer’s message. Do they have a trusting relationship?
As well as these characteristics, there are also 3 unique types of influencers: micro, top, and local.
Micro Influencers
Micro influencers are people who have a tight-knit following. They are usually everyday consumers or people with a personal story which has struck a chord with the target audience. They sound authentic and genuine.
Micro influencers may be bloggers, or small business owners themselves and usually have followings as little as 500 people to as many as 10,000.
You may be thinking that the more followers, the better, but that’s not necessarily true. You want influencers who have an engaged, active following, and you want to look for influencers who’ve managed to cultivate massive amounts of trust with their audience. A micro-influencer with 5,000 highly engaged, targeted, and trusting fans will deliver you better outcomes than someone with 10x that following and none of the engagement or relevancy.
While they may have a smaller following, it’s a high-quality following. And utilizing the services of a smaller, micro influencer can be more comfortable on your wallet. Looking into forming a business relationship with a micro influencer is a great way to test the waters if you’re new to this type of digital marketing strategy, too.
Top Influencers
‘Top’ influencers in a field are the big dogs, the people with a huge following – an army of qualified leads. They’re often celebrities, athletes, or entertainers with millions of followers. These are also the most expensive influencers. If you’re a small business on a budget, you’ll probably want to skip over top influencers to focus your efforts on micro influencers and those that are local to your brand.
Local Influencers
If you want to drive traffic to an offline store or an event, you might like to look into local influencers. These people can really help your brand or products get in front of qualified leads in your targeted location.
What does an influencer actually do?
Now, let’s get into the role of your influencer in your digital marketing strategy.
The goal you have for your influencer(s) is to drive online or offline purchases for your products, start conversations about your brand to build up awareness, or to establish the credibility of your business in your industry or marketplace.
How does this look from the influencer’s point of view? What will they actually do?
An influencer may do any number of things to help promote your brand, but here are a few examples:
- Write a testimonial to be used in your marketing material.
- Place your product strategically in images or video posts on their social media networks.
- Create a review of your product for their blog or YouTube channel.
- Promote your product to their email list with an exclusive offer.
Why would an influencer do this for you? Of course, they will need some sort of compensation such as money, free products, or something else they value… we’ll discuss this in a later section of this article.
How do I find and work with influencers?
Despite its potential ROI and rising interest, 67.6% of marketers still find it hard to discover relevant influencers for their brands.
So, how can you go about finding, approaching, and working with the right influencers?
There are 3 critical steps for this process: find, approach, and determine compensation.
1. Finding influencers
Finding the right influencer for your digital marketing strategy might seem like a daunting task, but there are tools at your disposal. Of course, good old-fashioned word of mouth can always work here, too. Ask some of your business associates who they’ve used. They might be able to recommend an influencer, or at least start you down the path to finding the right one for your company.
If that doesn’t work, here are 3 free and low-cost tools you can use to find the right influencer for your business:
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