The millennial love for social media now seems to be driving the advertising and promotional front of marketing campaigns for huge as well as upcoming brands. Each of them is busy trying to carve a niche in the minds and hearts of their Internet-loving audience/prospective customers. These customers/members of the audience have their own favorite social media stars and they absolutely love to watch them and follow their lifestyle. Falling for this trend, brands have embraced Influencer marketing and are now collectively spending billions of dollars a year on influencer marketing campaigns.
You would be amazed to learn that Influencer marketing will become a $10 billion industry by 2020. Every brand seems to be ready to invest in Influencer marketing and in fact, they are now becoming competitive in the pursuit of trying to seal partnerships with their favorite influential celebrities. These influential celebrities are in demand and given their online reputation and popularity, brands are striving to cash in on the trend and drive promotion for their products/services.
What is Influencer Marketing?
If you are not aware of this marketing lingo, here is a brief definition. Influencer marketing is a new form of marketing widely used by brands where they hire Internet superstars/ Youtubers/ Instagram Celebrities/ Viners/ Facebook & LinkedIn Influencers and other popular bloggers who are widely followed by people.
These individuals have influence over potential customers and they drive your brand’s message to the larger market. As per a report, 22% of 18-34 year-olds made a large purchase after seeing an online influencer endorsing the item. So, as a Brand, you need to begin by identifying, researching, engaging and supporting the people who can create high-impact conversations with customers.
Assessing the prerequisites
Given all the rage caught by the method of Influencer marketing, it is absolutely fine if you are trying to get on the bandwagon and get started with Influencer marketing for your own brand. However, before you board the train, it is essential that you do the preliminary work and ask yourself certain questions.
You must determine the goals for this influencer content. Also, you should be able to assess if this investment is going to be reasonable for your brand? You will have to figure out the metrics that you will employ to calculate the ROI on this investment. It is very crucial to understand that before you move ahead and pick your influencers, you need to pick your goal for the content they will be pushing out and the metrics that will be employed to ascertain the performance on this campaign.
You should focus on the following once you are done answering the obvious questions above.
- Picking the right influencer and channel
- Building trust
- Focusing on authenticity
- Measuring ROI
Now, it’s time to talk about how you can approach Influencer marketing for the marketing of your content so as to drive maximum conversions.
Choosing your influencer(s)
This is the most important step in your big leap towards Influencer marketing strategy. Similar to the manner where we assess all our requirements before starting a website, choosing influencers on such a basis is crucial. Once you begin the hunt, you will come across different kinds of influencers who enjoy a gracious social media following and are quite popular with the masses. It is going to be a task to assess their credibility and reach so that you can determine their candidacy to help promote your content.
Be careful about fake influencers with a huge user following which is paid for. There are many other tricks that these wannabe influencers employ to increase their follower count. Simply put, their profiles are inflated by fake followers. Regardless of the number of followers on their social media accounts, these fake influencers have no target audience for you. So, beware of fake influencers.
If you are a small brand which is working towards success and would like to go for influencer marketing, you can move ahead with micro or nano influencers. Their fees are typically low, given their follower count in comparison to big influencers. By working with them, you still get to access a genuine set of their audience and hence, make the most of your budget.
Once you have chosen your influencers, make sure that you work out legit work terms with them on paper and make sure that all working terms and conditions have been well laid out and there is absolute transparency in the agreement. This will make sure that you and the influencer continue to share a cordial work relationship without any hiccups.
Creating specific campaigns that let Influencers get into action
Once your influencers are on-board with your marketing requirements, you must create a very specific marketing campaign that can let them unleash their influence for your offering.
The right influencer marketing campaigns will amplify the performance of the content, organically. Work to implement a social media and content marketing plan which repurposes and boosts influencer content in order to keep your campaigns fresh, and consistently in-front of a whole new audience.
When you are working with multiple influencers at the same time, you can create parallel campaigns for them. This will send out a subtle message that your brand is everywhere and that everyone is using it.
Content for Influencers
This is yet another crucial tip – using content marketing and Influencer marketing for best results. Creating the right kind of content for a certain influencer will help you boost the conversions that you have aimed for. At the beginning of this influencer relationship, it is recommended that you craft the content for them to push out. Once they understand the pattern, you can work with them to create content that really appeals to their followers. Now it’s time for providing these chosen influencers with the right tools so that they can begin promoting your content and drive conversion.
Setting goals for this Influencer campaign
Before setting the engine in motion, you and your influencers need to be aware of the expectations for this working relationship. It should be obvious that you can’t tie them down in a manner similar to a sales target but asking for a little accountability will do no harm. Marketers state that engagement is the most common metric to their success using influencer marketing. You will need to maintain oversight to ensure influencers follow all applicable regulations, but don’t pull them back from exercising creativity.
Monitoring and measuring the ROI
Determining the performance of your influencers in their individual marketing campaigns should be your priority. You can weigh the performance of factors like the number of pieces of content produced, impressions received, signups, social media followings, or the number of times unique discount codes have been used to get quantifiable measurements. You can also host a Live experience to see social amplification in real time. Use tools like Meltwater, Klear, Traackr, and Dealspotr among others to monitor and measure the ROI.
Wrapping up
The popularity of Influencer marketing is soaring higher than ever. Brands like Huda Beauty show us how a million dollar business can be born using individuals who are capable of influencing their large number of followers. This holds true for all your content marketing campaigns as well. By using the tips and directives mentioned above, you can effectively use Content Marketing and Influencer Marketing for best results.
