Influencer marketing is something that is on trend in the space of digital marketing. It’s not only limited to emerging trends but plays a crucial role in companies’ overall online marketing budget. 

Over the past couple of years, the increase in the number of social media platforms and the rise in demand for these platforms have made Influencer marketing expand its roots.

This type of marketing is one of the best ways to reach larger audiences, attract more followers and promote your brand in a crowd-pleasing way. 

  Imagine you are running an Ad-Campaign on any of the social media platforms. What will be your reach?. It may be in the thousands or millions, depending on your spending and the segment you have chosen. But for a brand, the number of reaches is of no use, if there is no conversion. This is where influencer marketing comes in. 

Instead of thinking of influencer marketing as just sharing and promoting on social networks, you can think it as an influencer who is your unique customer and has millions of fan bases recommending your product to their followers. For sure, people will love to try something referred by their influencer. As a result, it will increase your brand reach along with the return on Investment(ROI).

However, every business needs to market itself in today’s highly competitive and specialised industries. Social media has become the answer to reaching a large number of people across all platforms.

No doubt influencer marketing has unlocked a new segment of online marketing. Although having massive advantages in business growth, it is still ignored by several brands. While there are businesses that are not aware of this new form of marketing. And some are still having conflicts on certain information like the strategy to follow, platforms to select, Influencers to choose from, etc.

No worries, this blog is specially meant for you. All confusion will get cleared at the end of this blog. Before we dive into the depth, let’s quickly talk about what influencer marketing means.

It doesn’t make any sense to understand influencer marketing without knowing who is an Influencer. Let’s first know about that.

Who is an Influencer?

 An Influencer is a person that has developed a widespread following in a specific niche of their choice, who makes a difference for people by providing them with information, guidance and hopefully inspiration. 

The reason why the audience follows the influencer is that they believe that what he/she gives to them will be valuable and not just another ad promoting some product via social media. Moreover, they have a large following and the post and recommendations that they shares have value and trust among their audience.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a business strategy where brands get the help of online influencers, to promote their products, services and brands.

The growing popularity of social media, it’s the reason why many businesses are approaching this new method to market their products and services. Influencers make up a huge portion of online traffic and have proven that they can be a very effective source of brand awareness and engagement.

As per a report, the adoption of influencer marketing is growing fast and currently, 93% of the marketers use this marketing strategy.

When you are in the business world, you would want to build up a brand but the marketing of your product or service is not easy. With a lot of work and dedication, you can build up their name so that people will be able to associate it with your product or service. But creating a strong brand image takes a long time. If you are not able to create the right image for your brand then you can use influencer marketing as an alternative solution to solve this problem.

Anyway, implementing this new marketing technique will not help you unless you build a proper strategy for it.

Before moving to the mainstream of our blog, first, let’s talk about some benefits of this marketing.

Why your Business needs Influencer Marketing?:

• Establish credibility and trust:

At present, people don’t want to see any overhyped Ads. Instead, they find something interesting, informative, and useful when an influencer promotes a specific product or service on their social media account. As the influencers are experts on the particular niche, whatever the knowledge they share, followers get inspired and engage with that content. Additionally, they love to follow their recommendation.

• Boost Brand Awareness:

Influencers are individuals having a huge fan base. As they are specialized in a specific topic, people love to hear from them. For sure, brands collaborating with such influencers can connect with many prospective online audiences.

• Reach Target Audience:

Recent statistics state that 80% of advertising reaches the wrong audiences. As a result, most companies spend a lot of money that gives no result to them. This gets avoided in influencer marketing as most followers know their influencer is based on which domain.

• Increases ROI:

89% of the brands believe that their return on investment in influencer marketing is better than other marketing techniques. Influencers gives a positive impact on their followers resulting in driving traffic to the brands’ websites and increasing sales for a specific product.

Check out a few statistics published by the Influencer marketing hub, 

• The influencer marketing industry is expected to reach $16,4 billion in 2022 from $13.8 billion in 2021.
• Instagram is one of the most prefered social media platforms for brands that engage in Influencer Marketing 
• Zara was one of the most mentioned brands on Instagram in 2021 followed by Instagram itself.

However, several small and medium-sized organizations invest a handsome budget in this marketing technique but fail to achieve their goal.

Like other marketing tactics, influencer marketing even needs proper planning and targeting. You won’t find any success in your campaign by just spending a lot of budget on an influencer if your strategy is not proper.

Here are some marketing strategies that you need to follow if you want to gain your brand visibility and sales.

How to build an influencer marketing strategy?

#1: Do your research:

For any strategy, research is the first step. There are plenty of social media platforms available with a billion users. But what matters the most is identifying a suitable platform that is frequently used by your ideal audience.

Let’s say you are in the beauty and beauty and fashion industry, then no other platform would be better than Instagram and youtube.

Additionally, you can even analyse your competitor and check out which platforms they use.

Choose the platform that you want to on your priority. Anyways you can expand to other platforms but as a beginner, you need to focus and stick with one.

(Note: Keep in mind your brand should already have a presence on that platform) . Know how Social Media Marketing is Important for your business. 

#2: Find an influencer for your niche:

You can even take this as research. Selecting the right influencer matters a lot for your business because sometimes Influencers with a smaller and more dedicated follower base give more effective results than an influencer with huge followers. Besides, the budget you need to spend will be comparatively low.

Talking about social media influencers, they are 5 types

• Nano-influencers: They are the ones who have 10,000 followers or less. With the less follower count, this type of influencer has the highest engagement rate of any other influencer type.
• Micro-Influencers: They are the one who has a follower base above 10,000 but below 100,000. Businesses usually go with these types of influencers as more effective in terms of engagement and trust. Apart, they seem to have a close connection with their followers and are more focused on a particular niche.
• Mid-Tier Influencers: With followers between 50,000 to 500,000, this type of influencer offers a brand with wide reach and engagement. Usually, these types of influencers are pretty more experiences in terms of creating content and attracting audiences.
• Macro-Influencers: They are well-known personalities having follower sizes between 500,000 to 1 million. Since they have a reputation to gain followers, brands with this type of influencer get a massive reach but may not get the engagement rate that they are expecting.
• Mega-Influencers: With more than a million followers, these types of influencers are quite popular on social media due to their stardom. As they are very active on social media they generate a huge engagement.

#3: Set your budget:

After finding an influencer, you would have got a clear idea about the follower base they have and the prices they are charging. Now it’s time to set up your budget. Don’t forget to monitor and follow up during the marketing campaign.

It’s very clear influencers have partnerships with multiple brands and more chances are there they may fall behind your commitments to post on time or to add tags and call to action. Here it becomes important for you to communicate and refine your approach.

#4: Build your Content:

Although influencers are experts in developing rich content you need to refine it. Because you are the one who knows who are your customers and what exactly they love. Your valuable information to an influencer can be more useful.

#5: Set your goal and KPI:

Every strategy has an ultimate goal. When you are planning about influencer marketing campaign it has a number of goals. It may be to build brand awareness, drive sales or occupy a new market. It becomes important for brands to set goals before running a marketing campaign.

Once you are done with your goal, it’s time to identify your key performance indicators (KPI). These are the metrics that will help you to track and analyse your campaign. For example, let’s say your goal is brand awareness then you need to track analyses of your website and the gain in the number of followers on your social media page.

Influencer Marketing Tools:

Now is the time for you to start with influencer marketing for your brand. Before you begin check out a few tools that will make your job easier.

Hootsuite:

It is one of the tools that can help you to find out influencers by tracking conversions related to your industry across multiple platforms.

Brand Collabs Manager by Meta:

This is a free tool from Meta that allows brands and creators to connect with each other.

Trufan:

Trufan helps your brands to connect with nano and micro-influencers and identify your top fan on your social media page.

Right Relevance Pro:

This tool helps you to find out the top content shared by influencers based on the topic and location.

 

Wrapping Up:

Influencer marketing, a relatively new concept, is playing an increasingly important role in the marketing world. It is not just a trend, but an actual strategy that you can use for your brand’s success. As more and more brands are getting involved with this Marketing, it is important to understand what Influencer marketing is all about.

 The key concept of this Marketing technique is to build a bridge between a brand and customer through an influencer who has credibility among his/her followers. It’s not only about spending a certain budget on an influencer, but rather how you are promoting your product with them. It becomes necessary for your business to follow the above strategies for a successful influencer marketing campaign.