Influencer marketing (also called branded content) serves as a straightforward approach to growing the reach of your brand on social media. It is defined as a form of marketing that allows businesses to collaborate with those individuals having a considerable following for enhanced brand exposure. The collaboration of a brand with an online influencer will help it to market its products/services.
To make this strategy work, there is no universal approach. However, with proper planning and extensive research, your business can make the most of it. With a whopping figure of 80% of companies dedicating a separate budget towards influencer marketing, the significance of this field is hard to overlook. However, leveraging the right approach to do this is the key to implementing and reaping actual value from influencer marketing.
Allow us to take you through some of these key approaches you can use to strengthen your marketing game with the assistance of influencers.
Key approaches to leverage the power of popularity of influencer marketing
Prepare media-centric content:
There is a substantial increase in the demand for media-centric content due to the increased social media usage resulting from increased smartphone dominance. Live streaming, vlogs, and reels have dominated the traditional forms of content. Moreover, the advent of influencer marketing can be imputed to this. Consequently, brands today prioritise media-centric content to cater to the dynamic content consumption demands of the people.
Media-centric content has benefited businesses with the opportunity to serve customers with more relevant and personalised content that will eventually influence their decisions.
Establish long-term influencer collaborations:
Since influencer marketing has attained traction in the last few years, long-term influencer collaborations will be the future for businesses. Long-term influencer partnerships can help brands in generating content with high credibility. The continued collaboration of the creators with the brand will equip them with a better insight into their business offerings. Consequently, they can effectively communicate with the public. Therefore, influencers can turn out to be reliable brand ambassadors and serve businesses with crucial information for creating new products/marketing campaigns.
Utilise the performance influencer marketing:
Certainly, influencer marketing is an economical marketing strategy since it doesn’t force marketers to make huge financial obligations. This holds true chiefly when it is employed as a performance channel rather than a brand awareness channel.
Influencer marketing has benefited marketers with easy measurement of real-time ROI and implementation of immediate action. It lets influencers provide authentic information on sales and consumer engagement. Subsequently, the brands can use this information to adapt their strategy, revise the content they intend to promote and pursue a higher return on investment.
Influencer Marketing Guide
The following section walks you through how to create an effective influencer marketing strategy.
i. Set your goals
The key goal for brands aiming to use influencer marketing is to reach new target customers. It is crucial because an influencer campaign enlarges your reach to that individual’s followers. It is not required to generate a sale at this stage. The next goal is to increase brand awareness, and the third goal is to drive sales.
ii. Identify your audience
You must know who you want to influence. To make sure you effectively implement your influencer marketing strategy, you must speak to the right people by using the proper tools and the relevant influencers.
The foremost step is to define who your audience is for the particular marketing campaign. To precisely understand who you intend to reach, you must develop audience personas. Post determining the type of audience you wish to target, choose your influencer.
iii. Understand the requirements and rules
It is essential to understand the rules and requirements before implementing your influencer marketing strategy. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) determines these rules in the United States. It strictly takes disclosures to ascertain that you assimilate disclosure guidelines into your contracts with influencers.
Influencers don’t always identify sponsored posts, but they must do it. The rules differ slightly by country. Hence, you should check the latest requirements defined in your jurisdiction. Make sure to be clear and direct so viewers comprehend when your post is sponsored.
iv. Consider the components of Influence marketing:
The three components of influence marketing are relevance, reach, and resonance. Here we look at the brief of each of them.
-Relevance
A relevant influencer shares content pertinent to your industry and business. They must have an audience that coordinates with your target audience.
-Reach
It denotes the number of people you can potentially reach via the influencer’s follower base. Although a small audience can be effective, you must ascertain that there is sufficient following to match your goals.
-Resonance
It indicates the prospective level of engagement the influencer can establish with an audience related to your brand.
Remember that a huge follower count is not always advantageous. A huge follower count is insignificant if those followers are not intrigued by your offer. On the other hand, niche influencers can have very engaged and committed followers.
v. Prepare a list of influencers
Your influencers’ opinions must be reliable and honourable to your audience. Engagement is the metric that comes in handy to determine whether your potential influencer is reliable or not. A decent engagement rate indicates a loyal following compared to an enhanced follower count built by fraudulent accounts and bots.
vi. Conduct thorough research
You must carefully look at your potential influencers’ posts. Determine how frequently they are sharing their sponsored content. You must look for lots of non-paid, organic content to make sure the followers stay encouraged, interested, and engaged.
vii. Obtain effective content from your influencer
Influencers are content creation experts and therefore regarded as creators. Collaborating with your influencer and allowing them to demonstrate these skills facilitate you with the best outcome from their work.
Conclusion
Considering the fact that more and more users are devoting maximum time to social media, the 2023 year will certainly be the era of influencer marketing. Effective influencer marketing can be a win-win approach. It helps influencers earn money by making sponsored posts for brands. Also, they can work as brand ambassadors after having gained sufficient experience. Thus, they can leverage the power of the popularity of influencer marketing.
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