Today, everyone is an influencer who shares their everyday lifestyle with their followers on social media. Marketers use influencer marketing to showcase the brand’s story and uniqueness through the persona effect to which their niche audience can relate. The concept of using well-known faces to reach a huge audience is not new but is being transformed into a digital platform for reaching niche audiences. It is favorable in this phase of e-commerce and e-business. With this strategy, not only companies but also social media platforms are gaining popularity. In the beginning, it was YouTube, but today, Instagram is preferred by the most successful influencers. Here’s what it is, before we discuss how this is beneficial to marketers and business owners.
What is Influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is digital Words-of-mouth where an influencer builds a following and works with brands to promote their products, events, ideas, and services. Viewers enjoy seeing glimpses into someone’s everyday life where they can relate and get influenced. Influencers create raw and creative content through photos, videos, and status updates on social media for their followers. Fundamental to the success of this marketing strategy is the influencer’s willingness to promote both sponsored and professionally produced content. Influencers promote brands through Photography, Reviews, Videos, Live stream, Unboxing of products, contests, and taking over the brand’s social media. It creates trust between companies and consumers by creating a genuine bond with the followers. There are different Influencer categories:
- Micro-Influencers: Under this category, influencers have 10K-100K followers. These influencers, maintain close relationships with their communities and provide quality output at a reasonable price.
- Macro-Influencer: These Influencers have 100K-1M followers. They have a large audience of specific demographic which can be helpful to the business to reach their targeted audience within the specific region.
- Celebrity Influencers: Influencers who have more than a million followers are considered celebrity influencers. They provide a wide audience reach which helps generate high views on the campaigns.
How to approach Influencers:
As a marketing tool, influencer marketing has become increasingly powerful because influencers are storytellers and experts in their niche markets, who build relationships personally with their audiences. Marketers find it easy to target the market by relying on influencers because they know their followers and use effective strategies, and know how to target specific hashtags on social media so that they can reach a wider audience. Influencers are no longer difficult to find nowadays. Influencers share their collaboration details on their social media accounts and have connections with agencies, but approaching them and keeping them is the hard part. Taking the following steps can help us reach the influencers effectively:
- Identifying your audience and conducting research is the very first step to approaching influencers because it will help you to find the right person out of the pool of many. In addition to knowing your audience, you should also learn about the influencer and understand if they have the reach of your ideal audience.
- Just when the right candidate is found, outreach them with a professional, respectful and clear email. And nurture the relationship with them from the first interaction. And follow up with the professional emails in the future.
- Prepare meetings to address the campaign’s vision once all agreements and negotiations have been completed. To have a warm relationship with them, make the conversation comforting and heartening.
- Rather than focusing on a single social media platform, think about finding influencers on various platforms. Influencers who are successful on one platform might not do so well on others. To get the most out of this marketing tool, you need to first understand your business and audience.
- Influencers and investment management go hand in hand. On the basis of visibility, engagement, and revenue, keep track of the success, the performance, and the ROI. Monitor your CRM with influencer reports and dashboards that integrate social media.
- Use the results to plan your future campaigns. So that it will help you define and identify your future campaigns and try investing again in the winners from the past.
- The thing to keep in mind is your influencer has a strong connection with your audience so you should have a strong connection with your influencer as well.
Influencers and Businesses work hard to reach the audience, it is very delightful for both of them when the audience like their content and tries to reach out to them. This is the ultimate goal of this whole marketing process. Like any other marketing process, this process also involves- setting goals, getting the baseline metrics, tracking the process, and performing audits within a time period. Making use of these steps with the hustle on social media will give the best results.
