Why influencer marketing is the next big move in digital marketing?

With the changing time, the digital world and the strategies of digital marketing have gradually transformed. From email marketing to social media marketing, experts have developed a number of tactics to help you boost your brand and your business. If you are acquainted with the online marketing sector, then you must have heard about influencer marketing. A very few people know the importance of influencer marketing and are unaware of what exactly it is or how it helps. In fact, it can be a great challenge since an influencer has a different image for every brand or campaign.

Who is an influencer?

Influencers are people who actively promote a particular brand or niche on social media and blogs. Jay Baer, Marketing and Customer Service Keynote Speaker, delivered this crucial piece of information on influencer marketing, “True influence drives action, not just awareness.”

An influencer is a mutual person who connects your brand with your target audience. When you take the support of an influencer, they don’t just fetch the audience but bring their network as well.  And due to their audience’s loyalty, the influencer is able to drive exposure to your brand and increase your growth opportunities.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing emphasised on using key personalities or influencers to deliver your brand’s message and drive more audience. This procedure is alternatively used to market your brand, rather deploying marketing executives to promote your brand. Along with influencer marketing, there are two types of marketing that go side-by-side, and they are content marketing and social media marketing. Nowadays, most influencers use their personal social media channels to spread words about a brand. This way the brands outreach the influencer’s followers and an awareness created among them. Most of the influencer campaigns carry a content element where either you create content for the influencers, or they create it themselves.

The importance of influencer marketing

As consumers prefer and trust recommendations from third-party resources or person, influencer marketing can turn effective in such a scenario. This kind of marketing spreads the message about a brand in a more personal context. It is obvious that you won’t like any stranger to come up to you blabbering about their brand and trying to convince you ridiculously to use them. On the other hand, if a mutual friend arrives and delivers the same message to you in a personalised way, then that could be convincing to you. Therefore, it’s the common friend who plays the role of the influencer here, connecting his friend’s brand with their target consumers.

With the downfall of email marketing and the traditional internet marketing process, people are adopting influencer marketing to attract and fetch more clients and customers. Consumers nowadays are more inclined towards getting recommendations from someone they can trust and want to research the brand on their own. Advertisements and commercials, no more work efficiently to pull the consumer’s trust, and hence, customers turn blind towards them.

So, what you think is the role of influencer marketing here? They surround themselves to your brand conversations and generate content about it. They recommend your brand to their audiences in various ways, from different platforms, and lead them to you before your competitor does. Hence, that leads to a huge success to your company.

How is it more effective in the marketing field?

According to a marketing campaign report, 94% people who have utilised the influencer marketing strategy has literally found it effective. This technique should be necessarily activated because marketers initially face the major challenges, including questions about the increasing prices, market saturation, and questions of attribution. And influencer marketing helps you generate 2x the sales that of banner advertising, and the customers who have a higher retention rate than other acquisition channels. However, social media marketing and email marketing, along with influencer marketing are the effective channels for brands, however, the prices increase with the popularity of the brand.

Secondly, it’s not only about the content, but the delivery is equally a crucial step. You need to research the audience’s mindset, what channels they trust and which do they use the most. According to Joseph Serano, President of CX Insurance, “Using an influencer to motivate such disparate groups as retail banking technology buyers, capital markets, the telecom industry, and also enterprise technology purchasers, takes a deft and confident touch. Too broad a stroke means that pinpointing the influencer will not be possible, and the wasted time and expense can become considerable.”

To finalise your influencer, you need to understand who your target audience would be and which channels would offer the best possibility to find them. Next, comes the most challenging part, how to engage them through a message of your brand. This requires additional efforts like team building, creating great content and generating marketing strategies to bring outcome important insights. You need to go beyond your in-house projects and create special plans to make this workout.

One of the biggest mistakes committed by the B2B marketers is, they make their message too long. This oversees the pitch of the message and can confuse the buyer. Your brand’s message should be short and simple and should deliver the key message through it. Influencers should use the ‘elevator pitch’ concept for presenting your brand to your consumers. The statement should include a sense of motivation with the ideas how the brand is related to your customers and how it can help them.

It is not important that what tools or software you are using. It can be paid or shared or maybe a free one, but what matters is how you deliver and outreach your content so that it reaches the appropriate channels timely. So it’s necessary to determine the significant channels of your influencer so that you can plan it in a better way. Formatting the content is also equally vital, therefore, your influencer will input some solid and working ideas to format your content.

Influencer marketing can considerably boost your brand’s search engine ranking, helping consumers to find information via search engines to determine their choice. The leading brands use this technique to make their brand found in search results. The more people mention your brand in social media, the higher your chances increase to be found in search engine results.

Influencer marketing strategies

The first and foremost step of influencer marketing is to select the right influencer for your brand. Depending on your budget and requirement, you can choose an influencer by identifying them in four key ways – databases, networks, marketplaces, and Google.

Using the databases requires fetching the publicly available data of each influencer, and communicating to them individually. This wastes a lot of time and effort, but ultimately, you might the right influencer for your brand.

There are thousands of networks that can connect you with influencers worldwide and help you outreach them. For this, you need to connect to selected networks and reach them out to analyze their capability and suitability.

A marketplace pulls out real-time information, avoiding the middle person that you get into a network. It offers the best out of the database and provides you the freshest information on influencers.

Google is the key and leading way to connect to influencers with the help of individual searches and scanning the web pages for contact information. The pulled out information is maintained in a spreadsheet to analyze and keep a track of them.

Another step to effective influencer marketing is creating great content. An attractive and compelling content can target a huge number of audiences, only if it doesn’t miss the key factors. The content displays your personal opinion on the brand and experiences that the influencer has come across. It should be engaging enough to indulge your audience in it, convincing them to share and shop the content, and drive them towards the brand.

Use different goals and strategies to market your brand, so that it can define your success and leads you to your goals. After collecting the data, you can use it to optimize your influencer marketing efforts.

Types of Influencer marketers

Celebrity influencers: Celebrity influencers have great command over their followers and network. If you have enough money to spend on a campaign, then they can help you deliver a large audience and, can be used as a renowned face of the campaign.

Promoters: Promoters got a great voice that can reach an enormous audience. They know how to spread the word and helps your brand find the response you are seeking for. They collaborate with the right people and outreaches your campaign with an enlarged public.

Advocates and Employees: They emotionally love your brand and usually keep talking about it in social media channels and another medium. They create and share content and invite people to read and reshare them. They willingly talk about your brand because they are emotionally attached to it.

Content Creators: Content creators create high-quality content and attract a sizeable audience. They follow a content creation strategy and applies a building process. Content creators know how to build a content for a certain group of audience, and presents it accordingly. Each of their content differs in the presentation so that it attracts the different group of audience.

Also Read:-How to use social media for influencer marketing?

Where to find them?

Now that you have known much about influencer marketers and their types, it is significant to find them to reflect your brand image.

Social media monitoring

Brand advocates and employees are the most effective and sound influencers for your brand. They do not simply promote your brand, but they actively talk about it because they love it. You’d never realise that how many brand advocates you have unless you come across their social media mentions and blog posts about your brand. This way you will also find the advocate for the niche you have outlined. For instance, if someone posted about an awesome product, but did not mention the place from where you can get it, you can perhaps, expose your brand to him/her.

Study Hashtags

You will randomly notice that most influencers use hashtags for a particular brand in their tweets and conversations across social media channels. You might not have identified the influencers in the categories, you can research them with the hashtags they normally use. Search the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or Hootsuite for combined results with a particular hashtag of the brand that people generally use. You will find the entire list of people who are talking about it and to find the influencers, you need to analyse the kind of messages they are tweeting. Probably, it will be in a promotional form with a personal touch.

Google Alerts

You can set keywords alert pertaining to your brand to identify influencers who actively write about the topics. Also, create alternate keywords for your brand to find posts and articles containing your brand name and identify the brand advocates.

Social Mention

Social mention lets you type your company name to find mentions on different channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.

Blogger outreach

Bloggers hold the strongest role among influencers. Most of the influencers run a minimum of one blog, and they are active across social media channels, talking about your brand. On the other hand, you can search for blogs related to your brand niche by going through the posts. You can accordingly make a list of the relevant bloggers, and start analysing their blog statistics and visitors. Analyse the social media information to pick the one who has the best reach of your brand.

Conclusion

Now that you got a solid idea about influencers, and have learned how and where to find them, you can start your operation. Make sure you interact and communicate with them without directly promoting your brand. After all, why would anyone check out your brand without any core reasons? So it is extremely significant to build a communication with your targeted influencers. I hope this is enough to inject an idea about influencer marketing so that you can start off.

References:

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-influencer-targeting/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2017/08/10/the-importance-of-influencer-marketing-for-b2b-marketers/#6fe4a9bb4871

https://www.r2integrated.com/r2insights/5-reasons-why-influencer-marketing-is-right-for-your-brand

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/6-big-benefits-using-influencer-marketing-your-social-strategy

Image Courtesy : Pixabay

SUGGESTED READ:- HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR INFLUENCER MARKETING

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