What is Influencer Marketing?

An influencer marketing, which is sometimes referred to as influence marketing, is a marketing strategy that places focus on very influential people such as leaders and celebrities rather than the target market. In this marketing strategy, the influencers use their social position or influence to popularize your products and services and/or brand to your target market through such platforms such as social media.

This means that you will need to hire an influencer who has a large social media following so that your products and services can get to a larger potential market or target market. 

For you to use this marketing strategy, you will need an influencer campaign. The influencer campaign contains the marketing content which your influencer will spread to a large potential market through his/her personal social media account. This means that influence marketing contains two major forms of marketing: social media marketing and content marketing. However, social media marketing and content marketing are not synonyms of influencer marketing since they all mean different marketing strategies. 

When choosing an influencer, you should select someone who has a "relatable" profile or personality to your products/services. And of course someone who has a large audience in order to increase business leads and sales.

When a trusted influencer with a large audience of social media followers recommends a product to his/her followers, the effect can be immense. The followers will not only buy the recommended products but they may possibly show interest in some other products that produced by the same manufacturer. Subsequently the followers will likely to re-share / retweet to spread the information, therefore multiple effects can be expected from an influencer marketing. 

So what are the important components of using leaders and celebrities to market the products and services of your business or brand?

Influencer Marketing Strategies

Influencer marketing requires a good strategy for your business to realize more customer base. This form of marketing has four main components or activities. These components include:

"Identifying an appropriate influencer for your business."

Before you hire any influencer, understand the nature of your business first then proceed to hire an appropriate influencer. It’s better to hire an influencer who has few followers who are interested in your business’ products and services than to hire one with many followers but aren’t potential customers.

Sometimes, the number of followers doesn’t correspond with the number of potential customers. You have to be careful when you are identifying and hiring an influencer for this form of business marketing. For example, the followers of a video game blogger will definitely try out a new video game however few they might be.

In this case, the video game blogger could be the most appropriate influencer for your video gaming company. And when you own a business that deals in organic facial products, you will need to hire an influencer who understands your product and is capable of spreading the marketing campaign in a persuasive way. 

"Marketing your business to influencers."

For the influencer to spread or popularize your brand or business in the right way, he/she will need to familiarize himself/herself with your business. This will help the influencer market your business using the right marketing contents. Therefore, you will need to market your business to the right influencer so that its awareness stays solid within the influencer’s community. 

"Marketing your business through the influencers themselves."

For the influencers to market your business so that it can reach a larger target market, they will need influencer campaigns. When an influencer understands the nature of your business, he/she may create the marketing campaign himself/herself. But when the influencer doesn’t understand your business like you do, you could create the marketing campaign for him/her.

It’s very important that you create the marketing campaign yourself if you want the influencer to market your business in your preferred style. 

"Marketing your business with your influencer."

You could also market your business together with your influencer. In this particular strategy, the influencer will act as your business’ advocate. Other key components include: programming your marketing workflow; monitoring and keeping track of very important metrics; and optimizing work distribution. 

How can you conduct a good influencer marketing?

Having already looked at the key components of a good influencer marketing, it’s now time to look at how you can have a very good influencer marketing for your firm or business:

#1 Plan your marketing strategy

Any marketing needs a strategy for it to reach the right target market. And influencer marketing is no exception. You need a carefully and well-thought-out strategy for your influencer marketing to become a huge success. You could get some of the best strategies by doing a thorough online research or you could read a workbook that contains helpful worksheets as well. 

#2 Identify and select the most appropriate influencer for the job

There are so many ways that you could use to identify the right influencers who will help you get your brand information out to the public. Some of the avenues of finding potential influencers include Google, databases, networks and marketplaces. When using Google, you will do individual influencers’ search by scanning through the web pages. You will also be looking for their contact information using Google search engine. 

#3 Create a great marketing content

The success of your influencer marketing heavily relies on the marketing content. And for this reason, you will have to create a great influencer marketing campaign. The content should be compelling, authentic and delivers messages about your products and/or services. This will inspire more customers to buy your products and services. 

#4 Optimize the influencer content distribution

Creating a great marketing content isn’t just enough if you want to get the most out of your marketing contents. So, how then can you optimize your influencer marketing contents? You could organize your marketing contents into very useful quotes and testimonials. You could use these testimonials in your TV ads and prints.

You could as well share the contents through dedicated sections of your business’ newsletter. Therefore, besides letting the influencer post about your business in his/her personal social media account, you could also help get the information out there to your esteemed customers through other means.  

#5 Monitor and analyze the success of your influencer marketing

To track how excellent your influencer marketing is, you will need to monitor and analyze it. You could do this by using technology solutions which comes in handy during such tasks. These technology solutions will help you calculate the media value of your influencer marketing.