The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing Tactics

Getting Started with Influencer Marketing

In today’s times, it is without a doubt that the term “influencer” has already been circulating around the Internet due to the numerous technological innovations. Moreover, the word “influencer” has been associated with the idea of marketing.

For some, this is a brand of marketing. For others, it’s simply a short-term fad. Whichever it is, it is without a doubt that it’s taking the digital world by storm. In addition, it had indeed become an essential way of promoting a company’s goods and services online. Therefore, it is important that you learn influencer marketing to further drive sales into your company.

One of the many reasons as to why this marketing strategy is so successful is because it is one of those that is most authentic and genuine – and customers are typically drawn to honest reviews of products and services.

What is Marketing Through an Influencer?

The goal of this marketing strategy is to properly identify the main individuals who act as an influencer in a particular niche so that companies can approach and ask them to work with them in promoting a brand.

In addition, an influencer is someone who has the power to affect the purchase decision of potential customers. It is important to take into account that an influencer can do this because they have position, knowledge, authority, and of course, a special relationship with their audience. Moreover, an influencer is someone who has a significant following in a particular niche, and that they can engage them well.

This is a marketing strategy wherein the main activity is leveraging the reach of a particular influencer’s large following as well as strong brand reputation in the same niche as your business to co-create content, endorse your products and services, support your brand, as well as aid in increasing brand awareness and drive more sales.

The Success of Marketing Through Influencers

Moreover, the ultimate goal is to lead and redirect the reader or viewer into taking some kind of profitable action, whether buying a particular product or sharing the said content to reach a wider audience.

Do note that this marketing strategy tends to cover the entire process involved in the creation, distribution, and the need to use content in order to meet business goals.

Brand Ambassadors

As for the brand ambassadors, these may include a kind of variation on the formal influencer advertising process wherein the business typically cultivates brand ambassadors. Moreover, a brand ambassador is an individual who represents as well as talks about your company’s products and services with passion.

Nevertheless, brand ambassadors can be your fans or other customer advocates. Brand ambassadors aim to provide you with a form of crowd-sourced marketing that tends to amplify your brand awareness campaign.

Should you desire the need to cultivate and motivate your brand’s ambassadors, the process required can easily be achieved through online and offline techniques. Keep in mind that often brand ambassadors can also perform as an influencer.

Why do You Need An Influencer For Your Business?

Now on to a more serious topic, why is there a need for this type of marketing strategy? Honestly, when was the last time you took a look at a banner advertisement on the Internet? The harsh truth is that no one notices them anymore. Thus, these banner advertisements are no longer effective at fulfilling their job.

With a worldwide average click-through rate of about 0.19%, the online community finds it difficult to consider displaying online advertising successful. In addition, a poll from Infolinks state that about half of the Internet users never really click on these so-called online ads. Moreover, about 35% only click on less than five ads every month.

Remember this, a number of people on social media have a network of a few hundred “friends.” This group of people will always have a wide range of interests and tastes. There are even times when their only common factor is that they are friends with the same person. This person may be a family member of that individual, a friend, or a workmate. Whoever they may be, these individuals are different and the same in some way. They have managed to successfully cultivate an audience of like-minded people. In some cases, these support bases are very huge.

How Can They Help Your Business

If you are a company who is looking for new influencer marketing tactics to promote your products and services, creating a fruitful relationship with these individuals seem like a good idea. If you are skeptic about this strategy, here are some of the statistical data to show how much popular this strategy is in driving sales for your business:

Only 1% of the total number of millennials trust advertisements. About 33% of them trust honest and authentic blog reviews for when they purchase something.
About 40% of the people have reported that they bought a product online after seeing it used by an influencer on various social media platforms.
Moreover, 71% of these individuals believe that it’s an honest and authentic voice that keeps an audience engaged.

In today’s times when most celebrities are promoting products left and right, it becomes difficult to figure out which of these are true and genuine. Thus, consumers tend to seek promotions that come from these individuals whom they can relate to.

Here are some of the ways that an influencer could help you with:

Creating an article, blog post or social media post, or video about your products or services.
Sharing information or even promoting your business on their social media accounts.
Providing you with access to their website or any other platform so you can write a guest post promoting your company.

Where to Look for Your Ideal Influencer

When selecting for the right influencer whom you will work with, you have to always set the goals for your marketing campaign. It is crucial that you choose the appropriate influencer to represent you as they can either make or break your campaign.

Some of the mistakes made by companies who seek out influencer include thinking that the more followers a person has on social media, the better. While some of the biggest social media celebrities have millions of followers, what you want is a high level of engagement rather than a high number of followers. Moreover, even an influencer that only has about 10,000 to 500,000 followers may be a better suit for your company.

Thus, when you look at an influencer’s commercial visibility, the level of engagement should be your number one priority. Look at their likes, comments, shares, and even saves. Believe it or not, a micro influencer may have a higher level of engagement as compared to that of a macro influencer. This is because they are more dedicated to engaging their audience.

Nevertheless, to effectively look for the perfect influencer to represent you, you can either utilize social media monitoring or blogger outreach, or both.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring allows you to find an influencer who advocate a particular niche that you have outlined. To make things much more clear, picture someone who regularly posts and tweets about products or services that you offer. However, you have noticed that they haven’t posted anything about your company or your products and services yet. This is someone you want to engage with as they may very well be a good candidate in exposing your brand.

Through social media monitoring, you can easily identify hashtags that target your ideal influencer. You can even set alerts for certain keywords which pertains to your brand so that you can easily identify those who actively write or post about the topics in your niche.

Blogger Outreach

As for blogger outreach, when you locate influential bloggers for your company, you always start by searching for blogs in your field as well as finding the niche appropriate for your campaign by reading through said blog posts. This will determine whether or not a blogger influencer has the ability to write relevant post topics.

How to Get Started

Now that we have gotten the basics out of the way, let us now proceed to the step-by-step process of achieving a successful campaign with influential people.

Define Your Goals

By defining your marketing goals in the early stages of planning for a campaign, you will generate a consistent strategy throughout your entire journey. Moreover, this will also give you a glimpse of what the metrics are. In addition, you should also track as well as monitor these metrics as a means to measure your success at the end of your campaign.

Here are some of the goals that you may want to consider:

Brand Awareness
Building Brand Identity
Audience Building
Increased Engagement
Lead Generation
Increased Sales
Customer Loyalty
Link Building

Define Your Target Audience

If you want to successfully find the right influencer for your marketing campaign, you have to know who your target audience is, because there is a high chance that the correct influencer is also a target audience.

If you already know who your target audience is, that’s great. The next step would be to keep the persona in mind when you are on the lookout for a particular influencer. Do note that for this marketing campaign to be achievable, you need to work with an influencer who affect the purchasing decision of your target audience.

Strategy Development

One of the first steps to achieving a successful marketing campaign is strategy development. Much like setting your goals and defining your target audience, you also need to develop a plan as to how you will carry out this campaign.

With strategy development, you may want to take into account some of these pointers:

Budget
Timeframe
Platform
Demographic
Promotion
Activity
KPI’s

Reach Out

As soon as you finalize the list, you would now want to collaborate with them. It is best to be polite, informative, and conversational. Introduce who you are, talk about your business, and explain to them why you love to have them be involved with your marketing campaign.

Moreover, it is also a good idea to ask them about their media kit and rate card at some point during your talk. You’ll be able to better understand how you will approach the situation through the influencer’s audience demographic, social media reach, and website traffic. A media kit will give you an idea as to how you can work together in relation to payment and compensation.

Campaign Support

Moreover, once you have settled your relationship with the influencer and you have already discussed the many ways in which both of you can gain an advantage through your relationship, you can proceed to further support your campaign.

This entails talking more about the possible processes, ways, influencer marketing tactics, projects, and so on. You can inspire an influencer to share your content or you can ask them to post something on their own. You can also pay them to promote your company’s products and services.

Here are other ways that you may want to consider:Gifting

Gifting

You simply give an influencer free products and services in exchange for a review or even a mention.

Affiliates

Through affiliates, you can provide a code that gives an influencer a percentage of every sale that they drive.

Guest Posting

As the name suggests, this pertains to creating as well as contributing content for an influencer’s platform.

Co-Creating Content

On another note, you can opt for the co-creation of content. Try partnering with an influencer to create content. This can be featured on either your website, their website, or even the website of a third party.

Social Media Mentions

Basically, social media mentions are when an influencer mentions your brand on their platforms and social media posts. This is an effective strategy for expanding your customer base.

Discount Codes

This pertains to giving an influencer a unique discount or promo code for your products and services so that they will be able to promote and offer it to their audience.

Contests and Giveaways

One possible way of utilizing this is through unboxing videos through their YouTube channel or even an Instagram live video. This strategy can greatly help shine a spotlight on your products simply by getting it in front of the influencer’s entire audience at a minimal cost.

Monitor the Campaign

You will also need to keep in mind the maximum fee that you intend to pay during your negotiations with the influencer. As the project or campaign moves forward, you have to always update your negotiations.

Once you agree on a fee, the contract signing with your influencer is crucial. This outlines the expectations of both parties. Moreover, to ensure that they are fulfilling their end of the bargain, you have to monitor the campaign’s progress.

Final Thoughts

Until recently, influencers weren’t getting a fair deal. Nonetheless, this marketing strategy has always been an effective way of increasing brand exposure. It can also drive website traffic and build your audience in the long run; thus, this is the ultimate strategy that will help you drive more sales to your products and services.

Be sure to download our Influencer Marketing course to learn influencer marketing as well as how you can fully optimize influencers that have the same audience as you. Moreover, you can check out Digital Everything for more details.