Building a Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy

Influencers on social media are a relatively new phenomenon in recent years. From their early days trying to learn more about beginner’s photo editing tutorials, to eventually having millions of followers, these influencers have come a long way. They are bona fide celebrities today and are often as well-known as actors, athletes and musicians. And partnering with an influencer as part of your marketing strategy can ensure your product and service reaches the right audience.

Not only do these influencers set trends and connect with/entertain their audiences, but they can also help businesses grow. If you work directly with a major influencer, it can lead to a lot of reach and exposure for your product or service.

In order to do influencer marketing right, you need a strategy. This article will go over a few helpful tips to help you build up a successful marketing strategy featuring influencers.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing where a business partners with someone who is a trusted authority in a particular industry or with a target audience. These influencers have a dedicated following and are viewed as experts in their niche. They have earned trust with their audience. When they recommend or review a product or service, it serves as a quality reference to your potential customer.

Find an influencer in the right niche

A lot goes into choosing the right influencer, such as their reach, how they connect with their community, and even how reliable they are. But perhaps the biggest thing is to find an influencer in the right niche. For your journey into influencer marketing to be successful, you need to work with someone who has an audience that is closely related to your target market.

You want a lot of crossover to ensure you have the best chance of getting new customers. If you sell a skincare product or type of makeup, you will want to work with a beauty influencer and not a fitness influencer. If you choose the wrong influencer, their audience might have zero interest in your product. This partnership would be a huge waste of time for you.

You want fans of the influencer to be excited and interested when they show off/talk about your product or service. A good way to ensure you are choosing the right influencer is to track your results and make sure the marketing efforts are effective.

Communicate well

Communication is important in any business relationship, but especially one between a company and an influencer. You need to work with them to ensure the content they put out highlighting your product is what you want. But it also should fit your brand.

Working with influencers isn’t always cheap. You need to make sure they are showing off your product in a way you like. If you simply let them do exactly what they want, you may find that they miss mentioning certain things and don’t get their fanbase excited about what your product or service offers.

However, avoid being overly involved in the creative process of the post or video. If you try to boss them around and direct them, many influencers will simply back out of the agreement.

Instead, a good idea could be to give them a light script of things you want them to say or tell them about some features you want to ensure they mention. Give them some freedom, but ensure you let them know the points that you want covered.

Consider Micro-Influencers

When many companies are looking for influencers to work with, they often go for the mega-influencers with tens of millions of followers and fans. While these individuals can help a company grow, they also command a large fee to do so. For small businesses, this may not be practical.

A better idea can be to work with a micro-influencer. These are individuals with generally 10,000-100,000 followers. This is still a significant amount, but they are often much more affordable to work with.

In addition to being cheaper, many of these micro-influencers have a better and closer relationship with their audience. This often means the fans will trust these influencers more and feel more connected. These fans will be more willing to check out the things the influencer promotes or talks about.

Also, for the price of one mega-influencer, you can often work with several micro-influencers to gain access to each of their unique audiences. Many of these micro-influencers are easier to reach and will be more willing and excited to work with you in many cases, too.

In conclusion, we hope this guide has been able to help you create your influencer marketing strategy and find success.