Happy Monday Marketers!
Today we’ll be exploring another buzzworthy topic related to Digital Marketing! Here’s a clue, it’s the kind of marketing that feels a little more authentic, a lot less sales-y and gently influences your decision.
Yup, you guessed it – today’s all about the ins-and-outs of Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing seems simple enough right? You have a brand, they have an audience, together you’re leveraging off each other and boom!
The truth is, there’s a little more to influencer marketing! But before we share those tips, let’s clarify exactly what influencer marketing is.
What is Influencer Marketing?
As marketing trends change, people are becoming less susceptible to traditional forms of sales and marketing. Influencers are people on social media with an engaged following. There are macro influencers (more than 150 000 followers) and micro influencers (1000 to 100 000 followers).
They are either specialised in a niche (e.g., travel, fashion, tech, food etc.) or are influencers who are known for sharing their lives (lifestyle influencers).
They provide brand value by having a dialled-in following who engage, follow and support the influencer organically.
Tip #1: Alignment, alignment, alignment
While it may be easy to get caught up in the marketing frenzy of using influencers to boost sales and market your brand, its important to do your research. Having alignment between the brand and the influencer is incredibly important.
Luxury lifestyle influencers would not be interested in promoting budget conscious products. Their following would not be interested in seeing that kind of content. So it’s important to make sure the people you approach are naturally in alignment with your product and/or service.
Tip #2: Clear goals. Clear message.
The beauty of working with influencers is that you can target very specific audiences for a very specific purpose. Being clear on what those are early on, can assist in ensuring your marketing campaign is successful.
There are really only two main goals for influencer marketing:
– brand awareness
– increased sales.
However, its important to narrow these broad goals in smaller, measurable and achievable goals. Perhaps you want to increase brand awareness among a particular youth demographic, or introduce a new product to specialists in the industry? Being clear on purpose of your campaign can assist in maximising your ROI.
Being clear on messaging is also a great way to make sure that using influencers produces different results.
Influencers are conversational, as opposed to sales-y. They are creatives and can generate content in ways that are more authentic and tell a story. However, you want to be clear on messaging to ensure that your salient points are covered and that you can maintain a level of consistency, even when the marketing is “outsourced” so to speak.
Tip #3: Monitor and Innovate
Many people incorrectly think that simply hiring the right influencer is enough to turn around the marketing and sales in their business.
This is not the case. As with every marketing campaign, monitoring and evaluation is a huge part of the job. Setting those clear goals assists with creating performance indicators with measurable metrics.
It’s important to monitor the campaign so that changes can be made to optimise and innovate as you go along.
With social media playing an important role in marketing, its important to establish good tools that allow you to monitor and track your campaign.
Influencer Marketing isn’t going anywhere for a long time. These partnerships can be rewarding, hugely successful and fun! Content creators have multiple platforms to choose from, and they know their audience.
We hope you’ll consider using this powerful form of marketing soon!
With love,
Splendid Marketing and Communications