Stop wasting time and money on the wrong influencer marketing campaigns!
A successful Influencer Marketing campaign should meet the following clear objectives:
- Discover the most lucrative influencers for your business
- Advance your brand awareness and get it in front of the right audience more often
- Drive leads or sales relatively quickly
- Pick up more brand awareness and exposure in the appropriate places
- Improve your online reputation with the increase of online reviews on Google+, Yelp and Facebook
If you answered yes to at least three of the objectives on the list, this article will be of interest to you.
We are going to list five 5 of the most advanced Influencer Marketing strategies that you could easily implement right now:
What is Influencer Marketing?
Let’s start with the basics.
Influencer marketing can be defined as an action or a set of actions that promotes and sells products or services through people (e.g., influencers) who have the ability to influence consumer decisions.
It is not new and has been around for a long time. For ages celebrities, athletes and leaders have been acting as influencers in their respective fields and brands would partner with these individuals to promote their products or services.
A good example of this is YouTube celebrity PewDiePie. He teamed up with the makers of a horror film set in the French catacombs under Paris, creating a series of videos in which he underwent challenges in the catacombs. It was the most perfect content for PewDiePie’s 27 million subscribers, and received nearly double the views as the movie’s trailer. It was a win-win situation for everyone.
Influencer Marketing has, however, changed with social media communication. You do not necessarily have to have a celebrity to endorse your brand – anyone and everyone have the ability to share their voice. That is anyone with internet access and a camera who wants to share their opinion and content. If they do it well enough, they will become influencers. The most intriguing people will rise above the rest. These are the individuals that brands are scrambling to work with. And you should be too.
5 Influencer Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Brand Awareness
1. Avoid Fake Influencers:
Some businesses cannot resist the temptation to make a fast buck and alter the rules of the influencer marketing game. They opt to buy followers and engagement on social media and reviews on review websites, which makes the whole idea of promoting products or services to their audience illogical. Consumers are not stupid; they will figure it out sooner or later. Some of the indicators they use to detect fake influencers: low engagement rate; few image and video views; spam comments (e.g., cool, nice); meaningless and generic content.
2. Allow Influencers to Write their Own Pitches:
Business owners and their content writers are skilled in writing commercial content. Influencers, on the other hand, speak a different language than business owners. They have a common language with their followers and can use it to inspire them to make a certain purchase. Here, they have an important advantage — a unique personality that has attracted people and trust they’ve built with their subscribers/followers. Influencers know their audience and understand what style of advertising would better echo with it. That is why you should allow them to speak from the heart without interference or opt to co-create the pitches with them.
3. Don’t Get Caught Up on Numbers Only:
The number of followers means nothing. We have seen identical campaigns run on social media with 1 million followers and more and several accounts with 10,000 followers and under. In every case, the smaller accounts outperformed the larger ones by close to 50%. Our recommendation is to focus on the engagement rates and the type of engagement posts that bring success. We can promise you that the audience following some of these big hot shots with millions of followers are not interested in buying anything. They are following for the trending images and videos — nothing more.
4. No Selling!
An influencer holding up your product with a “Buy Now!” sign is not going to receive the best engagement. With Influencer Marketing, your company is NOT trying to create an infomercial that simply lists all of the amazing benefits. You want the influencer to design an organic post — something that does not spell overly promotional all over it. When you partner with the correct influencer sometimes a picture of them with your product in a natural setting is all that you will require.
5. Make it Easy for Influencers to Share:
It does not matter if your content is great, you still have to entice your influencers to amplify the content they created. Many experts (especially those that do this professionally) have no time to sit there and write the endorsements. So, to make it easy, send influencers pre-written social messages and image bundles so that they can simply copy and paste the messages you have written to their social networks.
So is Influencer Marketing an important and worthwhile strategy to put your resources towards? Absolutely, and if done right this can easily be the prime catalyst for your growth.
Influencer Marketing | iRISEmedia | Internet Marketing Agency Toronto
iRISEmedia is a digital marketing agency that focuses on helping clients with social media management, online branding, influencer marketing and online reputation management. We service clients throughout Canada and the U.S. as well as globally. Contact our online marketing agency in Toronto to begin your quest to finding the right influencers for your particular business or industry.
