The internet is packed to the brim with influencers. Browse any social media site, whether TikTok or Instagram, and you’ll soon discover many influencers promoting a particular lifestyle, activity, or range of products. It’s why they are called ‘influencers’ – they can influence their audience to buy the products they endorse.
With this much power, it makes sense that businesses utilize this online presence to promote their brand via an influencer marketing strategy.
What is an Influencer Marketing Strategy?
So, what is influencer marketing? It’s a specific kind of marketing wherein influencers and businesses work together to promote a particular product or service. Usually, companies pay influencers to promote their brand to boost their brand awareness. You do however need the right influencer outreach strategy in order to make sure they’ll respond to you. Of course, it can increase sales, too.
This marketing tool looks different depending on which platform the influencer promotes said brand. For example, the influencer might promote it via a short video on TikTok, or they may post text and an image to their Facebook page.
This guide will teach you how to start promoting your brand with influencer marketing to make the most of this business strategy.
Set Your Goals
Before starting any marketing strategy, you must define your goals. For example, are you looking to increase sales? Do you want more brand awareness? By setting specific goals, you can start looking at which influencers can help you reach them.
Understand Your Target Market
Next, you must understand precisely who your audience is, as it will tell you which influencers to target. After all, your strategy goal is to align yourself with influencers with the same audience.
For example, if your marketing strategy targets new mothers, you should reach out to parenting bloggers and Instagrammers. That way, you reach the correct target audience to sell your product, which leads to more sales.
Sometimes, finding influencers with the same audience as your target market can prove tricky. In these circumstances, you will need to integrate into social media to research influencers and find out which audiences they are popular with. Doing this will boost your marketing strategy.
Set a Budget
Your influencer marketing budget must cover compensating influencers and paying for free products. If this is your first time building a marketing influencer strategy, you may be unsure how much to budget for this.
Generally, businesses determine their budgets based on the number of followers an influencer has. If you want an Instagrammer to promote your new perfume, you will usually pay more for someone with 500K followers than an influencer with 20K followers.
It is important to note that your influencer marketing strategy might target smaller influencers (also known as micro-influencers) due to a particular niche. In this case, you may want to adjust your budget. Even if an influencer only has a small number of followers, those followers might be extremely valuable to your brand.
Another important note: underpaying influencers is a bad look. So while it’s good to budget wisely, try not to offer a pittance compared to what they are used to. Otherwise, you might become known as a brand that doesn’t pay enough!
Find and Connect with Influencers
Finding and connecting with an influencer is crucial to your influencer marketing strategy. You can seek influencers and reach out on social media platforms or use an influencer-finding tool to help your search.
How you reach out to influencers varies depending on their follower count. Reaching out to a micro-influencer (one with less than 10K followers) is usually different from reaching out to celebrities or macro-influencers. With micro-influencers, sending a direct message is usually an appropriate way of connecting. For celebrities and macro-influencers, you will likely need to go through an agency.
Connecting with the right influencers is essential – not just for promoting your brand but also for creating long-term brand deals with them. A long-term brand deal with a well-known and well-liked influencer can do wonders for your brand image and sales.
Understand the Platforms
It is a good idea to get an idea of each social media platform before paying influencers to promote your product. By understanding how the market works, you will better understand whether a promotional post is right for your product (or not).
Think About Authenticity
When finding influencers for your influencer marketing campaign, you must consider authenticity. It’s what people look out for, after all – many people only like to buy an endorsed product if they feel that the influencer genuinely likes and uses it. That’s why you should only connect with influencers that you think will enjoy your product. You want them to be excited to promote it, after all!
Don’t Ignore the Micro-influencers
Many businesses ignore micro-influencers in favor of an influencer with far more followers. While follower count certainly counts for something, it shouldn’t be all that you look for. In fact, ignoring micro-influencers could actively harm your influencer marketing strategy.
Micro-influencers can benefit you because they often have a specific reach within a particular niche. Influencers focusing on beauty, fitness, and fashion aren’t exactly rare. However, influencers that post about remodeling 1940s cars are harder to stumble across, but if their audience matches yours, they are a gold mine.
Is Influencer Marketing Worth it?
So, is an influencer marketing strategy worth it? While it requires some effort and budgeting, the answer is a resounding – YES. Influencer marketing is only getting bigger; right now, it’s a $13.8 billion industry and is only set to rise. As a business, you don’t want to get left behind.
Some change you might see in the influencer world over the coming months and years is more focus on authenticity. Influencers and brands have realized that followers want the real deal – not some mundane promotion with little passion. So, when you choose influencers for brand deals, picking ones with a genuine online persona will help you sell to more people.
With the number of influencers and followers online, it makes sense to utilize that marketing power in your business’s strategy – especially when so many of the younger generation fully trust influencers to guide them. By getting on board with an influencer marketing strategy, your brand can experience endless growth.
