The best marketing about your brand doesn’t always come from your business.

 

Influencer marketing offers you another voice and/or platform to get key brand messages out. So, whether you pay or inspire them to talk about you, influencers help spread the word about your business.

 

An influencer could be anyone, such as a blogger, YouTuber, social media personality, celebrity, well-respected industry professional. Quite simply, it’s anyone with a significant following or influential voice that could help you reach out to your target market.

 

The influencer usually has built up a platform or audience by talking about, or producing content about specific topics or in a certain style that resonates with their fans. As a result, they have the ability to change or encourage customer behaviours and purchasing decisions by creating trusting relationships with their audience.

 

Influencer marketing works incredibly well hand-in-hand with social media and content marketing. Both of these types of marketing provide great platforms for the influencer to share their thoughts, opinions and experiences with your brand – and it can be easily consumed by the audience.

 

For example, a jewellery brand might work with a well-known blogger and ask them to feature a post on their blog about the new jewellery items they have been sent and what they think of them. Alternatively, a make-up brand could send some seasonal products to a popular YouTuber and ask them to demonstrate how they’d wear these products in an online tutorial.

 

Influencer marketing is much like ‘word of mouth’ as it offers a reliable recommendation from a trusted or respected individual – just on a much larger scale. By sharing thoughts and opinions with their audience, the aim is that their valued judgement will encourage the audience to connect with, research or buy from your brand.

 

Remember, businesses of any size – big or small – can benefit from influencer marketing

Although it could prove costly to work with celebrities or bloggers with millions of followers, there are plenty of up-and-coming or local influencers that are looking to develop relationships with brands. It’s not about the size of their audience but the potential reach and resonance that your brand could have.

 

Read 5 key things to consider if you would like to try your hand at influencer marketing:

 

Who do you want to work with?

 

Start by researching the type of influencer you’d like to work with (with your budget in mind). Consider the style and quality of the content they create, the way that they communicate, the rapport they have with their audience, the type of people following them online and the sort of brands they’re already working with. The most important factors to consider is whether their personality and content accurately aligns with your brand and whether their audience is right for what you’re trying to achieve.

 

Above all, the relationship needs to be relevant so make sure you understand the influencer and their community before you reach out to them.

 

Build genuine relationships

 

Although one-off campaigns can work well, the best influencer marketing often comes from genuine, lasting relationships. If you connect with someone who genuinely enjoys your brand or believes in your business, they are much more likely to show honest passion to their audience and encourage a greater response. These on-going relationships are much more likely to see the influencer feel inspired to talk about your brand online, even without being paid for it.

 

What content do you want to develop?

 

Would an online review, social media post, video or a blog work best for your brand?

 

Content is at the heart of influencer marketing so seek to work with someone who is the perfect marriage between content and distribution for your brand. You will want them to create something that accurately reflects or demonstrates your brand – but also distribute it across the appropriate channels that are likely to elicit the best response. Consider both your needs but also the platforms that the influencer is already successfully using.

 

Think about experiences, not just products and services

 

Get your influencers, and even their audience, involved in real experiences. This is a great way for the influencer to create visually interesting content and share much more engaging materials than just a new product or press release updates. Give the influencer something they will react to and genuinely want to share with their audience. This will help both the influencer and the audience associate your brand with good experiences and positive emotions.

 

Track successes

 

How will you know whether influencer marketing (or the particular influencer) is working for you? You might want to look at the amount of engagement a sponsored tweet gets, how many sales your specific discount code logs, the number of visits to a landing page or how quickly a product sells out. By tracking the success of the campaign you can begin working out the value of the influencer’s platform and voice by reviewing the successes against the cost of working with them.

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