Do you want your business to reach more people? Well, it’s not that easy to drag customer attention to your brand.
You may need some famous persons to recommend your product to the customer. Those persons are called Influencers.
The target customer will get to know your product and the brand essence of your company through these influencers.
61% of the marketer says it is difficult to find the relevant influencers for the campaign.
Here, in this article, we are going to explore how to create a perfect Influencer Marketing strategy and its importance.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a kind of Social media marketing that uses Influencers to create an endorsement for your Product.
Marketing Campaign uses Influencers who is an expert in a particular niche and has a strong social following.
The target audience for your business trust the Influencers, whom you use for Brand marketing.
Importance of Creating Influencer Marketing Strategy
Before getting into the strategy, you have to know why it is important for your business, especially for the startup.
Brand Awareness
Whatever the product may be. Most of the people lean towards the reputed brand.
When people find a new product, they can recall your brand name. To change the fact, the founders of the company need to create brand awareness. This impacts the buyer’s decision to purchase your product.
Influencers have the strong potential to attract the customer and change the buyer behavior.
Therefore it is essential to have the perfect strategy to create brand awareness among the people.
Targeting The Right Audience
Reaching the right audience is a big task for marketing management.
You have to identify which group of people will buy your product. Which means the buyer persona.
This should match with the influencer, who has the strong influence over them. Finding the relevant influencer is a key factor in promoting the product to the people.
Thus, an influencer marketing strategy is significant to target your customer.
Building Trust And Credibility
The influencer or celebrity who has massive audience shares variable content on the online platforms. He or she gains credibility from those followers.
If the influencer shares about your product and its features, people recognize your product.
By doing so, you can gain interest in your product and people believe that it would be a trustworthy product to buy. It is a significant matter to develop an influencer marketing strategy to gain trust from the target audience.
To Deliver High-Quality Content
What do people think when buying? What do they see?
When people follow your influencer, they cannot go blindly to buy yours. The content you share on the influencer’s page is crucial and it should be an appropriate one.
Developing an influencer marketing strategy with proper content strategy is important for marketers. It will help to increase the visibility of the content and improves the customer’s engagement.
If you deliver unique content with high quality, it would turn the customer’s attention towards your brand name. Also, it will act as a testimonial for your product.
Creative ideas and elegant design are the key features to deliver high quality and rich content.
Cost-Effectiveness and ROI
Every businessperson wants to maximize the profit at minimum overall costs. It is quite obvious to expect so. For newbie entrepreneurs, it is hard to invest more money for marketing purposes.
However, you have to consider influencer marketing strategy in marketing campaigns at a low cost. That yields a high Return On Investment (ROI) for your company.
When compared with other traditional methods, influencer marketing is better and worth investing in. It is evident from a survey that, you can earn a return 6 times the money you invest in.
How to create Influencer Marketing Strategy?
Define Your Goal
The first step to start with Influencer Marketing Strategy is to define your Goal.
Defining the Goal at the initial stage gives the proper structure to successfully implement it.
Narrowing the checklist that you want to achieve in the future would be essential for fast processing.
If you did it right, then you will find better results with a quick response.
Plan Your Budget
The next step after defining your goal is to plan your budget, which should be specific for Influencer Marketing, leaving other types of marketing.
Budget varies according to what type of Influencer Marketing Campaign you opt for and the type of content you deliver.
Another big amount you will allocate for the Budget is for getting Influencers for marketing campaigns and signing the mutual contract to engage them with your business in the long-term.
It would be more significant to analyze and predict your Return On Investment for your Budget Forecast.
Identify Your Audience
Before identifying the Influencer it is important to know the potential customers of your product.
Who are the end user of the product?
Understanding the relationship between the audience and the influencer is important and it is easy to match them and convert your business.
Try to identify the age group, gender, lifestyle of your audience to be focused on product delivery for the specific group. It will be an added advantage for you, if you analyse the behaviour of your customer on social media.
On which social media the target group is active?
Choose The Type Of Influencer Marketing Campaign
The marketing campaign for all type of business is available in Digital and Online Medium.
Here are some types of Influencer Marketing campaigns you can choose according to your Business Models and needs.
Brand Ambassador
Influencer act as an Ambassador for your Brand in the long term to reach out to the huge number of audience.
This includes signing the contract with the influencer for all kinds of Brand promotions like advertisements, sponsored events, etc…
Brand ambassadors should be provided with your Brand products or services for free, when they agrre to work with you.
Posting Content of the Influencer
The influencers will post content on your Brand website or Blog describing the products or services and get paid from you.
This kind of campaign is cheap for your Business when compared with others.
Getting Featured in Influencers Blog
A businessperson have to pay for the Sponsored Content to get featured in Influencers Blog. Here the Influencers create content for your product or services by showcasing the advantages and benefits of buying your products.
Social Media Campaign
Besides creating the marketing campaign in your Social media profiles, Influencers promote your products by sharing the content on their Social Pages.
Contest and Referral
The Influencers will participate in Shows or Contests conducted by you for marketing your product. But, this will work for only certain products.
This type of campaign is direct advertising where it is easy to convert the customers especially by providing referrals and coupons. Small business can choose this option, specifically for geotargeting method.
How to Find the Influencers
The Influencers should be relevant to your business model. You have to choose the right person for your marketing purpose.
But, before that, get to know who is an influencer and their types. This might help you in selecting the influencer that matches absolutely with your business model and marketing budget.
What is an Influencer?
A few years back there was not a clear idea about who the Influencers are?
Many people have different opinions about influencers that they influence over both the organization and its potential customers.
Some people will say that they have a significant power to change the customer’s purchasing decision.
Literally in Business perception, Influencers are the third party for your organization, who has the potential to change the purchasing behavior of people and convert them as your customers.
They are the Trendsetters in your niche industry.
Influencers have a strong authority and relationship with your customers so that they recommend your products to them.
Who are all can be Influencers?
In most cases, Celebrities will act as Influencer. The Influencers could be a reputed brand, Expertise in your niche, an Advocate and Referrer, etc…
Types of Influencers Based On Followers
Relevance to your budget, you need to choose what type of Influencers you should reach.
The Influencers are categorized into 6 types according to the number of followers they have on social media, they are
Celebrity: Everyone knows that celebrities in any field have a maximum number of followers than any other person in social media. A celebrity who has more than 5 Million followers placed in the top category of Influencers. They also might be experts in certain niches.
Mega: Famous personalities, leaders, niche experts who have more than 1Million followers are considered Mega influencers.
Macro: Macro Influencers are the niche experts who have social media followers in the range between 500K – 1 Million.
Mid-Tier: Personalities with the range between 50K – 500K social media followers are included in the Mid-Tier category.
Micro: Micro-Influencers have social media followers in the range between 10K – 50K. You could find these Influencers easily for low cost, which could be probable to make for Startups
Nano: These influencers have a very minimum number of followers in social media in the range between 1000 – 10K but have a strong influence among people in a particular niche.
Qualities of a Good Influencer
Well, the number of followers is important for the influencer you choose for the campaign.
Meanwhile, you have to look for certain qualities in them. Try to find some of the following qualities from the influencer, as it creates good value for the company.
Passion
A good influencer should have passion for your business.
- Do they have a strong desire to learn new things?
- Are they ready to get updated with the latest trends?
Besides making money they should have real interests in promoting your product. Only then it could be possible for the influencer to deliver engaging content.
Engagement
Here, engagement means, the influencer will be connected with the people for long time. They post content frequently.
People would be always reminded about your brand when influencer engages with them often.
Authenticity
Always people believe in the authentic influencers. If you find an authentic person, he or she would be the talk of the town. People talk, like, and share about the person with the other.
This will ensure that your product is a genuine one. Further, it will increase the curiosity about your product among the audience.
Long-term Commitment
The other important quality you need to check is, whether the influencer will give a long-term commitment. Not only with you, but also on the social media pages.
There shouldn’t be any gap between the followers and the influencer. Also, check that, they use all features to engage with them.
For example, posting videos, stories, sharing an opinion with morality in general.
Reach
This seems to be many followers. No, exactly this is not a number game. It is of no use to have more followers of a single set of audience. Instead, the influencers must have a different group of audience, irrespective of age, gender, and other factors.
Relevance
The influencer should be relevant to both the brand and the followers. For example, if your product is about fitness, you could approach any sportsperson. He/she has to have good number of followers, influencing and motivating them regarding fitness.
Resonance
It tells how the influencer is communicating with the audience. In a general view, there must be a good vibe between the followers and the influencer. This makes the followers completely believe in product recommendations.
Choosing The Right Influencer
Plan And Objectives For The Campaign
Have the clarity about the objective of your company. What will be the plan to achieve it?
Once you are committed to the influencer, you cannot step down from your decision. Therefore it is essential to search for the influencer with above-mentioned qualities.
Are they relevant to your business objectives and goals?
Before searching the influencer, try to explore some types of influencers who will be suitable for the business. They are
- Bloggers
- Vloggers
- Sports stars
- Actors
- Tv stars
- Leaders
- Industry Experts
- Models
- Activists
- Journalists
- You Tubers
Searching The Influencer For Marketing
First, manually search the influencer on search engine pages like, google, Microsoft Bing, and Yandex.
Next, find them on social media that you will start marketing.
- YouTube
Identify the various types of influencers working for your competitor.
According to your budget and goal, list down the data about the influencer you search for. And document it, as follows
- Name
- Age
- Number of followers
- Social media profiles
- On which platform the influencer has more followers
- Content Posting Frequency
- Engagement
- What value he/she adds to the company
- Cost
Analyze these factors from them and select the right person to approach. By doing so, your marketing prospects would be clear, without any compromise.
Tools To Find Influencer
Some of the database tools are available to reach the influencer.
BuzzStream
BuzzStream is a link-building tool to reach influencers. It includes some of the free tools like email research, build outreach list from blogrolls, and link building query generator.
The paid tool allows you to evaluate the influence of a particular domain.
Upfluence
Upfluence is a full-scale influencer program. It has more than millions of influencer databases.
You can find the influencer by simply searching the related keyword, in any niche that you target.
It is available with the chrome plug-in, which allows you to analyze the influencers from all the social media like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Buzz Sumo
BuzzSumo is a paid search tool to find influencers and content related to your brand. It gives comprehensive data of all businesses.
It helps you to explore high-performance content that gives you more likes, shares, and backlinks. It is a good source for monitoring and analysis. Also, you can analyze and track your competitor from this tool.
Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach helps small businesses and Digital marketers to reach influencers. It is cloud-based tool with a strong database. It connects with the experts in all niches.
Like Upfluence, it has extension features to use with the browsers.
Pitchbox
Pitchbox is an influencer outreach tool, especially useful for a blog. It is efficient for content marketers who plan for SEO strategy.
Pitchbox tool integrates with other SEO tools like Moz, SEMrush, etc…
Content Plan And Strategy
- Plan and create awesome content to post on the influencer page.
- Content could be in the form of Videos, GIF, images with attractive captions. Make your that, the content you post on the influencer’s page includes the logo of the company and the site link.
- Create trendy hashtag that makes many people to talk about your brand.
- Include the product link if you run the e-commerce website.
- Allow the influencer to create and post content on your website.
- It is better to post SEO optimized articles on your blog and share the same on different social media. And revise them periodically.
- Analyze, track, and monitor the results. This helps you to focus on what you are delivering currently and ensures not to repeat the mistakes if any, in the future.
Contract With The Influencer
To maintain a good relationship with the influencers, the company must sign a contract with them. That should include
- The purpose, and objective of the collaboration between you and the influencer and the time duration for the marketing campaign.
- Content posting frequency on a daily and weekly basis need to be scheduled and practiced.
- Payments after negotiating.
- Mention rights and liability for the promoting content.
- Legal guidelines and have to be stated clearly to avoid confusion. Termination of contract has to be written necessarily, in case of failure of the campaign.
Reader’s Insight
Let us know if we missed out on anything in this article, influencer marketing strategy, and share your thoughts in the comment section.
