Today, the average consumers have become smarter and more conscious about how they spend their disposable income. This means you’ll have to do a lot more than just hire a celebrity to flaunt your brand to boost sales. This is where influencer marketing strategy steps in.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
In layman terms, Influencer marketing is when you promote and sell a product or service through people or influencers. These influencers ideally have a lot of followers on social media, and their opinion is revered which essentially has an effect on the brand’s character.
Influencer marketing is quite similar to the concept of brand ambassadors. The only difference is that brand ambassadors are mostly celebrities while influencers are common people with a large fan base on social media.
So, whether it is an e-store selling an array of products online to customers around the world or a security solutions provider vowing to protect its customers from a horde of internet security threats, influencers can give a brand a much louder voice that can be heard by the target audience.
How Influential Is Influencer Marketing?
According to this blog, businesses make an average of $6.50 on every $1 spent on influencer marketing. That’s how effective influencer marketing really is! But what is it exactly that makes it influencer marketing so effective?
The main advantage of influencer marketing for businesses is that it has leveled the playing field. Since it relies solely on social media, influencer marketing has given an equally loud voice to smaller and younger brands.
So, literally anyone with access to the internet can share their opinions on a brand. People who have a lot of followers on social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are then approached by companies that ask them to promote their products to the masses.
Another advantage of influencer marketing is that it’s as cost-effective as it is effective. After all, companies ideally pay an influencer much less than what they would pay a marketing agency to promote their brand.
With the right group of influencers, businesses can drives awareness, cultivate an audience, improve word-of-mouth advertising, and bolster conversions.
How to Develop an Influencer Marketing Strategy
In this dense social network of today where information travels as far and as wide as the waves, influencers are no less than the wave makers. With a massive following on various social media channels, they command the respect (and the trust) to turn an audience into loyal consumers.
But how does a business develop the perfect influencer marketing strategy? Here are a few essential tips to keep in mind.
Step #1. Define Your Audience
As a business, it is essential that you know your target customers. Only by knowing them can you understand who can impact and motivate them to make that all-important purchase decisions. Thus, choosing the right influencers based on the profile of your target customers is the most important to kick off an effective influencer strategy.
Step #2. Start With The End In Mind
Even before you begin working on your influencer marketing campaign, you must have a clear idea in mind of what goals to achieve. Identify the goals that you wish to accomplish with the campaign and then try to work your way backwards.
Reverse engineering your way through the influencer marketing strategy is a good way to make sure that you don’t set off on the wrong footing. It will also give you a better understanding of the budget that you need to set in order to accomplish your goals.
Lastly, always keep the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in mind when devising an influencer strategy. How will you measure the effectiveness of your strategy? Your KPIs could be one or more of the following:
- Audience reach
- Views
- Engagement
- Increase in followers
- Sales
Step #3. Monitor Influencers For Opportunities
Devising an effective influencer marketing strategy is just the first step. You must also make sure that you’re using the right real-time analytics tools to monitor what’s happening. Do thorough research on what your target influencers write about and who they write for. Knowing their audience will give you a good idea of how to promote your brand to the audience through the influencer.
Step #4. Take Action & Engage
Engagement is the key to an effective influencer marketing strategy. You must build long-term mutually beneficial relationships by using simple actions like linking, sharing, following. Another effective way to engage the audience is to make sure that you choose influencers who publish quality content rather than simply relying on ‘click-bait’ techniques to maximize outreach.
Step #5. Measure Your Results
It is also imperative to routinely check results and compare them against set goals. With the rise of digital marketing, tons of tools are available to measure KPIs like sales, traffic, conversions and impressions. These tools are great for measuring overall outreach and effectiveness of your influencer marketing strategy.
How to Measure Influencer Marketing Strategy Results
A powerful tool for tracking the success of your influencer marketing campaigns is by measuring Cost per Engagement. Tools like Tap Influence have highly effective CP metrics that accurately track the amount of dollars you are spending for every re-pin, comment, like, retweet etc.
CPE metrics play a pivotal role in running an effective influencer marketing strategy as they give you complete command over the marketing budget while also simplifying overall efforts you put into campaign.
Another unmatched benefit of CPE metrics is that they give you the power to track campaign performance with ease while also allowing you to choose your influencers. Thus, you enjoy much tighter command of your overall marketing spending from the onset, communicating real-time data and substantiating your marketing costs.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing has gained a lot of traction in a very short time, thanks mainly to the rapidly expanding social media network and innovations in digital marketing. It is no wonder then, why marketers have focused their efforts on catching on to the massive return-on-investment and relationship-building potential of influencer marketing.
