The success of any business depends heavily on marketing, because advertising and other marketing techniques, like influencer marketing, are a primary means by which a business can expand. It’s only by attracting customers and creating brand loyalty that a business can sustain itself, let alone grow. However, modern marketing has changed drastically, and this is due in large part to two factors. Social media marketing, primarily influencer marketing, has become the single most prevalent form of marketing as TV viewership and radio listenership dwindles in favor of online streaming. Additionally, influencers have become a PR asset comparable to Hollywood celebrities. The following tips can help you come to grips with marketing for the digital age in order to grow your business with influencers.
Learn from Influencer Marketing Resources
Learning how to market on your own can be a huge advantage to your business, but of course there are still tools to help you get there. Marketing seeks to cultivate the reputation of a given business, but approaches the problem from different perspectives and with different short-term goals. Marketing brings in revenue which you’ll recognize through celebrity and influencer endorsements.
There are plenty of resources online through articles and apps that can help you understand how to use social media to your advantage. Platforms like Instagram even offer easy ways to promote a post without an influencer at all. However, an influencer marketing strategy will help your company gain more of a following and you can find someone to help promote you in any industry, whether it’s business, technology, or a retail social media marketing campaign.
Find the Right Influencer
There are a number of factors that can dictate the best choice when it comes to partnering with an influencer. For starters, the relative popularity of a given influencer (based on their audience size) will determine their asking price. While many smaller influencers will gladly take sponsorships of all kinds as a way to get by, larger influencers may be a little more difficult to persuade. However, that cost roughly equates to the potency of the results. A more popular internet star could cost you more, but they will also have a much larger audience that will give your brand that much more exposure.
Likewise, the type of arrangement you want to make will depend on your budget and your marketing needs. A standard sponsorship deal will essentially entail paying an influencer for their services, which take the form of brief mentions in their content. Booking an influencer in an appearance in your advertisements, on the other hand, will be much more costly, because you’ll need to pay not only for the influencer’s labor, but also for the production of the content itself.
It’s also important to find an influencer that compliments your existing branding. Branding is the foundation of all of marketing, and forming a narrative that runs throughout all of your marketing materials is how brand recognition and brand loyalty are generated. However, the same is true of influencers who have to market themselves to an ever-increasing audience, and this can create a conflict in some cases. For the most part, this means that your best bet is generating a brand that is compelling to younger demographics, although this isn’t exactly a new concept. However, the more closely you look at the situation, the more room there is for conflict. For example, you probably should avoid using a video game streamer to market fitness equipment, unless you’re working with an influencer who bucks the trends associated with that kind of content.
Utilize Social Media
Social media is already a marketing powerhouse, and that trend is likely to continue unfettered. Therefore, it stands to reason that any business should employ social media marketing strategies in order to engage with the largest possible audience. This has a few major advantages, in addition to the massive exposure that such a large potential audience provides, however. For starters, influencers have been able to build a name and a career for themselves out of virtually nothing thanks to social media, and meeting influencers in their own domain can make integrating them into your marketing campaigns much easier.
However, social media also has a variety of integrated marketing tools, none of which are quite as powerful as engagement metrics. These metrics include not only likes and dislikes, but also shares, comments, and a whole host of hidden statistics that can all add to your market research that can help you to tailor your future marketing strategies based on the observable successes and failures of your previous efforts.
In addition, it’s a fairly common practice for brands and influencers to share each other’s content during a collaborative project, meaning that the benefits of working with an influencer can become even more substantial after the fact. While having them appear in your advertisements can be a major boon to your business, the true strength of influencers is the sway they have with their audience. While you can advertise to whoever happens to see the ads, being promoted by the influencer themselves gives you a direct connection to a large audience that will definitely see them.
Freelance contribution especially written for Find Your Influence by Lindsey Patterson.