Digital marketing has experienced tremendous growth and success in the past few decades. It is now considered the strongest tool for wide reach and brand promotion, which is why many companies choose to pursue this path.
As a result, it is much harder to stand out in the crowd and get your message to the target audience.
In these changing times, there are plenty of tricks that you must indulge in to boost your marketing efforts. One of the most promising tricks today is influencer marketing.
This concept started small, but grew faster than any other strategy and has definitely attracted a lot of attention.
Those who manage to run a successful influencer campaign report amazing results with attracting leads and making sales, not to mention reaching a really wide audience.
By combining influencers and their impact on social media users, you can get your business to the right people.
Influencer Marketing Basics
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Basically, influencer marketing is a type of marketing in which brands are promoted on different social media platforms using recommendations and product mentions from individuals who have wide fan following. Such individuals are called influencers. Such individuals have earned the reputation of being experts in their fields. Influencer marketing is highly effective as people believe in what social influencers say. Social infuencers have built up trust with their followers by consistently writing about a particular topic. If they endorse your brand, you can use them as social proof to target your customers.
Someone who has a great fan following on one or many social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is called influencer. If a business hires an influencer to market its brand, it is called influencer marketing.
Why Influencers?
Word of mouth is still the best tool for success, especially now that the web is full of unreliable or scam companies. People rely on what others say online.
This holds the most value for your target audience. By picking someone established in your niche, you can reach the audience and earn their trust.
Creating quality content is simply not enough unless you find a means to get it to the right people. Statistics say that influencer marketing boosts the ROI eleven times more than any other marketing form.
Instead of using outdated strategies that might not convince people regardless of your efforts, you can use key leaders in the industry to promote your brand’s message.
Influencers are a kind of mediators that promote your business and motivate others to click on your pages, share your content, and make purchases.
For example, if you’re a student looking for a writing service to do your papers, you won’t just pick one because of the good website.
This is too risky knowing how unsafe the market can be. What you do is to type “writing help” in your search engine and check testimonials and reviews from trustworthy people, otherwise known as influencers.
When it comes to influencer marketing, social media is the most widely used tool for spreading the word of mouth.
Influencers have large following and great authority, making them ideal when you want to increase the reach of your content and use it to build a positive brand image.
Let’s say that you have hired professional, good dissertation writing services to help you create the content that you publish on your website or your social media.
Also if you might want to provide people with high-quality issues, using posts, and don’t know how to begin or don’t have enough time for that, you might utilize professional services such as:
- Essay Help at BestEssays, is a good team of professionals who can provide you with high-quality content
- AssignmentHolic, the content creation agency that can quickly adapt posts for influencers purposes
- Dissertation-today.com is a high-quality assignment help, which is held by the team of professional writers, editors and proofreaders.
They do an amazing job, but you still don’t get the results you’ve wanted. That is because the quality content hasn’t reached the target audience just yet. With the right influencers on board, you can make this happen.
Key Influencer Marketing Statistics
The size of influencer marketing was $1.7 billion in 2016. By the end of 2020, its size increased to $9.7 billion in 2020. Experts believe that its size will increase to $13.8 billion by the end of 2021.
As influencer marketing has evolved and expanded, agencies are finding ways to simplify its process so that brands and influencers can come on the board. In 2019 alone, there were around 240 new influencer platforms arrived, taking the total number of influencer agencies and platforms to 1360.
The most common influencer budget is $1,000 – $10,000/year. At the close second is the budget of $100,000 – $500,000/year. According to a survey, 19% of marketers were planning to spend $1,000 – $10,000 per year on influencer marketing in 2020. The same survey found that 18% of marketers had decided to spend between $100,000 – $500,000 per year on influencer marketing.
How To Use Influencer Marketing To Improve Your Strategy
Influencer marketing can process your quality content through social media channels and get your brand recognized by the right people. But, you cannot just hire any influencer and expect great things for your business.
There are plenty of things to consider. Here are some tips that would help you create an effective influencer marketing strategy.
1. Determine Your Goal
Before you go ahead with this idea, you need to know what you want to accomplish. This is the only way to find the right influencer.
Many entrepreneurs jump into influencer marketing thinking that they cannot go wrong. Yes, this is a proven strategy today, but only if you approach it right and attract the right influencers to share your message.
The first step is to ask yourself the following questions that will allow you to determine your goals:
- Are you looking for visibility and/or branding?
- What content do you want to promote or create with this strategy?
- Do you want to get more people to share your content or are you just looking for engagement?
- Who is your content aimed to reach?
Answering these questions will help you determine what type of influencer you need, how many followers they need to have, in what niche do you need an influencer, as well as how to approach them.
2. Create Quality Content
First of all, you need a buyer persona for your brand. Creating an image of a buyer persona is crucial for your marketing strategy as a whole.
Before you hire an influencer, you need to create quality content that reaches that buyer persona. Based on this information, you should tailor your message and content to the right audience.
Even if you hire the most prominent influencer in the field or the niche, it won’t work unless you have something good to offer.
All your efforts and investments will go in vain if, once the influencer recommends your brand, the target audience is pushed away by the low content quality you’ve provided.
To ensure that you have the content that will work perfectly when combined with an expert’s influence on the market, you might want to hire some assignment writer to get your content strategy started. An expert can tailor your message to reach the right audience.
3. Plan Your Budget
An influencer marketing strategy does not come free of charge. Sure, you’ll get word of mouth once your brand gets widely recognized but if you want to make this happen fast, you need to be ready to invest some money into it.
Thankfully, the range for influencer marketing costs varies greatly. Some influencers have wider reach and more experience than others, and they charge a lot more because of it.
Others have an average number of followers and a lower price. In the end, it all comes down to who their followers are.
Before you reach out to anyone, you need to plan your budget. This will tell you what influencer you can afford, what type of campaign you can run, how frequently you can use the influencer, what mediums to include, and more. Then, you can discuss the plan with the influencer you’ve picked.
This strategy has to be built around the budget you have. The influencer should provide a final payment plan that you will accept or not. Don’t forget – there are different ways to pay for influencer services.
Some influencers accept free services or products to get your brand featured on their social media pages, while others ask for payment.
4. Find The Right Influencer
Out of all the things in this list, this is the hardest one. You cannot go after every influencer that’s popular in your industry. You need to find one based on their target audience, number of followers, and of course – your budget.
There are two kinds of influencers – micro and macro-influencers. The first have a smaller number of followers, but they come at a cheaper price. The latter have huge followings and their services cost more.
It goes without saying that if you have a bigger budget to invest in this, a macro influencer will provide you with bigger content outreach. But, keep in mind that the number of followers is irrelevant unless they include many of your target audience.
If an influencer has millions of followers but only a small number of them fall into your buyer persona description, spending a fortune to hire him is not a great idea.
You’re best off hiring someone that works in your niche and can reach people who’d be interested in your particular brand.
You cannot reach out to influencers and just ask them to work for you. Many of them will want to check your services to see if they’re interested in promoting your brand.
This is why you need to set some time aside to earn your influencer’s trust and build a relationship with them.
5. Discuss The Details
When you’ve landed yourself an influencer, it’s time to discuss the details. What type of content would you want them to promote? Do they create the content or do you? Consider collaborating with the influencer in this process.
This will give their message a certain unique flair since their followers are already familiar with the influencer’s style.
6. Track The Results
Influencer marketing won’t necessarily change things for you overnight. The influencer you pick may not be the best choice, which is why you should measure the results continuously to determine your next steps.
Set parameters that will help you do this, such as key performance indicators. Give it some time, but if it doesn’t work, invest your money elsewhere.
Wrapping Up
Choosing the right influencer is easier said than done. However, once you do this, you can promote your brand to a wide audience.
A good influencer marketing strategy will amplify all your efforts on content marketing. If you do it right, this will be an indispensable and effective tool for your brand.
