“There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.” – Malcolm Gladwell, Author, The Tipping Point
Influencer marketing is just that. Find the correct people to promote your brand, and you will ace this game. After all, Influencer marketing, in simpler words, is word-of-mouth gone right. It can help you achieve your brand goals in a relatively short period, in a budget that you will be comfortable spending.
The concept of influencer marketing has been a favourite topic of discussion for the past few years and is selling like a hot cake in every industry today. However, many are unclear about how correctly brands work with bloggers and influencers. Everyone is trying to understand what Influencer Marketing is and how it works, but most importantly, how it benefits a brand.
To know more on this topic, do read our earlier article on why Influencer Marketing can be a game changer for your business.
The best way to begin your influencer marketing campaign is by getting clarity on your goals. As the concept is relatively new, marketers are still figuring out how to link their campaign goals with their marketing efforts. Therefore, in-depth knowledge of the former is essential for the success of the latter.
There are 4 goals that Influencer marketing can help you achieve. We suggest you take them into consideration and target at least one of them while planning your next influencer campaign:-
Building brand awareness
Increase in social media engagement
Improve conversion
Collecting customer data
For further clarity, let us take one goal at a time and dig into the details.
Building brand awareness
“A brand is no longer what we tell the customer it is – it is what the customers tell each other it is” – Scott Cook, Director, eBay
Proving this statement is a recent study by Nielson wherein 92% of the surveyors stated that they would trust recommendations from their peers over the brand itself.
Further, Facebook has caught the same sentiment and made recent Algorithm changes to their feed that now filter your audience’s content and allow more posts from their friends and peers over brands to be visible on the feed.
At such times, influencer marketing works best for a brand. It is an excellent way to work between the lines and create brand awareness among your digital audience.
A successful influencer ad campaign will create effective brand awareness among its audience. The secret is to identify and get on board the right influencers and content creators – those who resonate well with your brand message and brand content. Based on your budget, you can opt for micro or macro influencers.
For example, when Jo Malone introduced its new floral scented product in India last month, they brought together an eclectic mix of Instagram influencers and bloggers in Mumbai for an early morning visit to a famous local flower market. Thus, the brand gave their social media audience a glimpse of what was new in store for them and how fresh the new product was, without the whole marketing act, directly through influencer marketing.
Learn how to find the right influencer for your brand here.
Increase in social media engagement
We all know that the recent change in Facebook Algorithms has led to a significant decrease in branded content’s organic reach and engagement. Also, specific social media platforms prioritise content based on the number of interactions received such as the total number of likes, comments and shares.
You must be thinking if there is a way to increase engagement and interactions in such times, which isn’t incorrect. The same question has troubled many digital marketers over the past few weeks, and the solution is opting for influencer marketing.
Digital influencers strike a chord with their audience through their content and are already considered as friends by them. Getting on board a few influencers that are already engaging with their audience quite often and are more of a friend to them is a perfect strategy for getting more engagement.
While collaborating with brands, influencers can:
Review a product or service – Sharing a positive experience of a brand with their audience is a fool-proof way to gain higher social media engagement.
Amplify the content shared by the brand – This, in turn, entails retweeting or reposting the content shared by a brand on their social media pages. It helps to attract the attention of the influencer’s audience and leads to a higher engagement for the brand.
Ask the audience to share their story – Taking an organic approach for higher engagement, an influencer can encourage their audience to share branded content on their feed, while tagging their friends or peers. This will catch engagement not only from the influencer’s audience but the audience’s friends and peers as well.
Improve the conversions
For a business, there are certain times when conversions are considered more important than engagement rates. For brands that are holding events and want a certain number of tickets sold, or for businesses who need a certain amount of clicks on their website or purchases from their online store, the social media platforms become their marketing field.
Influencer marketing can help achieve conversions through strong content. Content created not just by the brand but by the influencer, and their readers can get more traffic, which in turn will lead to more conversions. There are two types of conversion in this case.
Signups – This includes form fills, subscriptions for newsletters or events. You can further count the number of signups and check where the traffic is coming from, through links provided to the influencers. You can also get the email database about your audience through signups.
Downloads – Influencers can encourage their audience to download specific content, by sharing its importance with them. This helps the brands decide if their ads have been targeted effectively and also give them access to an email database for further ad placements.For example, when a person downloads an influencer marketing checklist through a social media ad, they have to share their email address for access to the said document. This process enables the brand to have access to an email database, through which they can further target their social media ads, based on the visits and the email addresses shared.
Collecting customer data
As mentioned above, there are various ways through which a brand can collect its customers’ data, through various social media platforms. Now, this database is the real gem as it is shares with you an in-depth analysis of your customer’s interests and preferences. Through this data, you will get a better understanding of your audience and what the dos and don’ts of your future campaigns should be, to successfully reach your goals in a shorter time frame.
Here is a list of what you can do with the data collected:
Have one to one communication with your audience and build a relationship with them by providing personalised service
Creating highly targeted audience base for your campaigns
Gain in-depth insights into your services/products
Also, learn more about why data analysis is crucial for influencer marketing.
The next question is – will your influencers be able to lead you to your goals? If yes, only then should you opt for an influencer marketing campaign.
Keep following us for everything to do with influencer marketing.
Cheers!
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