Have you ever been scrolling along on Instagram and saw an amazing picture and start reading the post and the person is talking about a life experience and then you read “this is why I use XYZ product” and ends the post with #ad? You my Friend, have just experienced influencer marketing.
What is influencer marketing anyway? Influencer marketing is a relationship between a brand and an influencer. The influencer promotes the brand’s products or services through various media outlets such as Instagram and YouTube.
Influencer marketing is quickly becoming one of the most efficient and effective ways for businesses to reach potential buyers of their goods and services. It’s like an online billboard for products and services.
With the creation of the internet and the popularity of social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, consumers have unlimited freedom and choice over the content they wish to view. This creates a problem for brands. As their target audience continues to spread out over various forms of media, it becomes increasingly difficult to reach them. There has been a culture shift and businesses need to learn how to move with the shift.
Here are some tips to Work with influencers and win:
1. Let Creatives be creative. I know that it sounds like this should be a given, but it’s actually not. You would be doing yourself a disservice by not allowing the influencer be authentic. If you have your “hand in the cookie jar” and dictating everything, what do you need the influencer for? Just recently I was speaking about a potential client about taking on her project. After all was said and done, I decided to walk away from the project because it came with a laundry list of things that I could not do while working on the project.
2. Choose influencers that love what you offer. Some companies make the mistake of choosing an influencer on the “likeabilty” factor, instead of doing a little more research and finding out the influencer that fits with your brand. For example, a company sent an influencer a particular product to review without doing the research. The influencer, started off the YouTube review, by stating “I don’t know why this company sent me this product to review as I have no experience with this product.” I cringed while watching and was mortified as the influencer picked apart EVERYTHING wrong with this product to her nearly 120k followers. Also, because she has HUGE engagement on her platforms, 115k people saw the video. Which leads me to my next point.
3. Look for audience engagement. To my earlier point, you want to choose wisely when it comes to the influencer that you contact to represent your brand. Keep this thought in mind, choose an influencer with a smaller reach but has great audience engagement over a influencer with a high following but lower engagement.
4. Have actionable goals for influencer campaigns. Sure sharing your product or brand with their followers is great, but put some actionable goals inlace of the influencer. Whether you are using a contest or a sharing campaign, make sure that you are maximizing the influencers reach and engagement but most importantly, leaning on their expertise.
Feel free to leave your comments and share this with others have questions about collaborating with influencers or influence marketing in general.
Contact Kennetta at kpiper@thebirthingpoint.com or 830.499.1172 for services or speaking engagements or simply to be added to the email list.
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