If you are an avid reader of digital marketing guides then you probably have come across the term influencer marketing or influence marketing. Basically, influencer marketing is the enlistment of influential people in a specific industry to market products to an audience. You could think of it as celebrity endorsements for the digital age.
Influencer marketing 2024 is divided into macro and micro and can range from activists to educators, socialists to trendsetters, and experts to entertainers. While micro followers are the people who have a number of loyal followers with a particular aim. On the other hand, macro-influencers are those who have a larger following that respects and value their insight.
However, when these influencers express their honest opinions and reviews about a particular product or service, they are establishing credibility that makes their testimony much more meaningful for their followers. In short, influencer marketing is part of endorsement along with referral marketing, testimonial marketing, and product placement.
Benefits of Influencer Marketing
There are a number of benefits of influencer marketing. One of the key benefits of influencer marketing is raising the brand awareness of your brand and reaching audiences that you may never organically reach. While the other benefits include:
Trust
Influencers already have engaged the audience that trust and admire their opinions.
Targeting a Niche
Finding an influencer with the same purpose or niche as your product or service will help you to put your product in front of an audience that is interested.
Inbound Marketing
With the help of an influencer, you can attract qualified leads that are more likely to consider and convert.
How Does Influencer Marketing Work?
Most of the traditional marketing methods have brands that market and advertise directly to the consumer. While influencer marketing has brands that market their products through the influencer. Unlike generation X who grew up surrounded by technology and are most prone to traditional forms of marketing.
However, it is important to effectively market to this socially active generation as they are soon going to hold the majority of these will be spending power globally.
There are basically two types of influencer marketing:
Earned Influencer Marketing
It is the paid partnership between a brand and an influencer without any monetary compensation instead, it is a mutual agreement of exposure to each other’s audience.
Paid Influencer Marketing
Paid influencer marketing involves a brand offering that offers a free product, monetary compensation, or sponsorship to the influencer.
How to Choose the Right Influencers for Your Brand or Business?
Micro-influencers have a following that ranges from 1000 to 10,000 followers. While their communities are engaged and their conversations and personal brands are authentic.
What Should You Consider Before Looking for an Influencer?
- Understanding your target audience is a must so find an influencer whose community reflects that. It is not enough to just choose any fitness blogger for your athletic wear brand.
- Find someone that shares the same ideals and values as you. All you need is to make sure that their brand voice and messaging align with your brand. As they will directly reflect you and the community and will also favor your association with your brand with them.
- While looking for an influencer, you should check and see what partnerships they have made in the past and even check if their campaigns were successful or not. If your goal is about brand awareness then you should look for someone that is great at showcasing a product and establishing a name for that brand. If your goal is about sales then you should have someone who is good at convincing in their reviews or makes great tutorial videos.
Why Do You Need Influencers?
There is no denying the fact that marketing is moving more toward social media. As your business can’t afford to be left behind when there are more than 70% of brands that are investing more resources in social media marketing. The reason is simply that social media is more engaging than other platforms.
However, customers want to interact with brands and that is what traditional advertising has been about for so many years. While customers ever want to be informed, entertained, and delighted by brands instead of being asked to buy products.
This is where most marketing is done by social media influencers. This is because they have a pulse on their respective audiences so anything they say is treated as reliable and worthwhile information.
It is the reason why partnering with the right personalities will help you put your brand out there and are leading to improving brand awareness and organic conversions.
Tips to Find an Influencer
- Look for someone who may be already interested in your brand. While keeping in touch with people who interact with your brand will surely help. Also, check geotags, hashtags, and post tags for influencers. Also, take a look through their followers to see if they already have an influencer that can engage with your brand.
- Filter through more general hashtags that are relevant to your brand. Also, look through geotags that could help you find someone in a particular location.
- Apart from that, do check for their competitors, and do they have followers of influencer status that they are not working with but are interested in a similar product?
- Also, check for other known influencers in your industry to see if they have similar influencers within their communities.
Conclusion
However, in this world of online advertising more traditional marketing strategies are not enough. There are audiences out there that are immune to advertising. So it is important to reach your audience without feeling like they are being sold to.
Moreover, influencer marketing is proven effective for those reasons and is a must to add to your marketing strategy. However, with the right partnership with an influencer, you can reach new audiences that share the same values and trust the opinions and expertise of the influencer.
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Author Bio:
Maulik Patel is the Founder & Director of ClickMatix.com.au. His passion for helping people in all aspects of online marketing flows through in the expert industry coverage he provides. He is an expert in Web marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing, B2B Marketing, and Online Advertisement on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.