Influencer marketing is the latest buzzword in the world of digital marketing. The strategy is popular among big brands and startups alike, helping the increase brand awareness and sales revenues. But you can’t just throw your brand into influencer marketing strategies won’t help much.
You need to utilize a careful marketing strategy that will get you the best possible ROI for a reasonable price.
In case you were wondering how to use influencer marketing on social media, here are 12 things to consider.
Influencer Marketing Strategies
1. Find the Best Influencer
The best influencer does not necessarily imply the most popular influencer. What it does mean is an influencer that best matches your brand. Similarly, your influencer of choice is more likely to agree to collaborate if your brand supports their image, message, and if it is relevant to their current audience.
2. Find a Helping Hand
Sometimes, it’s best to ask experts in the field of influencer marketing to help you find the best strategy.
Platforms like ProvenSEO offer such services to agencies and companies and they’re found to help you save time and money on marketing so you can focus on other important aspects of running your business.
3. Give Your Influencers Creative Freedom
The main reason why influencer marketing has proven to be so successful is that it attracts customers through organic content. If you have too much say in how your influencer will promote your brand, you may be taking away some of their authenticity.
Let your influencer have their creative freedom and you are more likely to gain some of that audience’s trust as well.
4. Look for Micro-Influencers
If you’re a small business just trying your hand at influencer marketing, you’ll already be turning to micro-influencer. But if you’re a larger company, the same rule can apply.
The technology company Markerly recently published results from their survey showing that micro-influencers have greater audience engagement.
This is the main reason why even big brands are reaching out to micro-influencers to help sponsor their products/services.
5. See What You can Offer
Not all influencers are looking for monetary gain through collaborations. Some may see it as an opportunity to increase their outreach and build a reputation.
If you’re on a tight budget, you can find influencers who are willing to collaborate for product samples or smaller prices. Make sure to keep this in mind when looking for an influencer.
6. See What Your Influencer can Offer
While you should give your influencer plenty of creative freedom, you also need to be clear with them what you are trying to achieve with your collaboration. This is, after all, a business agreement that needs to benefit both sides equally.
Do you want them to increase brand awareness, promote a product, or increase traffic to your website?
7. Share their Content
The best type of business agreement you could have with an influencer is that akin to a partnership. So, make your collaboration mutual by sharing their content on your social media accounts. However, make sure that you share only content relevant to your brand only.
8. The Type of Social Media Platform also Matters
Corbett Drummey, co-founder and the CEO of Popular Pays explains which platform works best for what business. Facebook is a great marketplace for brands who want to target a specific demographic while Instagram is a perfect choice if you’re looking to get quality content to increase your sales.
Pinterest is a great choice for brands trying to reach female customers while Snapchat is the easiest way to reach younger audiences.
9. Tell Influencers to Share Your Content
You may already have plenty of quality content on your Blog or social media accounts and just need someone to push that content to a relevant audience. Simple retweeting and sharing of content is the easiest way for your to rank in SEO and that your influencers will also find the easiest thing to do.
10. Focus on Experience
Instead of sending your product to an influencer and telling them to review it, you can let the influencer get experience with your product first. This will make for more authentic content that both you and your influencer need.
11. Image is Key
Provide your influencers with high-quality images that they can include in their content. This is especially true if you’re looking for influencers on Instagram and Facebook.
12. Be Different
While SEO will help you rank first in search engines, quality content is what helps in the long run. Think outside the box and make sure to reach influencers with quality and unique content. In this way, you’ll be able to become noticeable in all that online clutter.
Also See : Top 6 Social Media Marketing Trends to Stay Ahead in 2017
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is not as simple as it may initially seem. For a successful marketing campaign, you need to do plenty of research before reaching out to an influencer. Other than that, working on your own brand and image is important if you want to reach a large audience with the help of influencers.
