So you want to follow the trend in advertising. And you also want to replicate what’s working with other businesses. Well… you’re doing the right thing. And I believe you stumble upon this post because you are interested to know more about Influencer Marketing.
The basic, Influencer Marketing is a marketing strategy by which a business would seek the help of an Influencer (a person who has a huge number of followers in social media) to promote their products and services.
It seems easy, right? It’s like “pay the guy and tell him to promote our products” kind of thing. After all, you just want sales. However, if you think that way, then you’re not really exhausting other benefits that influencers can do for your business. You’re probably just wasting your resources. There’s more in Influencer Marketing than just pay-him-to-post products. And to make it effective, all you have to do is to set these goals and expectations and share it with your Influencer. Yes! Share it with them so you can build trust with them, and they can also understand what you want to achieved. More importantly, so they can share insight with you on how to effectively do the promotion.
Right Way to Generate Leads/Sales
As I’ve said, there’s more than just pay-to-promote. To ensure sales or leads, you must give your influencers something that only their audiences can enjoy once they promote your business. For instance: custom or exclusive coupon codes, special discounts, special promotions like pre-launched sale, and promotional videos. Some businesses also asked Influencers to host an exclusive contest to his/her followers.
Brand Awareness Should Be The Goal
When Influencers promote your products/services, their followers would be aware of your brand. However, if you focused on drive sales, then your brand might become forgotten after the post. It will also be bad for the Influencer as the audience would think that it is just to drive sales and nothing more. They will definitely think “This guy does this just for the money”. To effectively make them aware of your brand, do these with your influencers: have your brand introduced casually and not your products, make them do a product review that is not hard-sell, have them use original hashtags, have them encourage sharing, and make them do a contest to spread brand awareness and not to drive sales to products.
Increase of Followers/Engagement to your Own Social Media
It is wise not to always rely on Influencers to promote your business. It’s cost-effective and strategic. You should have your own social media with huge followers that can also promote and reach your target audience. To do so, you may want to tell your influencer that aside from brand awareness and driving sales, you want their audiences to follow your own social media page by invitation from them. Aside from that, you can also have the promotion material of the influencer to be posted on your account rather than theirs. And just tag them for their followers to see. If you have a physical location for your business, invite influencers on the site, give them some freebies so they can post it on their social media and always make them invite their followers to follow you.
There’s no wonder why Influencer Marketing has been proven effective by 94% of those who are using it. It is much cheaper than traditional TV ads, Billboards, etc. and it is much direct to your target audience. Just carefully choose the influencer according to their niche.
