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If you open up a social media app on your phone right now and take a little scroll down your timelines, you'll find at least one or two posts offering product or brand recommendations. This is the work of influencer marketing companies! It takes many forms – and is a powerful way for brands to make close and lasting connections with their target audience.
Influencer marketing, however, can be challenging to get right – and disastrous if gotten wrong! If the brand comes off as inorganic or too commercial, for instance, users will look the other way. This is why many brands today are now enlisting the help of an influencer marketing company to capitalize on this explosive form of digital marketing.
Interested? Keep reading for an easy guide to working with influencers you can put into action immediately!
Why Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing, as the name itself suggests, involves a brand collaboration with someone who can, well, influence others. Influencers typically share a close and often personal collection with their often active follower base in their niche. Their followers, in turn, trust them. This connection can be a powerful path for a brand to grow its own reach and brand awareness.
According to a study, 73 per cent of digital marketing expenditure in 2021 was on influencers. Clearly, brands are picking up on this potential very quickly and aren't hesitating to put their money where their people are. If you're on the fence, you don't necessarily have to shell out a lot of your marketing budget: there's an influencer marketing company for every budget out there.
Crafting Your Ideal Campaign
Influencer marketing companies have become especially popular because there's something for every kind of brand. No matter your niche, there's someone out there who can reach the people you want to reach. Influencer marketing companies can offer you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to your strategy, from the platforms you want to be active on to how overt – or covert – you want your campaign to be.
The Many Flavours of Influencers
When we say come partner with an influencer marketing company, you might find yourself thinking about celebrities with millions of followers – and likely very little time and attention to personalizing their posting for you. This is simply not true anymore!
Influencers today come in many shapes and forms – and most importantly, with many ranges of follower bases. You'll be surprised by how much you can get out of collaborating with someone with a small but active user base.
Nano-influencers have about 10,000 followers, for instance, and micro-influencers boast a slightly bigger follower base at around 80,000 to 1,00,000 followers. Macro-influencers have a bigger follower base than that, and so on.
You might think bigger is automatically better – but that's not the case at all. An influencer marketing company can be invaluable here in getting you the biggest bang for your buck.
A Quick and Easy Guide
As any good influencer marketing company worth its salt will tell you, influencer marketing strategies are no walk in the park. Here are some of the basic tenets of influencer marketing companies that are guaranteed to put you on the right path.
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Know Who You Will Be Talking To
Before you hit the speed dial button on your influencer marketing company to snag a collaboration, you have to stop and ask yourself a few questions. One of the very first ones will be: who exactly are you trying to influence? You can't reach out to study-centered Instagram accounts if your product is in the skincare niche, right?
Once you ascertain who your target audience is – everything from what kind of content they like to where they hang out – you can start identifying your niche and active influencers that might play well with your brand image.
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Shortlist Your Faves
This is the second step. Once you identify your niche and spend some time exploring and hanging out with the cool kids, you'll have a better sense of the kinds of content that perform well and the influencers that have the most reach – and the different kinds of responses you can expect to get. For instance, some influencers are known for their unboxing videos, while others become famous for their daily routines. You'll need to shortlist influencers based on your own product or service as well as the image you are trying to build.
It can be hard to understand engagement metrics while shortlisting – how do you decide who is a good fit and who has the right kind of engagement? An influencer marketing company keeps running tabs on what's working on various social media channels and understands how to decode engagement metrics to find the best fit for your business.
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Outline Clear Goals
Finally, you should have outlined clear goals: do you want to reach new target customers? How exactly are you aiming for that? This can take many forms: a higher rate of conversion, more followers, more engagement in the form of likes and comments, etc. Communicating this to your influencer marketing company is integral.
Whether you're working with an influencer marketing company or reaching out to the trendy influencer in your niche yourself, you need to be able to tell them exactly what you expect from their campaign to see those results.
The Upshot
Different products have different kinds of target user bases, and many come with their own tastes and temperaments. Collaborating with an influencer marketing company can be a very efficient way to figure out how to plan your campaigns so they precisely land the right way. This also includes the scale of the influencers you choose to work with.
This choice can be a tough one: there's a lot riding on it, after all, and a lot of variety to choose from. When you partner with a reputed influencer marketing company like AdLift, you can sleep easy knowing that they're making considered and thoughtful choices about your strategy tailored to your business.
Thank you for reading!