Gone are the days when a celebrity was needed to endorse any brand. Social media changed the narrative when it comes to Influencer Marketing. Now, it is all about working with the right social media influencers to hit the target audience. There are so many social media niche centric influencers, having a massive following that a lot of marketing and brand awareness can be generated through this technique.
But what and how Influencer marketing works?
Influencer marketing is basically a collaboration between the brand and the social media influencers who are relevant to the brand in achieving the presence it is striving from the digital space.
If we talk about the major markets like the US and UK, there they used 10% of their marketing budget invested in influencer marketing. This indicates that this field of marketing is picking up momentum and needs to be given attention and strategy. But how can one use this to their advantage? Let’s find out.
There are a few things you should have to take care of before opting a social media influencers.
- Competence: You need to see whether the person/influencer you are choosing for the brand understands your brand’s niche and needs.
- Outreach: Is their platform engaging and aesthetic? Will it bring attention to your product?
- Followers: The persona they are carrying, is it in synergy with your brand or not? Are they followed by people who are relevant to your brand?
- Social Image: Are they well-liked by their followers? What sort of image do they carry as an influencer?
These are the four important questions you must ask yourself before picking up your influencer.
If they don’t set well in these criteria, then you have to think about why they should even endorse your brand?
Apart from them, there are factors that play an important role in making of Influencer market a success.
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Audience Personas
Can an influencer know your brand better than you? Maybe, maybe not but you need to understand your brand and your audience well. That will set the focus as to which influencer will fit your brand. It can’t happen until you know the demographics well enough to even allocate or appoint an influencer to work on it. Finding a renowned influencer is not the battle won, but just begun.
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Monitor your Engagement
Influencers in this age are not celebrities but social media identities. They are in a strong position because they are able to hook the audience to the content, or the lives they are living which people are interested to be a part of it. But when it comes to your product, is there engagement on their posts? You have to be vigilant and can’t just leave on the influencer’s popularity.
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Aesthetics
Influencer marketing is heavily dependant on the aesthetics because the visual form of social media platforms calls for such qualities. The content they create, its look, feel and appeal should be in sync with yours for the sole purpose of you using that content on your feed as well. It mustn’t look out of the blue as that will disrupt the flow of your feed. These things should be discussed and taken care of before opting for an influencer.
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Organic is Long Lasting
You ask any social media marketer, they will advice non-paid marketing any day over ‘paid-marketing’. Paid marketing gives an instant boost, but organic marketing is pivotal when comes to a long-lasting community if you are on the lookout to have one. The same comes to influencer marketing. If your influencer is using paid marketing to promote themselves, then the reach they are generating through this channel is not long-lasting and consistent. Therefore, an influencer with an organic reach and following should be your choice so that the traffic they generated so far is converted into your following as well since organic followers are more loyal and committed to the content the influencer generate rather than the ones who constantly use paid marketing to boost their reach.
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Know Your Influencer Well
Don’t approach the influencer without having a thorough knowledge of their content, their background, and their audience. To generate a healthy relationship between your platform and the influencer’s audience, you must interact and engage with them as well. For this, you need to know them, and then accordingly establish relations with them.
But there are few challenges you might face onboarding an Influencer, that would be:
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Budget:
Influencers with phenomenal reach will not settle for free products, you need to have a good budget pre-hand if you are looking for influencers with a solid following and reach. You can try to hire them on a commission basis which will eradicate the problem of reducing the fee or paying a flat fee.
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Reaching Out:
Influencers are hard to get hold of. But then what is the right approach to reach that particular influencer you really think is best for your brand? You have got to go a little personal. You need to individually direct message them. Yes, it could be tedious but shows sincerity and interest of yours. But the message should be drafted in such a way that it shouldn’t reflect too much frankness yet be very professional.
From a brand’s point of view, it could be overwhelming as well that someone else, not involved in the brand is endorsing the brand but you need to have faith and give your influencer the creative space to create content accordingly. Healthy monitoring must always be there but too much control might lead to poor content or even worse, discontinuation. So, it is also there that you yourself have to be convinced before giving any influencer your brand.
After all of this, comes the most important part,
How to track your Influencer Marketing Campaign?
The success of any campaign isn’t just about the increasing number of likes, comments or simply put, the engagement. That’s a part of it not entirely the outcome. You are selling a product or service at the end of the day. Therefore, in pure business terms, you need an increase in sales, no matter how important awareness is. You can track that when comes to influencer marketing through:
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UTM PARAMETER
- They help you track the value of social marketing programs and campaigns.
- They provide precise data about where traffic and conversions come from.
- They allow you to test individual posts head-to-head in classic A/B testing style.
In other words, it defines the source from where the traffic over the website, or any other portal has been directed. Your influencer having his/her unique UTM will help you in tracking the campaign’s success or failure.
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Discount Code
This is a comparatively easier way to track the progress than creating a special UTM. Discount codes are both beneficial from sales and marketing point of view because they attract people and help you keep a track as well.
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Product Wise
The influencer you are working along must be promoting a particular product or product range, to begin with. You need to monitor the popularity, growth, and sales of that particular to measure the growth of that campaign.
It is an old concept but with a breath of fresh air, but apart from the face value and dynamics, nothing much has changed about influencer marketing and it is still very relevant and popular among the marketing tools a marketer looks forward to.
By Doors Studio
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