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Using Influencers to Help Market Your Business

Influencer

Did you know one of the earliest marketing influencers was an 18th-century potter who leveraged his relationship with the royal family into a well-known fine china and gifts company?

While today’s marketers don’t need Wedgwood’s royal connection to make a powerful influencer marketing campaign, knowing how to pick the right partner and manage them can make or break its success. If you’re interested in exploring influencer marketing but don’t know where to start, continue reading for helpful tips and insights to help you succeed.

What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a collaborative social media marketing approach that leverages the profiles of well-known content creators with dedicated followings — also known as influencers — with featured products and services from sponsor brands. For businesses of all sizes, this relationship can:

• Increase brand awareness – Influencers have their own loyal audiences. By leveraging the trust their followers have and aligning your product or service with them, you can boost your business's profile, improve its reputation and increase awareness.
• Target specific audiences – Unless the influencer is a mega celebrity, most influencers gain followers through shared experiences and interests with their audiences. This gives businesses a powerful way to not only find their target demographic but also engage them with content that resonates.
• Net higher conversions – Influencers can harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing by offering their trusting audiences honest insights into product experiences. At the same time, interactive content, such as giveaways, live reviews and challenges, paired with limited-time-only unique discount codes or special offers, can prompt higher conversion rates.  
• Build trust and authenticity – Influencers build audiences based on personal experiences and opinions that appeal or relate to their followers. Many have unscripted moments with fans via chat features, making them come across as genuine and accessible. Paired with a brand partnership or product, influencers can make powerful inroads when sharing products or services they support.

Common campaign types include sponsored content, such as photos, videos or blog posts; contests and giveaways; live sessions and brand ambassadors for long-term influencer partnerships.

Picking an Influencer
Selecting the right influencer for your social media campaign should start with creating a profile of your ideal customer. This should include valuable information such as their demographics, interests, behaviors and preferred social media platforms. Once you have this information, it will be easier to find influencers who create content aligning with your needs.

Influencers vary in audience and reach, with some mega or celebrity influencers — such as public figures like famous actors, musicians, athletes and others — boasting massive followings of more than a million people. However, not all influencers boast such a broad reach, and you should not solely rely on vanity numbers like follower counts when selecting an influencer. Many successful personalities cater to smaller, highly dedicated core audiences through regular content that aligns with their interests and values.

According to McKinsey, influencers come in five different sizes. We’ve already discussed mega influencers, the social media heavyweights with more than one million followers. There are also macro influencers, who have more than 500,000 followers; medium influencers with 50,000–100,000 followers; micro influencers with 10,000–50,000 followers and nano influencers who cater to fewer than 10,000 followers.

No follower count, however, can outweigh the genuine connection some influencers have with their communities. In these instances, influencers share stories from their lives, post relatable content and create welcoming environments where people can ask questions, look for advice and get the support they need. Finding an influencer that relates to your product — either through lived experiences or likes — can help you deliver a greater impression compared to someone who simply has a large following.

Here are some requirements to look for when shopping for an influencer partner:

• Their content is appropriate; it is not racist, sexist or discriminatory.
• The influencer has not been partnered with a direct competitor in the past or recently.
• The influencer has the same values as your company.

Working With an Influencer
Like any other social media marketing effort, your influencer marketing campaign needs to be planned in order to succeed. That includes setting a budget — including your influencer’s creator fee — establishing campaign goals, placing guidelines regarding messaging and determining key performance indicators (KPIs).

If you’ve never worked with an influencer before, here are some management tips to keep in mind:

• Your influencers need good briefs to succeed – Briefs are the lifeblood of creatives, equipping them with the valuable details and resources they need to carry out the job successfully. Here are some items your brief should cover:
  • What is the primary goal of your campaign? What consumer actions do you hope to achieve regarding your product or service?
  • What are the key benefits and differentiators that make this product stand apart from others?
  • Who is the target audience? What values, words and concepts are important to them?
• Your influencers need space to be creative – You selected them for the rapport they have with their audiences and their unique personalities. Be sure to give them the creative space they need so their true selves can shine through — after all, it's why their followers like them. If you micromanage the content creation process, it can stifle their creative energy, resulting in pieces that feel inauthentic and stiff — the antithesis of working with influencers for word-of-mouth brand awareness.
• Your influencers need to share their metrics – If you’re launching an influencer campaign without capturing metrics, you’re missing out on powerful signals that can help you refine future messaging and marketing efforts. Aside from conversions and revenue data — all signs the audience is taking your desired action — you should also consider:
  • Engagement metrics, such as likes, comments and shares, so you get a better understanding of what resonates with your audience.
  • Brand awareness metrics, which can include views, clicks and website traffic, allow you to gauge any changes to brand awareness.
  • Follower growth, as it can help you determine the influencer’s impact on your brand visibility and audience expansion.

Influencers offer you new opportunities to access targeted audiences, boost brand awareness, build credibility and drive sales. Through the high-quality marketing materials they’ll create for you, you’ll have engaging, cost-effective content that can deepen the story of your brand and its products or services.

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