Use this influencer marketing strategy to build a memorable PR campaign that meets your goals.
Do you want to get media coverage and build a name for your brand without paying unreasonable fees to a huge agency? The solution for this quest is simple – influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is becoming a popular branch of marketing across different industries. Businesses worldwide- regardless of their size – are turning to influencer marketing to promote their ideas, get their accomplishments recognized, and increase sales.
Influencer marketing allows you to spread the right message to the right people. Connecting with the right influencer will help your business to stay relevant and earn recognition. Check out these five practical tips for building your influencer marketing strategy.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is typically used to raise brand recognition, but it can also result in many conversions and sales. Brands can use influencer marketing to promote their products by acquiring endorsements or recommendations from internet influencers and content providers. Influencers are most commonly found on social media and blogs, although other creators, such as podcast broadcasters, can also boost your brand. While influencer marketing began in 2006, it has evolved significantly over the last 16 years. Facebook and Twitter were still in their early stages, but Instagram would not enter the social media landscape until 2010.
When influencers first emerged, they were primarily bloggers who shared personal stories and promoted products they used daily. It’s a bit of a paradox, but while influencer marketing hasn’t changed all that much, it is vastly different in several ways.
Influencers are still sharing personal stories and promoting products they use daily. However, many people now do this as a career, earning a living through brand sponsorships. When it started, any money a blogger made through a partnership was nice extra money – you couldn’t consider it a full-time income.
Influencers today have far more options than previous generations of influencers. There are numerous social media platforms to choose from, and there are multiple types of content that can be created. YouTube and TikTok are great video platforms for those who enjoy watching videos. Traditional blogging or even Facebook can help those who want to share long-form written posts. Instagram is an excellent place for influencers who wish to do a little bit of everything. Fanvue is an emerging platform designed for premium, subscription-based content, offering creators new ways to monetize their audience. While Clubhouse is still a new platform, it won’t be long before influencers figure out how to use it for their promotions as well.
How to Create an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy in 5 Steps
1. Find Influencers Who Can Benefit Your Brand
Social media has created a whole new way of life for everyone, from considerable brands to social media users. Rising interest in the average person’s posts, preferences, and lifestyle has created a new kind of entrepreneur – the influencer.
Influencers are people with a large base of followers. Brands often hire them to promote products, which makes the influencer’s audience aware of the brand. Partnering with an influencer improves a brand’s online presence, drives engagement, and boosts sales.
Influencers can be your brand ambassadors, so you need to find an influencer who agrees with your goals and ideas and genuinely appreciates your product.
For influencer marketing to work, the influencers’ audience should match your target audience. Compare their demographics and interests.
Let’s say your business sells athletic wear for women. In that case, it is best to find a female influencer who advocates exercising and living a healthy life.
Through their content, you can learn about influencers’ interests and beliefs. Based on that, decide who the best fit for your company is.
Keep an eye on influencers who usually use the type of products you offer. You can send them a free sample and then ask for a review. After all, the best promotions involve influencers promoting brands they genuinely love.
Another aspect you need to consider is the type of influencer you want to hire. Based on their popularity, there are:
- Mega-influencers (over 1 million)
- Macro-influencers (between 100,000 and 1 million followers)
- Micro-influencers (between 1,000 and 100,000 followers)
Mega-influencers are mostly reserved for international brands. To clarify why, we’ll share that Kyle Jenner reportedly charges $1 million per social media post.
2. Use Sponsored Content
You create sponsored content when you pay influencers to mention your brand in their posts. Openly discussing the benefits of your products and services will help the influencers’ followers understand why your company is worth their attention.
“Paid-for” advertising will ensure the influencer takes your collaboration more seriously and mentions your product how you want them to. This type of collaboration is quite common.
You need to pay attention to transparency. Sponsored content should be presented naturally. Furthermore, the influencer needs to present your product in a way that resonates with the audience.
It is important to create a brief that outlines a few guidelines influencers should follow. However, your guidelines should also allow the influencer room to improvise so that your content stays consistent with their personal style.
“The audience respects honest posts, and trust me; they can recognize forced promotions. Truthful cooperation protects influencers’ integrity and your own,” advises Gregory Willis, a PR manager at BestWritersOnline.
3. Start an Affiliate Program and Use Discount Codes
Affiliate programs are a popular ingredient for an influencer marketing strategy. You might have noticed that world-famous brands like Sephora, Zara, and Asos use affiliate programs to boost their PR.
Match a good affiliate program with attractive discount codes, and you’ll have a powerful combination. Not only will you increase brand awareness, but you’ll also boost your sales rate.
Affiliate programs work by having an influencer post about your brand or mention it in a YouTube video. The influencer offers a discount if users click on the affiliate link and purchase a product. There’s usually a code that users need to type to get their discount.
This is a great way to use influencer marketing to promote your product and get users to try it out. The discount will encourage your target audience to purchase your product. You’ll get many positive reviews and repeat customers if they like it.
4. Organize Contests and Giveaways
When influencers promote your contest and giveaways, they’ll drive massive attention to it.
Contests and giveaways encourage users to promote your products because of the requirements. Usually, the requirement to enter the contest or giveaway is to like a specific brand’s posts and follow their social media accounts, or something similar. You’ll boost the brand’s online presence with the right contest structure.
Another way to run a contest is to have influencers post about your giveaways and invite users to visit your website to enter to win a free product.
Alternatively, you can agree with an influencer to include your product in their giveaways, thereby promoting it to their audiences.
Samantha Perry, a digital marketer and translation expert at PickWriters, recently discussed the benefits of contests in influencer marketing. She said, “Contests and giveaways are very much loved by users. Influencers also support this marketing technique because they get the users to react and engage. Since target members are asked to follow the influencer and the brand, both get recognition and a chance to grow their audience.”
5. Sign up for PR Services
As mentioned, as a startup, you might want to engage with more than micro-influencers when building an influencer marketing strategy. You have every right to want to start strong and land a significant collaboration with popular influencers. You’ll follow these steps faster when you partner with a respected PR agency.
Collaborating with a PR company has many other benefits. These include:
- Attracting new clients: A PR company will make you more trustworthy in the eyes of potential clients.
- Building your reputation: Get your name recognized from the very first mention. Reputation plays a major part in marketing, and a PR company can help your name be associated with high-quality service.
- Building your credibility: If you don’t have many clients who prove your quality, a PR company can help you build up your credibility. As Jean-Louis Gassée, a successful business executive, said, “Advertising is saying you are good. PR is getting someone else to say you’re good.”
- Improve your SEO efforts: With a PR company on your side, you’ll be able to get more mentions in the media and, therefore, get a higher ranking in search results. This will also benefit your influencer marketing campaign because influencers will see that you have a robust online presence.
- Present yourself as an essential brand: A company that works with a PR company invests in itself and its progress. If you use PR services to help your brand stand out, you’ll look more important among influencers.
There are many options, and you must choose carefully if you want that PR campaign to achieve your goals.
For example, Pressfarm can provide you with:
- Contact details for over 1 million journalists
- Press release writing
- Feature story writing
- Content distribution that boosts your online visibility
- Curated media lists containing media contacts in your niche
- Tips for startup growth, PR, and more
Reasons why influencer marketing will persist
Influencer marketing is popular right now, but it’s not just a fad. The concept is still evolving at a rapid pace. It will become increasingly popular in the coming years, so now is the time to learn about it and incorporate it into your strategies.
1) A growing number of people are becoming influencers
While there may be an excessive number of influencers, there is always room for new influencers. With the growth of social media platforms, additional opportunities for new people to become influencers arise. Some influencers set out specifically to carve out a space from themselves in the influencer space while others are simply sharing their lives and happen to form a commercial partnership with a firm they respect. In any case, the point is that there will be an increase in the number of people building niche audiences who respect what they have to say. This means you’ll have a higher chance of discovering someone who speaks to your target market and aligns with your online store.
2) Marketing agencies are growing in popularity
Like any other business strategy or tactic, influencer marketing is becoming more standardized. There are now agencies that represent influencers and agencies that help brands find the best influencers for their strategies. As the business of influencer marketing expands, so will the marketing industry itself. Partnering with these agencies is an excellent option for eCommerce brands that don’t want to devote the time or resources to stay on top of influencer marketing trends. You can still benefit from the incredible success that often comes with influencer marketing without having to learn everything from scratch.
3) There are more content options
When it comes to promoting products, video is perhaps the most popular type of content that influencers create. Influencers started by writing blog posts about their favorite products. Then, as social media grew in popularity, the types of content created by influencers shifted. Instagram and Facebook Live, IGTV, YouTube, and TikTok have all demonstrated the incredible power that video offers to connect people.
With the rise in popularity of podcasts and the launch of audio-only applications like Clubhouse, the next big trend in influencer marketing will arise. We may not know exactly how, but we do know that the number and variety of content options will change over time. By joining new platforms as they emerge, eCommerce brands can be ready to take advantage of new, innovative platforms and content. What’s more, influencers are more likely to want to work with you if you already have a following on a specific platform.
4) Influencers are showcasing more of their lives
Influencers are returning to their roots in many ways. People have been significantly more interested in seeing posts that aren’t heavily censored in recent years. They don’t want to listen to, learn from, or be advised by someone whose life seems so far away. Instead, people want to know what’s going on every day. They want to see influencers make mistakes and have terrible days, but they also want to see them get back up and keep going.
More people trust and follow influencers who are transparent about their lives, which implies more people will view and buy sponsored material from this kind of influencer. When you collaborate with influencers, you may reach an even larger audience. This is especially true if you aren’t focused on influencers who only showcase the most beautiful, highly-filtered elements of their lives.
Final Thoughts
Thanks to the world of the internet, startups don’t have to wait years to be recognized. Work on your PR campaign from the very start by making the most out of your influencer marketing strategy. The above-mentioned tips are good guidelines to make this whole process less complex. Just be confident and persistent, and ensure you build an influencer marketing strategy that works for your brand.
FAQs
What does influencer marketing do?
Influencer marketing involves businesses partnering with people who have a significant following online and can promote the business’s products/services to a wider audience than the business has access to organically.
What are the 4 types of influencers?
You can partner with nano, micro, macro, or mega influencers, depending on your campaign goals and the reach you’re aiming for. A common misconception when choosing influencers is that the larger the number of followers, the better. However, partnering with macro or mega influencers might look attractive from the outside, but it often costs brands engagement.
Which group of influencers is the fastest growing?
In the past, brands have demonstrated a preference for macro-influencers. However, micro-influencers (5,000 to 20,000 followers) or nano-influencers (1,000 to 5,000 followers) are now more popular because they offer brands higher engagement.
