Influencer marketing may seem simple. It entails asking an influencer to promote your products and services for you. But the process is more complicated than that. After all, you cannot just approach an influencer and expect them to respond to you. You need an influencer marketing strategy if you want this method to work for you. In this article, you’ll learn how you can adequately develop an influencer marketing strategy for your business.
What is influencer marketing?
Before you can use influencer marketing to promote your business, you need to know what it is. Well, influencer marketing is a form of collaboration between brands and influencers. Influencers can be paid in cash or kind, and then they promote the brand’s products and services to their followers.
However, influencer marketing is not as simple as paying the influencer to do something. You can only make that approach if you have a humongous advertising budget. Else, it would help if you came up with creative strategies on how you can get influencers to promote you.
Why Influencer Marketing
You may wonder why you should use influencer marketing to promote your business. Well, it has several benefits. Some of the major ones will be discussed in this section.
Instant Exposure
The great thing about influencer marketing is it promotes your business to an instant audience. With one influencer promotion, you will get many eyeballs on your offers. You will never see such a massive response from other types of promotions. Influencer marketing is the only way to get instant exposure without the hefty costs,
Brand Recognition
You’ll also love how it affects your brand. You’ll see that as you promote your brand in influencer websites or social media profiles, more people will know about you. These people may not buy right away, but they will learn and remember you. This works even better if you have unique products and services. The audience may even recommend you to their family and friends.
More Sales
Influencers are called as such because of their massive impact on their audience. Influence does not only pertain to appealing to their taste or memory. It also relates to the effect on behavior. Influencers can encourage people to buy a particular product or service. And if they are on the fence about one product, the influencer can push or stop them from purchasing a product or service. Their opinions on products and services are often highly valued, and their followers listen to them when they recommend products and services.
How to create your influencer marketing strategy
You need an influencer strategy if you want to use this method in promoting your business. After all, influencer marketing doesn’t take effect with only one campaign. You have to look for several influencers to help you. In this section, you’ll learn the exact steps you need to take to get more influencers to promote your business.
STEP 1: Know your target influencers
You cannot just approach an influencer because he has tons of followers. You still need to qualify the influencer to see if he is the right fit for your business. While influencers’ followers are often highly engaged, they may not respond to products and services outside the influencer’s niche. So if you are choosing influencers, be sure that they are relevant to the product or service that you are promoting.
PRO TIP: Analyze markets instead of products. If you are selling an aromatic candle, for example, you don’ have to limit yourself to influencers who have used candles in the past. You can also look for lifestyle influencers whose market will be interested in the product. So look at the market instead of the product when choosing your target influencers.
STEP 2: Implement a strategy to convince them
It is not enough that you found the right influencers. You also need to know how to talk to them – But it is not just about learning how to approach them. You also need to know what to offer them in return for their promotions. You cannot just come them and ask them to do you a favor. You need to give them something first and then ask.
PRO TIP: It may be best to look at the influencer’s content before offering them anything. It will give you an idea of their likes and dislikes. Plus, it will provide you with some ideas on what products you can offer them for their promotions.
STEP 3: Track your goals
You need to know why you used influencer marketing in the first place. Is it to increase sales? Is it to get more traffic? You have to track these variables if you want to see how influencer marketing improves your business.
STEP 4: Develop new and unique strategies
As time goes by, influencers get more offers from companies. It means that they are used to business pitches, and they will most likely not be attracted to another angle. So you have to make your approach more creative if you want to capture their attention. Could you give them a unique offer? Tell them you will make new products with them as an inspiration or host contests and giveaways with them. This is an excellent way to work with them while also nurturing your relationship.
PRO TIP: You can use referral software like OSI Affiliate Software to attract influencers to your business. The best part is it also has an abandoned cart software and referral email templates to help you. It worked even for new sites like Hunting Bow Lab and Drum Set Lab.
STEP 5: Target micro-influencers
You don’t have to target celebrity influencers to be successful. You can target micro-influencers instead. Who are micro-influencers? These are people who have five thousand or fewer followers on social media. They may seem like they don’t have much of an impact, but they do. It may surprise you that the followers are more responsive compared to that of celebrity influencers.
Influencer marketing is effective. But you can only reap its benefits if you can convince an influencer to work with you. It can be challenging in the beginning. But it gets better over time. As you work with some influencers, the doors will open for other influencer connections. If you use these relationships in your business, you’ll find that you can attract tons of traffic and sales without spending much.
