Brand promotion can be done in multiple ways. From print to digital, advertisements can be done to generate increased sales for goods and services. Influencer marketing has gained immense popularity owing to its excellent benefits for brands. Research has revealed that 94% of B2B marketers implementing influencer marketing strategies believe it yields highly effective results. Every company should try this method at least once. 

Many brands believe that influencer marketing takes a lot of effort and cost. But in reality, using an influencer marketing tool is easy. You only need to choose a reliable program that promises tasks like creating a creators list, drafting and sending personalized emails, reminders and shipping updates, etc. Compared to other techniques, this method is highly cost-effective.

The Benefits 

Increases brand credibility

It is essentially a way of having someone else promote your brand’s credibility. Thousands of people might be unaware of your product and service, but collaborating with influencers is a great way to make your target audience aware of what products you offer. 

Nowadays, consumers are much more informed and knowledgeable than before. Therefore, firms must establish a strong internet presence and reputation. New consumers are more inclined to believe you if they see well-known influencers endorsing your goods or services.

Higher sales

Influencers can impact positively and motivate the thoughts and actions of their audience. One of the primary uses is the increase in sales. Since people trust influencers, they take CTA seriously (whether asking to sign up for an event or buying a product). This is why brands want to collaborate with influencers with higher engagement on their channel or page.

Valuable insight into the market

Influencers are experts in their fields, and since 77% of consumers depend on their advice, every influencer is inevitably knowledgeable about the most recent trends in their area. Asking an influencer for a recommendation may be incredibly advantageous for your business, whether you are attempting to launch a new product or service or want to increase conversions or engagement.

Cost-effective Option

Brands do not just get video content, but they also get to market their brand through creative content that helps them outperform their rivals. As video content is high in demand, TV ads are expensive for brands. Also, it is not worth the expense. Hence, collaborating with influencers to make short or long videos promoting your product or service is cost-effective. The person will make the video, and you have to pay them for it and keep track of the campaign with the help of any Instagram marketing tool. 

Compel Today’s Youth

The younger generation and new-age audience increasingly embrace social media, which boosts its appeal. Using influencer marketing techniques to connect with millennials and members of Generation Z results in a larger audience and a boost in brand value.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a win-win partnership for both companies and the influencers. In recent years, the strategy has grown at a phenomenal rate. But planning such a campaign calls for a few efforts like finding the right professional, deciding on the budget, and choosing the right influencer marketing tool to help you keep track of your campaign. Collaborating with people is an excellent way for brands to increase trust, raise awareness and drive higher sales without much effort and expense. 

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing whereby you use key leaders to convey your brand’s message to potential customers. The key leaders are influencers that you hire to market your brand on your behalf. Key leaders are influencers who have gained the trust of your target audience.They are called influencers since they are respected by people. The social media influencers open ways for brands to connect with consumers who have greatly shifted to social media.

Why it is set to dominate in 2017

1. They value quality over quantity

Influencer marketing experts believe that the best influencer should have a range of 10 to 100 thousand followers. This will allow for quality engagement and broad reach with high rates of comments and likes. This is in comparison to those with a higher number of followers. Studies show that the rate of engagement of influencers with followers decreases with the increase in a number of their follower. It is important to ensure that you team up with the right influencer for improved business results.

2. Powerful way of conveying your information

Sales are more driven by a word of mouth recommendation more efficiently than sales of paid advertising. Influencers are in a position of winning more audience to your brand than other marketing strategies. This is because they integrate and create unique stories from your brand’s information without skipping any detail. They treat your every post with care since they are aware that their audiences are fickle and can quickly leave. Customers acquired through word of mouth have a higher retention rate. Influencers offer you an opportunity to leverage word of mouth through personalities who are followed and admired by many.

3. They carry out the targeting work for you

Influencer marketing has the ability to do the targeting work for you. The influencers have the ability for the audience to have been highly targeted self-selected already. You do not have to create audience profiles for campaigns within social media, reach out with traditional media tools, or comb a database for a target group. They establish the outreach channels for you. Thus it is necessary to ensure that the influencer has the desired reach and relevance before hiring them. Ensure that you are aware of how and why they communicate and also their tone of voice and style.

4. Influencer outreach strategy

This is a strategy that is beneficial for link building, content promotion, and relationship development. You can increase your response rate by 80% for your top Influencers outreach campaign. You can achieve this by outreaching your blog or post to several top influencers in marketing. For you to achieve the best, you can engage them by sharing their blogs and commenting on their blogs before outreaching your campaign. You can feature them as experts on your blog and let them know via email or other means.Leave it upon them to share, ignore or link to it. A high chance is that they will not ignore. However, the challenge is that most of the top influencers are flooded with many requests and message which can disadvantage you.

5. It is trackable and targetable

The new strategy allows you to store and analyze every social like, picture posted online, and website visit. This helps to yield data, which turns into valuable insights about your advertising performance and target market.

6. The influencer marketing technique is more social

The social influencers exist in all primary social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. They hold the attention of most of the potential customers. This helps to convey your information about your services and products to a large group of the audience on social media. This also benefits consumers in that they are in a position to share with others via social media. This leads to better purchasing decision as their share their experiences with the service or product.Traditionally, most of the customers made their purchase decisions following the advertisement they heard or saw.

7. Consumers are tired of Paid Ads

Consumers are exposed to too many ads to a point that they are unconsciously tuning them out. Only a few number of customers who are concerned with the ads and what is being promoted.People will tend to opt for influencer marketers such as Netflix, AdBlock, and Spotify Premium, where there are no advertisements to interrupt them.

8. Influencer marketing is native advertising

Native advertising places products and brands within the organic content. This helps to create a more powerful marketing solution for brands. It also creates a pleasurable experience for consumers. Traditional advertising, on the other hand, interrupts the consumer experience. A high percent of internet users prefer to learn about a product through content. This will raise the purchase intent with over 50 percent.

9. Influencer marketing helps you SEO

This technique contributes greatly to your search engine ranking. Thus it does not only improve your sales number and build your brand name. The more people comment about your product or brand on the social media the more relevant and popular you will be on the search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc.

10. Prices are rising faster in influencer marketing

Currently, the strategy is an arbitrage due to high numbers of influencers and few entrepreneurs running the influencer campaigns. This means that the influencer promotion is below its real value. The arbitrages will not last long as many people are learning about them. As a result, people will invest in that good closing the arbitrage and raising the prices thus increasing your profit.

Conclusion

The mentioned information shows why influencer marketing has high chances of dominating in the year 2017. However, it being new, many entrepreneurs are still hesitant of employing the strategy. The marketing strategy has numerous benefits to your business such harnessing online narrative to boost influence, cultivate trust among your target customers, and spread positive words about your brand. It has an impact on the customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue. There is need to embrace the new strategy which has a great impact on your business. It requires investment and time but it is worthy. However, before approaching an influencer, it is important to carry out more research to ensure that they have the desired relevance and reach.
 
Author Bio:

Vivian Michaels is a huge tech enthusiast, who likes to write articles on evolving technology. He is a Computer Science graduate from East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania, and has written for various website like ProvenSEO, VentureBeat, etc.

Social media guru and co-author of:

“The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social” Jay Baer said it best when he stated, “True influence drives action, not just awareness.”

Connecting with influencers is the key to generating massive organic traffic that is primed to trust you enough to make a purchase because of that connection.

More and more digital marketers and PR professionals can appreciate the way influencers drive traffic and marketing leads to their doors. Learn how to connect with these passionate individuals in your specific industry, through social media and other platforms, to reach people that may have been previously out of your reach.

Discovering Influencers

Before you can connect to potential influencers, you need to do some homework. Most influencers aren’t hard to spot. They either have massive social media followings or are considered authorities in their fields, or both. However, just because someone is a major player, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to be helpful with your business objectives. You have to research the following:

Who They Are – Read their online content and connect to them on social networks. See what their accomplishments and their values are. This way, you will know if a potential influencer is a good fit to promote your business. You would not want someone who is an influencer in devious black hat techniques to promote your SEO business because their reputation will naturally rub off on you. Make sure you pick individuals with a sterling reputation who can enhance your image, not detract from it.

What Audience They Reach – Analyze the audience that they reach with emphasis on the traffic numbers and demographics. If they aren’t reaching your target demographic then you need to move to a different influencer. However, that also means you have to be very clear about who your target demographic is and why you want to reach them. If you are a startup, this will require significant market research before you even start to look at influencers. In the words of the ancient Greek proverb: “Know thyself” first.

Where To Find Them – You could go one by one on social networks trying to locate key influencers, but that will take a long time. You could also query your existing customers to figure out who influences them and how. However, if you just want to do a broad sweep, there is nothing better than using some online tools to do the task of hunting these people down for you.

Tools to Help You Hunt Down Influencers

Here are five different tools that can get you started:

• Followerwonk – Best known for its “Search Twitter Bios” feature where you can pull up members by keywords in their bios. The list is ranked by social authority and also by the number of followers.
• Traackr – This is a premium tool that provides details about the influencers you pick, like contact information and their relevance to your business model. It also tracks their published content and updates.
• Buzzsumo – This goes across multiple social media platforms. Its main hallmark is ease of use. However, if you want to see if your influencer is active in a particular social media platform you prefer, you can easily tell from this tool.
• Alltop – Tracks the influence of specific blogs so you can find influencers through them. They only track “industry recognized” blogs, so most are already dealing with influencers.
• Linkdex – This paid tool is a SaaS solution that can help with organic marketing. It will analyze search, social, PR, and content data to help digital marketers assess influence.

Connecting With Influencers

Major influencers are solicited by people daily. If you want to be noticed, you can’t be too straightforward. Try to be patient and build a relationship first. Let them get to know you and you them. Familiarize yourself with their website, the topics covered and their general outlook on matters. Try to get under their radar by posting meaningful comments on their entries. Follow them on the channels they’re most active at and promote their content. It provides value to your followers while showing them that you respect their work.

Then, when the time is right, you can deepen the initial contact through a personalized and authentic cold email. You will see that this approach works much better than bulk email campaigns. Appeal to their egos by offering them to guest post for you or interview for your blog. Once you break it down to a one-on-one exchange, it’s much easier to set the stage for a mutual and beneficial relationship. Carefully and strategically laid groundwork will enable you to ask them for a favor in a way that will not come off as pushy or desperate.

Influence Peddling: A Successful Market Strategy

Once you start connecting with influencers in your industry, you will see your own online social influence continue to grow over time. It can be an ideal way to gain massive organic traffic. People are also more likely to trust you, due to your connection and social standing, than if you didn’t have these connections.

By following these tips, you will supercharge your marketing efforts beyond what you may have thought possible and reach new audiences that are eager to make your acquaintance.

Author:

Lisa Michaels is a freelance writer, editor and a striving content marketing consultant from Portland. Being self-employed, she does her best to stay on top of the current trends in the business world. She spends her free time trying out new recipes or reading Scandinavian crime novels. Feel free to reach her on Twitter or LinkedIn.