Increase Your Brand Awareness with Influencer Marketing
Want to know one of the best ways to promote your business? Influencers! Nowadays, businesses cannot afford to ignore the popularity and importance of partnering with social media influencers to showcase their brands. Unlike old marketing methods that require thoughtful creative and content planning, audience research, and marketing strategies - influencer marketing uses influencers as a means to promote a product or service.
Influencer marketing is a great way to help reach new audiences, increase brand awareness, and boost your CTR, ROAS and your bottom line. We’ve all seen it - maybe it’s our favorite Instagram mama raving about the latest baby must-have or LeBron James wearing a pair of Beats by Dre headphones. Either way, those marketing efforts work! Because influencers have a built-in user base and when they’re using a product, we all think, “hey, it must be a good product” and then silly us, we go out and buy it!
However, influencer marketing is not as easy as approaching an influencer and asking them to promote you. You may have done that already. If you did, you'd find that most influencers will ignore your messages unless you give them a reason to do you a favor. In this article, you'll learn some ways on how you can launch an influencer marketing program that is designed for success.
Find the Right Influencers
First, the influencer must be relevant to your niche or the influencer must belong to a niche that is highly relevant to your business. Second, learn to assess the influence level of the influencer.
Both of these actions require research on your behalf. Ask yourself these questions when searching for an influencer for your brand:
Is the influencer you’re after compatible with your product (i.e. vegan, health conscious, a parent, etc.)?
Does your influencer have a loyal following? Say an influencer has 1 million followers on Instagram but they’re getting roughly 1,000 likes per post - what does that tell you? It means their following isn’t loyal.
Start With Objectives
What’s your ultimate goal here? Do you want to drive more traffic? Do you want to increase your sales? Do you want more brand exposure? Whatever your goal is, be specific. Rather than saying you want to simply increase sales, say that you want to increase your sales by $10,000 by the end of the influencer campaign.
Having a clear objective, gives you direction and a number to focus on. This way, you’ll make all the necessary steps to meet that objective!
Be Creative in Your Approach
Influencers know their worth and this is the reason why they can get thousands of followers. They know what makes their audience tick and they know how to capture their attention. Because of this, you also need to be creative in your approach if you want to win them over!
Collaborate. Host an online event with the influencer. This is a great opportunity to do a giveaway with your brand. You will provide the product and all the influencer has to do is to promote your brand to their followers. You can then ask their audience to follow your brand (maybe for even more giveaways!).
Another way to collaborate with an influencer is to ask them to promote your business with a unique discount code. Their followers will then use the unique code at checkout and viola! You’ll have a new customer (plus a name and email address to go along with it!).
Can I Afford an Influencer?
We get it, you may not have the LeBron James level of a marketing budget, but don’t let that stop you from finding the perfect influencer for your brand! We’ve found that mid-tier influencers (with approximately 500k followers) charge around $800 per post.
So think about this, if your e-commerce company is paying $800 per post and your average order value is $50, you can see how the numbers add up in your favor!
Another suggestion is to leverage nano and micro influencers. These are influencers that have roughly 1k to 50k followers. Although their follower count is relatively small, they are highly active. Their audience responds well to the influencer's request because they feel that they belong to a small group of similar interests.
We also suggest influencer whitelisting. When you whitelist an influencer, they grant the advertiser access to their Instagram account and Facebook page, allowing brand partners to optimize paid media behind influencer content (turned into ads). Optimizations may include things like editing copy on the influencer’s post to add a discount code, testing various taglines and CTAs, adding/ removing a giveaway for free products and much more.
A Few Great Examples of Whitelisted Influencer Ads
Influencer marketing may not be for every brand or business. But, putting it simply, people trust people! Studies have shown that younger generations are almost downright hostile towards traditional advertising techniques, while the power of online influencers to sway public opinion and establish new trends continues to grow.
If you decide to go the influencer marketing route, know that influencers are an extension of your company's public presence, so being sure their aesthetic aligns with your brand is crucial in guaranteeing digital marketing success. If you’re still hesitant or have questions, feel free to reach out!