Influencers are perceived as celebrities on social media and their loyal fans are following their interests. Influencers are changing the face of online marketing, particularly with their social media influence. Your brand can significantly boost your target audience exposure with high engagement without intrusive advertising.
Why Your Brand Requires Influencers?
Consumers rely on recommendations from a third party more often than the brand itself and an influencer works as a mutual friend, linking your brand with your target consumers. Also, when you align with an influencer, target audience and their networks accompany along with them. The loyalty of audience gives an influencer the ability to drive traffic to your site, increase your social media exposure, and flat-out sell your product online.
As present consumers aren’t paying much attention to billboards and commercials, influencer marketing is turning out to be an effectual approach to attract customers and clients. They want to research and hear about the brand from a credible source.
In inbound marketing, where do influencers fit? They generate content about your brand, endorse your brand to the loyal followers, and insert themselves into dialogues surrounding the niche of your brand.
Think about the Audience as a whole or in simple words, don’t just think about your target audience, and obsess over it! In order to discover the ideal influence, you ought to think about the sort of topics, blogs, and tweeters that your audience would follow.
What Defines an Influencer for Your Brand?
Context: Influencers are contextually fit that is why they vary for each brand. While targeting the right influencers for your brand, this is the paramount characteristic.
Reach: Once a person is established being contextually appropriate for the brand, you’d want them to outreach so they can share their content and positive endorsements in a manner that will be taken into consideration.
Actionability: To cause action by the target audience is the influencer’s aptness. When the individuals that are in contextual alignment with your brand and have a far enough reach are targeted, this characteristic seeps in naturally.
Give Your Influencer an Image
Personality type: Determine the person who’d suit and promote your product.
Genre: Select one or two.
Topics: Pick a topic that your ideal influencer sometimes talks about on social media or their blog. You will be referencing this topic when you reach out and explain why the two of you are such a good fit.
Type of reach: Restrict down the channels and the number of followers on those channels.
Where to Look for an Ideal Influencer?
Social Media Monitoring: If you have influencers who are persuasive, your brand can reach to new heights in a matter of time as their audience follows them. Also because what they write aligns with your brand and they talk actively about how much they appreciate your company. Social media monitoring also gives opportunities to get influencers who advocate for the genre you have outlined.
Research Hashtags: The hashtags that your target influencers are using recognize them as by tuning into the conversations around these hashtags, you’ll find talkers, blog topics that are written to intrigue to these influencers as well.
Google Alerts: To discern people who actively write about topics, set alerts for keywords pertaining to your brand.
Social Mention: This enables you to type in your company’s name to find out mentions on several outlets such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
Blogger Outreach
Conceivably, in the wheel of influencers bloggers is the strongest spoke. Start by looking for blogs in your genre and find the niche to determine if they write about relevant post topics. Once the list of contextually relevant bloggers is ready, it’s time to locate their SEO stats and social media information to select the ones that matches the best goal for your brand.
Encourage Content Creation
A true influencer will be really passionate about your brand and can help you gain loyal fans faster than you can ever imagine. S/he would partake in several discussion forums such as Google Plus communities or LinkedIn discussions where s/he can get plenty of content from happy customers by asking them to answer case study questions. Through engaging in discussions with the audience, the influencer can then use their posts or words as quotes and even blog post inspiration!
Compensate Influencers
It is only natural that when someone is going to publicize good things about your brand, they need to be compensated. It can be financially. It can be also done by sharing a post they write about you on your social media outlets as it’ll also get more traffic to their respective site and make them significant as well. Something as simple as a thanking tweet or post will do wonders. As influencers are continuously working hard into conversations about your brand and bringing you big sales, it’s not a bad idea to give them some commission for the clients they bring your way. The point is you want your influencer to feel rewarded, acknowledged, loved, important, or any combination of those.
But even if you forget everything, just retain this crucial bit of advice from Jay Baer: “True influence drives action, not just awareness.”
Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
