Do you want a YES? Of course, you want to convince and influence is of the greatest interest. Influencer Marketing is the method. What is Influencer Marketing? What are the benefits?
How-to? Here you get the answers.
The advantages are that you simply get much more value per spent marketing crown compared to other form of paid marketing. In addition to increasing the reach of the company’s message, Influencer Marketing can help to strengthen the brand and the relationship with the customer. The influencer can also create new engaging content in the form of text, images and movies.
In the PR industry, this is nothing new. The new thing is digitalisation has created new types of influencers, people with large networks and influence, and new ways of communicating.
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What is Influencer Marketing?
Today, it is not easy to get distribution without a large amount of money, regardless of channel. We have to earn our audience because the media noise is so great. The recipient chooses what to take in and Influencer Marketing is another way to reach a relevant target group.
Influencer Marketing is a collaboration with influential people, who already have the target group you want to reach. An influencers can let you, for a fee or other reason, use their audience to reach out with your message. But it’s not advertising, it’s something else. Influencer Marketing is closely related to Content marketing. Both are methods for building relationships with the target group and increasing the credibility of a brand.
But it is not a shortcut to success! If done wrong, the effect can be the opposite. If a paid influencer takes too many sponsorships, its credibility will diminish, so be aware of how much involvement the influencer has. If you sponsor an influencer, it must be stated in the post, otherwise you will violate the Marketing Act.
Who is an influencer?
It is a person with influence over others in a certain area. The typical one is a blogger who uses social media for his influence. There are also influencers that are not digital but have influence for other reasons. Examples of influencers are celebrities, authorities in one area, people with a large contact network, expert or journalists.
The most common paid influencer turns to B2C. For B2B, the impact is more indirect and those who are really influencers may be more difficult to chart.
An influencer has a large audience, social channels with many followers. It engages its audience, and its audience. It is relevant to its field.
How do I get started?
The first step is to define your audience, who you want to reach and what results you want. If you have a budget, you can choose paid influencers, otherwise find a collaboration with influencers that provide both value other than pure money.
The second step is to find the right influencers and make a list of these. You are based on your offer and your target group analysis. See where you are in the industry you are in. What are you seeing and hearing? Who are active in social channels, in industry magazines and at conferences? Don’t forget your customers and suppliers! Make a list of these. Known influencers know other influencers. Ask them for tips!
The better you know your target audience, the easier it is to find the right influencer. If your target group is older than 45 years, perhaps more traditional influencers who have a more analogous influence right. For younger people, however, it is the digital influencers that are right.
There are tools to find out which ones are popular online. A good but expensive tool is BuzzSmo, it is free for a couple of searches but it costs. Twitter has great search capabilities to sort out those who have many followers. You can also search Facebook and see who has groups with many followers.
There are several companies working with Social Media Influencers. They can help find the right influencer. Follow the influencer for a period of time to see what they write and publish. Check that it is the right target group and what questions their audience is asking.
The third step is to contact and process selected influencers by making themselves known by liking their posts, commenting and sharing. Build trust with the influencer and develop a plan for activities that will allow you to work together.
To succeed with Influencer Marketing, the influencer you work with must have the confidence of your audience. If you’re just looking for a big spread, digital advertising on Facebook or Google Adwords might be better. The success factors with an influencer are what commitment it can create and how relevant it is to your target audience.
It may even be that the right influencer is any local person in a niche area, a Micro influencer, who has a close relationship with a smaller, but right, group of followers. These often have a higher credibility in the small group than large influencers.
In any case, it is best to meet the influencer IRL, in real life e.g. at any event.
There must be values for both parties that are not just money for lasting collaboration with an influencer.
For an influencer, it is important that its personal brand is not adversely affected by the partnership. Therefore, you must be clear with your own message, target group in a collaboration and the way to communicate.
You may well have a relationship with several micro influencers in different areas. By building the relationship over time, the collaboration will be stronger and the effect greater.
Keep in mind that social media is short-lived and that someone’s Instagram feed may have a duration of a few hours or a day. If, on the other hand, someone mentions you in a link or comment in a blog post on their website, then the duration is a completely different one, and the Google ranking!
Develop cooperation
Collaboration with an influencer does not have to stop at spreading and engaging. It can also be about product development and common brands. It can be good for a brand if the right influencer chooses to collaborate with a brand for a long time. As a company, you must have your basic values clear to you, then the relationship with the influencer becomes clearer.
