Have you considered using influencers to promote your product or service? Here we go through everything from what the phenomenon means to how to think and plan before contacting an influencer.
We also list some common mistakes you should avoid in your collaboration.
Contents
Marketing then and now
Marketing the product or service your company has is fundamental to attracting customers. In the past, advertisements in newspapers, posters in the city and advertising in the mailbox were the most common ways of marketing themselves.
Today, social media is at least as effective where you can reach hundreds of thousands of people with your advertising with just a few thousand dollars.
Besides the fact that you are most likely to have your own social media channels, it may sometime be relevant to have collaborations with influencers. This type of marketing is gaining in popularity, thanks in part to being more personal while reaching out to thousands of people.
Influencers – what is it?
Influencers can be said to be an umbrella term for those people who have built up large digital channels with many followers. Digital channels include everything from YouTube and Facebook to Instagram, and its content and main character can be said to exert influence over its crowd of followers.
The followers simply appreciate what the influencer is doing in their channel and are inspired by this flow of information. Building a digital channel with many followers takes time and requires a lot of commitment, it can take years to build a large channel and gain followers’ confidence.
To collaborate with influencers
Creating collaborations for marketing purposes is something that is in the interests of both the entrepreneur and the influencer. On the one hand, the company makes visible its service or product and on the other, the influencer gets paid for the job they put in to market.
When you want to start collaborating with someone who has great social channels, consider the following:
Who or what influencers do you want to collaborate with?
Which influencers have a target group that is interested in your service or product?
Does the person really have the number of followers claimed? It is easy to inflate statistics, followers and traffic on the internet.
Does your brand really fit with the person’s brand?
Does the person seem genuine or does he bring in any product just to make money? It is sooner or later seen by the followers who can then lose confidence, which in turn means that the value for your company is not at all the same.
Think about why the influencer should be interested in working with you! Again, genuine cooperation and interest in your product is important. Customers notice it.
Stand out as serious – follow the rules!
When considering using what is known as influencer marketing, it is important that you follow the rules to appear serious.
The time when a company could offer a product for free to a blogger in exchange for a post is over, today serious collaborations cost money and rightly so.
Few companies would dream of requesting that a daily newspaper, without compensation, publish an advertisement in their newspaper.
Thanks to increased awareness and greater regulation of the industry, cooperation is expected to go professional, both from the company and the influencer.
Therefore, do not see your collaboration as a simple and free way to get marketing. The rumor is spreading soon that you are not willing to pay for the service, which in the long run can damage your company’s brand.
Collaborations are chosen with care
Influencers choose their partnerships with care, which means that you as an entrepreneur should do this as well.
Thanks to stricter rules for advertising, it is now important to clarify when a post is sponsored and not, for increased transparency and to avoid stealth advertising.
In other words, what the influencer puts out in their channels is something they must be able to stand for and therefore it is important that the product or service goes hand in hand with their values.
So expect that your own company’s values and sustainability perspective can play into whether or not the influencer chooses to cooperate with you. Therefore, make sure that you are transparent and clear in your company.
Common mistakes
It’s not always the case when it comes to social media marketing. Below we have compiled the four most common mistakes companies make in influencer marketing. Therefore, consider the following points and avoid that your marketing campaign does not live up to expectations.
1. No clear purpose
It is not always the main purpose to sell products or services, but it may as well be to increase your own followers or get your brand out. Be sure to define in advance why you want to collaborate with an influencer and for what purpose. This way, you have an easier time following up the results and see if it gave what you wanted.
2. Failure to do research
It is common to choose influencers that you have in your own feed or that your friends follow.
But even though you find the person’s flow interesting, it is not certain that the followers this person has are interested in what your company has to offer. Therefore, do a thorough research and try to find an influencer that matches your company’s values and target group rather than your own preferences.
3. The influencer knows best
Once a collaboration is established, it is easy for the entrepreneur to try to step in and control and influence the influencer’s work. After all, it’s all about the company’s products, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, the influencer knows best what works in their channels and what their followers like. Therefore, hand over the artistic and trust that your campaign will be really good, after all it is what you pay for.
4. The expectation
It is easy to imagine that the collaboration should generate directly in large sales figures, but as with any sales strategy, it takes some time. Therefore, think long term and that if it does not lead to sales directly it can give your company new followers in your social media. Followers who can then be converted to customers.
Influencer marketing is here to stop, but probably higher demands for genuineness will probably be set in the future. Follow the advice you received and grind on your marketing campaigns.
