Influencer Marketing 101 – What you need to know

With tons of brands on the horizon, standing out can be difficult on social media. However, this stiff competition has given rise to various forms of marketing, one of which is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is, by far, one of the best and quickest ways to build your brand online and reach your target audience. Here’s what you need to know about influencer marketing: 

The job of an influencer

An influencer can affect the prospect’s decision to buy something based on their knowledge, online clout, relationship with the audience, and other factors. An influencer also has a hardcore following of people in a particular niche. 

Back then, brands would rely on celebrities to market their products. However, today, influencers who have clout online but not necessarily offline seem to get hired by brands to expand their presence. 

Basically, the brand and the influencer both win, by giving each other what they want. You pay the influencer and your brand gets to put out content to a brand new audience that is likely to hold the influencer’s opinion in high regard. 

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is fundamentally, a type of social media marketing uses individual brand endorsements and product mentions. Influencers build a dedicated following on social media platforms from scratch. You are essentially approaching an influencer to boost your social proof. The more followers the influencer has the bigger your potential audience.

What are the benefits of Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing has a plethora of benefits. Here are the main ones: 

Helps improve brand awareness

As you may have expected, it helps you boost your brand awareness. Instagram users can find out about your brand and understand your content and what you do. If you want to maximize your influencer marketing strategy, you should hire an influencer marketing agency and provide valuable content that helps the influencer and their audience.

Reach your target audience easily

Choose influencers relevant to your niche and post content that people who are interested, will benefit from. You do not have to invest extra money in finding your audience if you find the right influencer. After all, Instagram plays host to millions of users globally, so finding your audience should not be an issue. 

Easy to build trust

This is an important one. It is vital to build trust with your audience and increase your credibility. Since your target audience takes the influencer’s opinion seriously, you can use your content to build trust with the audience. If they benefit from your content, you can build your credibility. 

Easy to build a valuable partnership

Collaborating with another influencer, brand, or content creator, especially when you plan on doing it long-term can help forge some powerful relationships. You could do more collaborations, get more work via referral, host events, and grow together. 

How to go about building an influencer marketing strategy?

Well, now you know some of the benefits of using influencer marketing. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you build your influencer marketing strategy: 

Be clear with your goals and plan your brand’s message

Influencer marketing helps when you have your goals and message ready. Once you have these things in check, you can run a campaign and tweak it depending on what you want out of it. While every brand wants to build an online presence and increase sales, it is important to focus on specific needs that you think the campaign can take care of. 

The other thing you need to determine is your brand’s message. Remember, you are going for a niche influencer with a niche audience. You need to figure out what you want the message to be, how you want people to receive it, and how your audience can benefit. 

You need a budget

Even before you search for influencers, you need to keep a budget aside for compensation. As you look for your ideal influencer, you need to set aside a budget that you think you will need to pay them. Remember that they are individuals, which means they have multiple clients and may fall back on their correspondence from time to time.

Do you research 

As expected, you need to spend a good chunk of time researching your influencers. Ask yourself what kind of influencer you want, the niche, the number of followers, and so on. Looking for influencers from different social media platforms is an excellent idea. However, it may not be the best thing to do when you are starting out. 

Instead, stick to one social media platform in the beginning and make your way to other platforms. 

As far as payment goes, you have to consider the rates the influencers you want typically charge. Niche influencers typically accept products as payment. Some work for themselves while others are represented by an agency. As a rule of thumb, set big budgets for popular influencers. However, at the end of the day, it depends on what you are going for, how popular your influencer is, the type and length of the marketing campaign, and so on. 

Conclusion

As you can see, influencer marketing is a terrific idea if Instagram growth is a priority for you. Be sure to do your research, fix your goals and message, and set aside a budget to get the best results.