Influencer Marketing : How To Make The Most Of It

Getting celebrities to endorse your products has been an effective marketing campaign since the nineties. In the wake of the digital boom, influencers changed and although celebrities are still being nudged to endorse a brand, market gurus, thought leaders, bloggers, and social media stars are especially gaining prominence as influencers for building brand awareness, expanding audience base, increasing sales, or even increase trust among the target audience. Indeed, influencer marketing is an effective way to strongly connect with your buyers.

Even 37% of the buyers themselves state that their inclination towards buying a certain product or trusting a particular company increases if they see the influencers they follow, endorsing or promoting them. Realizing this, nearly 65% of the businesses have planned to increase their influencer marketing budget this year and if you are also among them, here is how you can make the most of influencer marketing.

Define The KPIs And Goals

Before getting started with any type of marketing strategy, it is imperative to define the key performance indicators and the goals that need to be achieved through the campaign. Same is the case with influencer marketing. The entire strategizing, starting from mapping the targeted audience and creating a user persona to finding the right influencers for that audience segment and creating content accordingly, should always revolve around your main goals. One needs to identify what he/she wants to accomplish. Also, know the key performance indicators from the start to track and monitor your influencer marketing results.

Some of the common goals for influencer marketing include increasing brand awareness, expanding the audience base, building loyalty, increasing sales, generating more leads, engaging a targeted audience, etc. KPIs could be the engagement, reach, likes/follows, real-time visitors, dwell time, sales, etc.

Map Your Audience

Depending on the goals that one wants to accomplish, one needs to map the audience and what segment needs to be targeted through the influencer marketing campaign. It is important to know what type of audience you want to connect with through the influencers. A buyer persona can help in accomplishing this task. Once you know who your target audience is, finding the people who have an influence on them would be easier.

Plan Content Strategy

A great influencer marketing campaign requires a great content strategy. Having defined the goals, identified the target audience, and creating the buyer persona, identifying the type of content to deliver is the next step in the process. One might have an audience that is hungry for video content while others may find their buyer persona focusing on blogs and articles. Some might find that their target audience is hungry for knowledge while others may feel their audience is most active on Instagram, browsing through images. This would guide your chosen digital marketing company to plan the content strategy.

Remember, our entire influencer marketing campaigns centers on the content that we are delivering. Having a well-strategized content plan according to the audience and goals can help in realizing various goals. In fact, the content promoted by influencers swayed over 26% of the consumers to make a purchase, thus achieving the goal of increasing revenue.

Choose The Right Medium of Influence

A common mistake that most of the marketers make while incorporating influencer marketing is to choose the wrong medium. In order to make the most of your influencer marketing efforts, it is important that you choose the right medium of influence. Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are the most popular mediums for influencer marketing. In addition to that, one can choose influencers that have a strong blog post following or are active on different other platforms depending on where your target audience's interest lies.

Identify Those That Influence Them

Knowing the audience, your content strategy and the medium of content delivery can help in finding the ideal influencers to curate your influencer marketing strategy with. First thing is to identify the type of influencer you need based on the content strategy that you have planned to adopt. These could be bloggers, thought leaders, social media celebrities, industry experts, PR influencers, editors, and many more. The success of your social media marketing depends on the influencer that you choose.

The audience you are planning to target also helps you identify the right influencer. Here's how you can find the right influencers through your audience:

• Via Mentions: Research and study the activities of the audience that you have chosen to target. At some point or the other, they tend to mention the people they follow, comment on their posts, re-share their content pieces or mention them in comments, etc.
• Via Topics: The topics that your audience is investing its time on can help you find the influencer to promote your brand. Once you know what things interest your audience, you can easily find influencers that are leaders in this forte. Search the related keywords and know which influence is getting the most traffic for that.

• Via Tools: There are a number of tools out there that can help you find the right influencer in the industry. BuzzSumo, Deep Social, Klout, BuzzStream, Klear, etc., are some great tools for identifying the right influencers.

In a world where people are making a majority of their purchase decisions based on the recommendation of their peers and even more by recommendation from someone they admire, influencer marketing has certainly become an effective way to achieve various business goals. And it's not just the worshipped names of celebrities and reckoned personalities, even micro influencers are able to drive any influencer marketing campaign to success with their niche following.