Top Influencer Marketing Strategies for the Social Business

Influence marketing is a strategy in which a brand collaborates with someone who has a strong influence on a highly-targeted audience. The influencer promotes the brand’s product to its large and engaged followers.

A successful influencer marketing strategy increases the traffic to your website and also gets new clients and customers for your business.

According to research, enterprises earn at least $6.50 for every $1 they invest in influencer marketing, and the top 13 percent of them earn more than $20.

As influencer marketing is highly lucrative, you need to invest your time, effort, and money to learn as much as you can about the different strategies to reach and communicate with different influencers in a professional manner.

The influencers get countless messages and offer from several brands and companies. Therefore you need to stand out from the crowd to get their attention to build a real relationship with that person.

 

Here are the top influencer marketing strategies which you can follow right away to make your social business successful:

 

1. Define your goals

The first and the most important thing to do while creating a marketing strategy is to define and know your goals. While communicating with the top influencers of a particular niche you need to be extremely clear about your goals and objectives.

It’s difficult to work with an influencer if you don’t know what you exactly want to achieve. Defining your goals and objectives helps you to understand which metrics you need to track and monitor to measure the overall return on investment of your marketing campaign.

Some of the goals which you can include in your Influencer Marketing Strategy include:

• Brand Awareness
• Getting traffic to your online store
• Lead generation
• Getting more sales
• Increase social media followers
• Promotion a product or service

The goals help you to measure the success of your marketing strategy, and what changes and improvements you need to do to optimize the campaigns further.

 

2.  Product Launches with Influencers

Most of the big brands and companies work with celebrities for any new product launching. But, if you are a small company or a young start-up, then collaborating with social media influencers can provide you with much better results as compared to celebrities.

The reason is that the celebrities have a huge fan following with diverse interest, and demographics.

Their endorsements are not much effective because they do not target a single niche. More importantly, the followers know that their favorite celebrity is promoting a product or services because they have been paid to do so.

Social media influencers are considered an expert in a particular niche, and if they promote a product related to it, then the audience is more likely to trust them. Therefore, the chances of conversions increase significantly.

According to a report by Google, more than 70% of the YouTube subscribers trust YouTube influencers more as compared to television and movie celebrities.

Here is an example of a product launch with an Instagram influencer.

Image Source – Pixlee

 

3. Collaborate with Influencers who like your brand and product

If a particular influencer is already talking about your business without any endorsement, that means they like your product. This could be an opportunity to leverage such social media influencers because their audience is related to your niche.

If you can create an influencer marketing campaign solely focusing on a particular influencer audience, then the chances of succeeding increases significantly.

For example, one such brand that effectively uses this influencer marketing strategy is Airbnb. Recently, when they came to know that the popular and well-known American singer Lady Gaga had used their services, they reached out to her for an endorsement.

Their marketing campaign was successful as one of the images received more than half a million likes.

Image Source – Instagram

 

4. Allow influencers to use their creativity

The most important thing in influencer marketing is the content. Most of the social media influencers are very talented and creative with an ability to create awesome content.

As a business, there are several benefits? You don’t need to spend your time and effort in coming with content ideas. The influencer manages all the content generation work.

Therefore, you need to give your influencer ample creative freedom to come up with unique ideas.

In a study, it was found that more than 77 percent of the social media influencers prefer working with companies that let them use their creative freedom.

For example, Maybelline gives complete freedom to the influencers to promote their products using their creativity.

Image Source – Instagram

 

5. Long-term partnerships

Effective collaboration is very important in influencer marketing. You need to find the right influencers who can work with your brand for a long time to make your campaign successful.

There are many companies which work with the same influencer in almost all of their marketing campaigns. The only criteria you need to fulfill is that their audience interest and your product niche align together.

For example, the brand Johnson and Johnfulfillson have been collaborating with Instagram influencers Joy Cho and Oh Joy for more than three years. The influencer promotes its colorful BAND-AIDS and helps J&J to get more sales and reach new audiences.

Image Source – Instagram

 

6. Leverage Micro-Influencers

The influencers with a less number of highly engaged followers are known as micro-influencers. According to a report, more than 82% of the online users are more likely to trust the suggestions of a micro-influencer as compared to the bigger ones.

Image Source – Experticity

The micro-influencers have a small following which helps them in making stronger relationships with their followers. Their audience is more engaged as compared to the other more prominent influencers.

The micro-influencers are also very cost-effective as more than 87% of them charge below $500 per post.  

 

7. Create your marketing strategy around social media influencers

There are several online marketing strategies to promote a business; however, it’s important to include influencer marketing as one of your strategies as it provides great results.

According to Google Trends, influencer marketing has increased significantly, and traditional print advertising has declined in the last five years.  

Image Source – Google Trends

There are many brands and companies which creates exclusive products for their influencers provide them to try and give reviews before launching to the market.

 

8. Track your campaigns and measure your success

If you want to make your influencer marketing campaign successful, you need to use the necessary tools to monitor your campaigns effectively.

In fact, more than 78 percent of the digital marketers and business owners find it difficult to calculate the overall return on investment of their marketing campaigns.

Image Source – Statista

As a marketer, you need to track the success of your goals by monitoring different metrics such as likes, engagement, shares, downloads, CPC, and many more.

Analyze each of your strategies and make changes to your campaigns according to the requirements to get the best results.

 

The Final Say

Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to increase your sales and gain credibility with your target market.

The above-discussed strategies will help you to implement successful marketing campaigns. If done incorrectly, you can potentially waste a large amount of money, time, effort and might hurt the brand image.

The secret of a successful influencer marketing campaign is all about collaborating with individuals who share the same ideas as you. Build a meaningful relationship so that it can both your brand as well as the influencer.