In recent years, influencer marketing has seen unprecedented growth in the digital business landscape. Influencer marketing is now a mainstream form of online marketing and a marketing buzzword that all top brands and businesses are getting into these days. Yet, there are still people who don’t really understand what influencer marketing is all about and its full potential in driving sales for all businesses.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing in simple terms is defined as a brand collaborating with an online influencer or celebrity to market its list of products or services. Influencer marketing is an effective marketing strategy because of the high amount of trust that social influencers have built with their following.
Benefits of influencer marketing
Improves brand awareness and audience reach
According to Bob Kehoe in an article entitled ‘11 Essential Influencer Marketing Facts & Statistics‘, results shows that 74% of people trust social networks to guide them in their purchasing decisions. This percentage also includes getting reviews and suggestions from their friends, family and influencers on social media channels.
Likewise, customers who rely on the recommendations of influencers are estimated to be at 49%, which is nearly half of all potential customers in the market. Influencer marketing in general is able to expand your reach and positioning in the market.
When partnering with a particular influencer in an industry or niche market, you will then have a direct line to the people they influence and to others who are highly interested in your products or services. Your business would also be able to cut through all the noise and directly reach to a specific audience group in the market.
Helps build brand trust and show authority
Whenever a celebrity, influencer, or industry expert shares content about a brand on social media, it helps to create a sense of instant credibility for the brand they are promoting.
The same goes for any business as well, if you are able to partner with an individual with industry authority to notice and recognize your brand and its list of products and services that it offers, it will definitely foster a perception that the brand itself is trustworthy and an industry leader in their field. Building trust and authority is critical in today’s business landscape, especially in a digital era.
Provides and implement long term strategy benefits
Influencer marketing works the same as how a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy would work. Results take time. Brands or businesses should not expect to see a massive increase in their sales figures right after or with only a single influencer post. Instead, brands should view it as a long term investment and strategy based on relationship building and not just from a one-off promotion.
Building trust between brands and consumers takes time, and likewise the same also applies to both influencers and influencer marketing.
Creates and sets social media trends
Influencers are the driving force behind newly created trends and movements. They often share with their audiences new ideas and reviews on both brands and products. Therefore, by aligning your brand or business with a trendsetting influencer, it shows that your business is an innovative leader in the market or industry.
Influencers comparison case study: Done right and wrong
Gary Vaynerchuk
Known as a serial entrepreneur, investor, the CEO of VaynerMedia and VaynerSports, writer, lecturer and deemed as one of the greatest marketers in the world. With over a million followers on his Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, Gary is an expert when it comes to all things marketing and social media.
He was also one of the first to introduce innovations into both digital marketing and social media while managing his New York-based companies, VaynerMedia & VaynerX.
His social media accounts are filled with entrepreneurial wisdom and practical advice in video formats, that gets likes, retweets and shares on all channels.
What he has done well: Creates long and short relevant original marketing videos that seek to educate, teach, critique and inspire all entrepreneurs, leaders and business owners from different industries.
Nuseir Yassin
Nuseir Yassin is a video blogger well known for his platform ‘Nas Daily’ that creates 1,000 daily one-minute-long videos as content to educate and entertain the masses on various topics and issues from around the world.
Just like Gary, Nas Daily‘s social media presence also has a mass following of over a million followers, with video content that generates likes, retweets and reshares.
What he has done well: Adds in entertaining content that are not just business-oriented, but also on various well-known facts, information and more about the world that we live in.
Factors that can lead to a downfall of an influencer
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Focusing on financial values instead of building trust
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Not being authentic
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Misaligned values between real and reel life
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Fake followers
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Being involved in sagas
Influencer marketing for 2021
Micro-influencers and companies today should focus more on being authentic and creating high-quality content not made only for the masses, but also aimed towards their target audiences in mind.
Start off by going through the following steps below:
1) Choose a niche
Define what is your audience niche. Without this step, you will have definitely have a hard time building an audience of engaged people who are interested in your message.
Ask yourself these set of questions:
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What do you love?
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What are you good at?
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What are you passionate about?
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What are your interests?
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What weird quirks do you have?
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What do you enjoy?
Make sure to select a topic that is something that you truly enjoy, as this will eventually inspire you to keep going on even when things are hard.
2) Strategically generate traffic
The more traffic you generate on social media, the bigger the influence. As your following grows, other people will start to follow you too, and eventually, you will be able to leverage the power of social proof to reach an even bigger audience of fans and followers.
Here are some tips for effective ways to generate more social media traffic:
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Make it easy to share your content with your audience and their network
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Tag others and use the right hashtags to increase visibility
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Post content during times when your audience are more active
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Consistently interact with the audience and always provide value to them
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Invest in social media advertising to expand your audience reach
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Write a creative and catchy call to action
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Engage with other industry influencers to boost both authority and credibility
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Establish good media relations for both publicity and promotions
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Mention social media accounts in emails, newsletters, welcome messages and outreach templates.
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Create visuals like images, videos, infographics and make them stand out to increase engagement and shares
- Consider engaging your audience in other places like hosting webinars, video interviews, and more.
3) Make it easier for brands to contact you
Different brands find influencers on social media using different methods. They could search for relevant hashtags, keywords posts, and location on a platform to see which accounts pop up that have the best engagement rates.
Make it easy for them to contact you by making sure your contact information is clear and visible on all channels.
In addition, add a compelling bio that announces that you are an influencer and open to collaborations. That way, brands will immediately know whom to contact once they have any slots or partnership opportunities available in the future.
Hashtaqs has worked and partnered with social media influencers from various industries to drive brand awareness, promotions, customer loyalty and audience reach beyond existing customer database and network.
Hashtaqs uplifts business through brand transformation and marketing advisory and implementation online and offline, internationalisation through business matching and community development.
Our consultancy work is supportable with the funding scheme of up to 70% for local SG businesses. Contact us for a consultation at +65 8868 1418 or email us at [email protected]. For more info, visit www.hashtaqs.com.
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