Most businesses have the same question in mind, how can we convert everyday visitors into loyal paying customers?
Influencer marketing has become one of the most popular and effective marketing strategies to build relationships with top social influencers to increase brand outreach, brand awareness, SEO, leads and sales.
With the right kind of social influence, brands can easily build large, loyal audiences.
In this blog, we will teach you profitable ways to use influencer marketing to increase all of your online marketing efforts.
The How To Guide For Influencer Marketing:
1. Find the Right Influencers
You want to find people that your audience already knows and trusts.
If you are a small business then it is more cost efficient to use micro-influencers, they don't charge a huge amount of money (if any at all). Using micro-influencers is also a great way to build a long-term relationships for your campaigns (How Much Does Influencer Marketing Cost?).
Important Questions To Ask:
- What kind of voice do they have?
- Do they know and understand your industry?
- Are they on social media? (twitter, instagram, facebook, linkedIn, etc.)
- Is their content similar with your brand and products?
- Does the influencer get a response from their audience?
- How engaged are they?
- Do they get likes, shares, comments, questions?
- Do they know their audience well?
- Do they have a blog?
- Who is their target audience?
In your influencer marketing strategy, marketers need to reach out to social media influencers regularly. The more frequently you do this, the more visible and engaged you become with potential brand influencers.
Tip: You want 70% of their content to be focused on one specific topic!
2. Demand Attention
You must stand out from the crowd and make them want to share your brand message, give them a story they can't resist.
Once you have narrowed down a list of potential social influencers to represent your marketing campaign, you want to focus on building a relationship with them and earning their trust.
Ask the influencer if you can help them in any way!
How To Get Influencer Attention:
- Share their content on social media (twitter, instagram, facebook, etc.)
- Comment on their social platforms
- Start a conversation with them
- Like their posts, pictures, videos on social media
- Write more content of your own and share it on all social media sites
- Make your brand more visible
- Incorporate their content in your blog (use backlinks to connect to their content)
- Use popular hashtags
3. Tell a Visual Story
TechCrunch reported that Facebook users watched an average of 8 billion videos per day. Woah!
Share your brand message with pictures and rich media so its easier for your fans to connect with you. It has been proven that customers tend to feel more connected when they can watch real videos and see actual benefits from using a product, service or anything that makes their lives easier.
Create short video clips or live videos with some awesome tips about your brand or products and share them on every social media site to gain more brand awareness, followers and audience engagement.
Marketers should use any type of visual content in their marketing campaign to evoke emotion, which results in higher influencer outreach, followers, etc.
4. Collaborate About Content Marketing Strategy
Consumers engage better with influencer-generated and user-generated content (great form of social proof), instead of content shared directly by brands.
Give your influencer the creative freedom to write their own content about your brand, and then collaborate with your brand influencer to find the best mix of content that satisfies your brand, influencer and audience.
Create content for marketing platform and share it on every social media platform. Make sure to add it to your blog!
You can never have too much content!
Remember to AMPLIFY every piece of content you create.
5. Increase Audience Communication
A lot of times when influencers get a huge influx of inquires about a product or service they previously shared on social media, they have a difficult time responding to each person.
Marketers need to watch for audience responses and make sure to connect and respond to all followers, which can dramatically increase brand advocates, followers, and overall sales.
The more engaged you can become with your target audience, marketers then build more long-term relationships and have greater company reach.
Buffer is a great marketing platform that connects all of your social media platforms to easily schedule posts, track the performance of your content, and manage all your accounts in one place.
6. Boost Brand Credibility
You can recruit influencers to participate in content that you share or cross-post on your own channels.
Influencers can create videos of them unboxing a product or share a video with their following showing how it enhanced their life or made parts of their life easier.
When an industry expert or thought leader shares your product/brand on their social channels, that boosts your credibility through the roof.
7. Rank Higher in Search Engines
Find the most relevant and strategic keywords for your content. You can use keyword research tools to help you find the best targeted keywords for your brand or products.
Once you figure out what keywords you should be using, incorporate them into your content marketing and amplification strategy and then make sure your influencer is using the targeted keywords in all of their content, blogs, social media.
Including backlinks in content is another great way to get better search engine optimization.
"The biggest brands in the world rely on user-generated content and social media mentions heavily, because it makes them more visible on Google. You can do the same for your brand."
In Conclusion
Dedicate a few hours a week on social media to build relationships and increase your brand visibility. Building relationships with potential influencers takes time. Take these tips and start increasing your sales, reach and engagement!
