If you’re an active user of social media and follow anyone with a large number of followers, chances are you’ve seen and have been exposed to a strategy known as influencer marketing. That’s because companies continuously seek to capitalize on large demographic of followers to push their product. But how do they do this? And how can this be a useful strategy to help your business?
Let’s break down influencer marketing and its benefits.
Who exactly is an influencer?
An influencer can be anyone. An athlete, actor, mom or yoga instructor—anyone with a large enough following to influence a segment of people or a specific target audience. Influence marketing allows businesses to take advantage of that audience through product placement or representation.
Let’s look at an example of what influencer marketing might look like for you.
Say an athletic brand wants to market their new shoes to a demographic of males, 18-30 years old. Instead of using more conventional ways of marketing like an e-mail blast or commercial, they decide to use influencer marketing and reach out to an athlete with a large social following for help.
After assessing the athlete’s reach and engagement, the athletic company then decides they can offer X amount of dollars to the athlete to feature the product in their posts. As a result, the athletic brand is easily able to feature the new product to their target audience. And the athlete is able to receive payment for promoting the product to their audience, without pushing content the audience would find uninteresting.
Finding the right one.
It’s important to acknowledge that not all influencers are alike as looks can be deceiving. If you don’t know, buying followers isn’t uncommon—unfortunately. So, when researching and selecting an influencer for a possible partnership, it’s important to make sure of a few things.
First, it’s important to ensure the person has a high engagement rate. This means they’re getting a high proportion of likes compared to their following. If a person is getting a very low amount of likes but has a large following this means engagement is low, and it’s possible all those followers may not be real. While followers are important for social proof, it’s not always what matters.
So, before you make a decision based on followers alone, check their engagement rate. You might be surprised!
Secondly, it’s important to find the right personality for your brand. After all, this person will be representing your company. So take your time. Remember, it’s about how active the audience is, not how many followers they have. Finding someone who shares the same values and goals as you and has a small but loyal following may be the answer.
So why is this important?
With the popularity of Instagram, the amount of influencers and equally large social followings, the variety of demographics for companies to choose from are endless. Influencer marketing has taken advantage of this, and will only to continue to increase as companies look to partner with leaders in their field to advertise their product.
If you want to stay current in the marketing game, or if you’re looking for new ways to market your product or services, there’s no doubt that utilizing this strategy will keep your brand competitive in 2017 and beyond.
And, if you’re not seeing the results on social media that you want to see, then make sure you’re not making one of these 7 mistakes on your social media accounts.
And, to make things easier for you, we’ve taken the liberty to compile the best social media tools to help you become more efficient on social media. You can download the short e-book below!
