Influencer marketing uses key leaders or online influential people’s to deliver the brand’s message to a large audience. It chooses persons with large social media followings who can influence your target audience and then create marketing campaigns to attract them.
Influencers are not celebrities. They can be anyone from a youtuber to a blogger but they must have large social media fan following.
Instead of directly marketing to a large number of customers, it’s better to pay or hire some influencers to get out the word for you.
Take an example of a famous YouTuber Gaurav Chaudhary, who is commonly known as Technical Guruji who collaborates with all major technology companies and promotes their brands. He is one of the top influencers in India.
A popular example of a successful influential marketing campaign is of Hard Rock café. On the occasion of World Hamburger Day, they collaborated with a popular travel blogger Mridula Dwivedi who posted a detailed post on her experience in the café and because of the honest opinion, she won over thousands of hearts.
According to a recent study, 94% said that influencer marketing was an effective campaign strategy. Also, it is the same kind of slow and steady approach as content marketing and Social media, where your campaign isn’t about directly selling your products & services, it’s about demonstrating your ability, credibility, leadership within your industry.
The current trend of influencer marketing is largely seen in Fashion & Beauty industry, they spent largely on influence marketing by hiring some famous YouTubers & bloggers.
Key Components in Influencer Marketing
- Planning your influencer marketing strategy:
Before beginning with anything you must set your goals for the marketing and also should decide how you will begin with and what result you want in the end. This all will help you to make a proper strategy which can lead you to a success path. It might not be an easy task as you need to analyze all the risks and uncertainties which can come in the future. Also, you need to analyze your target audience and make strategy according to it.
- Search for a suitable influencer:
After making a strategy it’s time to find an influencer which can properly suit all your criteria’s and most important who have a large social media following. This step can take time as you need to be in contact with a lot of influencers and also you need to choose influencers who are well connected with your target audience. It is not necessary that the influencer should be a celebrity only. In today’s world, people have more trust in YouTubers and bloggers than celebrity.
- Work on the campaign and its automation:
After finding a suitable influencer, you need to work on the campaign. You need to set a campaign which can attract a lot of people from your target audience. If this step is not done properly then your previous steps will be a major failure. You also need to identify the platforms for your campaign. Different platforms play a different role in your marketing strategy. For e.g., Instagram and YouTube are famous for having an influencer marketing strategy for fashion and beauty brands but if you want to do an influencer strategy for some automobile or electronics industry then you might focus on Facebook. So it’s important to properly plan and set a campaign and work on its automation.
- Monitor & track the results:
Imagine your campaign had great success, you also earn a lot of new customers and you again set the same campaign and now it’s a big failure. These things can happen if you fail to monitor your results. You need to identify the key point indicators which attracted your customers the most and should work on it every time you set a campaign or hire an influencer.
I hope that from the above points you might have known the importance of influencer marketing. So what are you waiting for? Start your influencer marketing strategy right now!