Influencer marketing used to only consist of celebrities and a few bloggers. Today, social media influencers have saturated the market and it’s important for your business to understand the value of influencer marketing. Read along to learn how to create an influencer marketing strategy for your business!
What is Influencer Marketing?
In order to see if influencer marketing is right for your business, we must understand what influencer marketing is. Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses influencers with a large following to market products or services to their audiences. Most influencers develop and establish trusting relationships with their followers; therefore, they can easily recommend and persuade followers into purchasing your products or services.
Budget
The first step into creating an influencer marketing strategy is research. When starting out, it is easiest for your business to focus on one platform, and expand to other platforms later on. Establish a budget and decide if you would like to work with celebrities with massive followings, 5-10k following influencers, or micro influencers, less than 2k. Compensation varies widely in the influencer industry. Some influencers accept products and don’t charge per post, some charge for both or even require your business to go through a talent agency.
Ulike automated ad strategy, influencer marketing differs because their post are in real time. Many influencer’s partner with a variety of brands and may fall behind on posting on time or make errors. Influencer marketing requires developing hands-on relationships with the influencers your hire.
What Are Your Goals?
The most common reasoning for using influencer marketing is to increase brand awareness and sales. With influencer marketing, it is important to have detailed and attainable goals. An example of this would be increasing your customer base in an older demographic or expanding your usual demographic to new users and new products. This allows for you and the influencer to assure the results of post are measurable.
How to contact influencers:
Once again, the most important way to begin the search process is research. When searching for the right influencers keep these 3 tips in mind
1. Does the influencers post about similar products or services already? If you are looking for an influencer to post about your restaurant grand opening, it’s important to pick influencers who already post about food or cooking often.
2. Make sure to check out potential influencers engagement ratio to make sure they are real. Many “influencers” pay for followers to make it look real but have little to no engagement and spam-like comments.
3. Contact influencers based on what is said in their bio. Some micro-influencers may ask for a DM, and others may ask for business inquiries to be sent via email.
Are you ready to create an influencer marketing strategy? Social Ape is here to help! Contact our team today to get started.
