Influencer Marketing Strategy You Should Know for 2021
Influencer marketing is the new and effective way to market your brand. Let’s learn more about influencer marketing strategy and why you should do it.
Among highly competitive markets, tons of brands are putting up their advertisements online. One’s social media feed is normally flooded with ads from brands that are hard selling their products. These posts can be annoying for the audience and people tend to not pay attention to what they know is ads. If you do not want to be scrolled passed, give influencer marketing a try.
We will touch on mainly three parts of influencer marketing today which are the definitions, the benefits, and influencer marketing strategy that you should know.
- What is influencer marketing?
- The benefits of influencer marketing
- Influencer marketing strategy
- Conclusion
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is the use of influencers and popular or famous people in promoting your brand. Influencer marketing is not a new marketing strategy, it has been around for ages. However, it changes through time.
In the past, those famous people that brands use for marketing purposes are celebrities, movie stars, or any one with lots credibility. However, with the help of social media, it allows people to gain popularity and become well-known on social media sites. These people who have lots of followers become the influencers.
Influencer marketing strategy is used widely on many social media platforms. The most popular social media site for influencer marketing is Instagram. 60% of brands that use influencer marketing strategy use Instagram as their platforms to promote their products and brands via influencer marketing. Other social media platforms that are great for influencer marketing include Twitter, Youtube, and most recently, TikTok.
Just like how big corporations and brands use celebrities as spokesperson, brand ambassadors or endorsers, any business these days is using influencer marketing strategy instead. Let’s take a look at the reasons why you should consider applying influencer marketing strategy to your business.
The benefits of influencer marketing
It is cost saving marketing strategy
Working with influencers might not be free, but we can guarantee that it will cost way less than working with national or international celebrities.
Influencer marketing costs three times less than hiring actors or actresses. You also do not need to pay for television or any paid advertising platforms, influencers can be done via social media that you can post for free. Paid ads for influencers are optional.
It is word-of-mouth marketing
Influencer marketing strategy is word of mouth marketing. When people know your brand and products from others that have used and tried your product before, it makes them believe in the quality of your product and trust your brand.
Word to mouth marketing is one of the best marketing strategies since it really can get people to buy the products. More than 40% of online shoppers have purchased the products that they saw in influencers’ posts on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media as well.
People do not like hearing only good things about products from the brand since they may find it unauthentic and pretentious. The audience knows that the brand will only tell the upside and not the real quality of the products. Influencer marketing is not like that, influencers are real people. Products sounded more convincing when you heard it from the real users.
You can aim for the target audience
When marketing your products, of course you will want to market them to groups of people who may be interested and are potential customers. Which is why influencers are perfect for promoting your products.
In each field of interest, there are influencers or the leaders of the field that many follow. When you market your products through influencers, you know that it will be seen by those who are more likely to be interested and more likely to buy your products.
For example, you can see that lots of cosmetic brands use beauty influencers to promote their products since they know that the followers are makeup lovers and will be interested in buying their cosmetics. In the same fashion, food and drink brands are more likely to collaborate with food influencers and food channels on YouTube to make their appearances to those who love to cook and enjoy eating. When you aim your products marketing to the right place, you are surely getting more sales.
Influencer marketing strategy
Now that you know the basics and benefits of influencer marketing, let’s hop on to the influencer marketing strategy that you should know. In this section, you will look at what needs to be done and how to execute the given influencer marketing strategy.
1. Be clear of your goals
As the foundation of every action you make to market your brand, you need to set your goals. To set goals for influencer marketing strategy, you need to ask this question, Why do our brand need influencer marketing strategy?
The answers to that question could be to build brand awareness, to gain more social media engagement, to build customer loyalty, or to drive more sales. It can have other purposes as well. These goals will help you find the right influencer marketing strategy that will work well accomplishing your certain goals.
The good goals are those that are realistic and will truly benefit your brand. Follow the SMART goals model to set the specific, measureable, attainable, relevant and time-based goals.
2. Find your target audience
In order to make the most of your influencer marketing strategy. You need to know who your target audience is. Aiming for the right audience will help you gain more authority, popularity, and even more sales.
For basic audience targeting, ask yourself, who will be interested in your products or services, who needs your products, or who do you want to see your posts. And if you can, follow the process of audience targeting for more precise target audience and information about your audience and customers.
Having the target audience will help you focus your marketing efforts for only that group of people and not wasting your time and effort marketing your products to those who do not need them. Targeting your audience will also save your budget as well since you do not have to put up ads all over the place.
3. Choose the right influencers
Now, you know your audience and you have your goals, but how can you choose the influencers that will speak for your brand?
Choosing the right influencers is very important for your brand. Influencers that you choose will affect your brand image, sales rate, and trustworthiness of your brand. You want to work with influencers that will improve your brand, not bringing you down.
Influencers are not all good, with lots of followers, sometimes there are lots of dramas on social media that are caused by or involve the influencers. You need to be careful when picking influencers you work with. The number of followers will not guarantee the success of your influencer marketing strategy since some of them come with bad reputations.
Here is what you need to look for in influencers.
You need the influencers to have matching points with your brands or products. You want to use the influencers that are in the same field of interests as your brand in order to guarantee that their audience matches your target audience. They should have good reputations and good relationships with their followers. They should also be trustworthy and if they have good persuasive skills, that will be a plus.
4. Pick the marketing campaigns for influencer marketing
You got the audience and influencers, now, what do we do with our selected influencers? There are many ways that you could use influencers in influencer marketing. Let’s look at the top influencer marketing strategy of our choice.
1.Gifting free stuff for reviews or mentionings on their platform
This method will not require you to pay any fee for the influencers, but you still need to give out your products or offer free service for the influencers instead.
Sometimes, when you send free gifts to the influencers, there is no guarantee that the influencer will post about your products or services or not. But it is more likely that they will mention your products if they enjoy it.
We recommend you to contact the influencer before sending them your products to avoid misunderstanding and argument. Plus, it is more professional that way.
2. Sponsored content
This strategy is to pay for influencers to talk about or feature your brand and products on their social media posts and other content like blogs or YouTube videos. If you are using this method, sometimes you might need to create your own content, sometimes you do not, depending on your deal with the influencers.
3. Get mention on social media
This method is when the brands pay influencers to post about their products or share their posts. This method is easy but very effective. Just make sure you have the influencers share posts that is well made.
4. Contests and Challenges
This trick is when you conduct contests or challenges and you pay influencers to share the challenges with their followers and encourage them to join the contest. Usually the brand will offer free products or any prizes for the winner of the contest.
5. Influencers’ affiliates codes
This influencer marketing strategy is very famous in many fields, especially the beauty community. It is when brands offer influencers a percentage of each sale that is driven by the influencers. They will track the conversion by offering unique code for influencers to share with the followers. When their fans use the affiliate code, they will gain some money.
6. Discount codes
This method is similar to the one above, the only difference is that the influencers will not get any percentage from sales. However, they might get paid or any gift in return.
Any influencer marketing strategy mentioned will work just fine, use the one that suit your brand needs. You can also be creative by coming up with new methods and you can always learn more about influencer marketing tips and tricks by learning from other brands.
5. Track the results
Last but not least, just like other marketing methods, you need to check whether it works well enough. You should use analytic tools to track performance of your influencer marketing strategy. Make adjustments if the results are not as you expect. Also, keep up and improve the good parts.
It is important that you know how well each strategy works, it helps you to accomplish your goals faster and more effectively. It will also save your marketing budget by giving you chances to re-manage the budget over time as well.
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing strategy does not have one right way to do so, each brand and product wants different things and have different approaches on doing influencer marketing. Find the ways that will work best for you. It will be perfect if you can follow and cover every steps. However, the only two things that you should not miss are setting goals and evaluating the result of your plan, since these two steps will help your brand grow efficiently.