Influencer marketing may seem simple enough: find influencers, negotiate a collaboration, and pay them to promote your brand on social media.
But before you try out the strategy, it’s important to know what you hope to gain from it. Let’s take a look at a few common ways influencers can help promote your business.
Brand awareness
Getting your name out there on social media is a great way to make your brand known. There are almost 4 billion social media users worldwide, and that number is projected to keep growing.
However, in order to be successful with awareness campaigns, it’s important to define your target audience and choose influencers who can help you reach those people. You want to make sure your brand is gaining awareness among people who will actually be interested in it, and potentially convert into customers down the road.
A good way to reach your target audience is to work with nano and micro-influencers in the social media niches your audience inhabits. Nano influencers, who have 1-5K followers, and micro-influencers, who have 5-50K, don’t have massive followings. But, they enjoy high engagement among their small niche followings, and when you work with them, you can leverage that engagement for your brand.
Also, keep in mind that the results for branding campaigns may not be as easy to measure as those for other goals. You can measure impressions and web traffic, but it may take time for your brand to feel the full effects of the campaign.
Incentivized sales
If you want to drive sales, influencers can also help with that. Take into account the same points referenced above: identify your target audience and find influencers that connect you with them. You can’t expect people to buy your products if they’re not interested in what your brand offers.
To incentivize sales through influencers, set up influencer-specific discount codes. There are a few best practices for creating these codes:
- Make it easy to identify which code belongs to which influencer (for example, use their name)
- Use block capitals to make the code stand out more and be easier to read
- Don’t assume everyone can copy/paste and avoid overly long or complicated codes
How do these codes work? The influencer creates content featuring your products and then posts the coupon code for their audience. This type of content may seem more authentic to followers than a purely promotional post that comes directly from your brand.
In fact, consumers trust influencers more than brands. They may feel more confident making a purchase knowing their favorite influencer endorsed it, and the added bonus of a discount doesn’t hurt. Further, even when followers don’t buy anything, you can still get curious deal-seekers looking at your website, and that’s branding.
Later on, you can also analyze which influencers performed best for your campaign. Who brought in the most sales? Which social network performed better? Comparing influencers in this way can give you a clearer idea of what to do next time.
Content creation
Finally, another common way influencers can help you promote your business is with content creation. As part of your collaboration, influencers create content featuring your brand and its products, services, or experiences. As long as you get okay with the influencer, you can repost this content later to your own social media accounts or in other places.
With the variety of social networks and media formats out there today, you can get all types of content from influencers. Think about how you can work this content into different parts of your organization. For example, Instagram influencers posting photos featuring your products may work well posted to those specific product pages. Or, tweets could become testimonials.
Remember, when analyzing the results of your influencer marketing campaigns, to consider the content created. Even if you didn’t get all the impressions or sales that you wanted, content creation counts too when measuring your success.
Conclusion
There are other ways influencers can help promote your brand, but these are three of the most common objectives in influencer marketing campaigns. However, regardless of what your goal is, it’s critical to understand your target audience and find influencers who can help connect you to it.
