Influencer marketing has grown to be a very powerful type of digital marketing in the past few years. Influencers have come to play an important role in the eyes of consumers. A study done by Twitter in 2016 revealed that 49% of users based their shopping decisions on influencer reviews. Because their opinion matters, the right influencer campaign can skyrocket your sales. If you want to make the most of influencers in your marketing, here are some tips for getting started.
Influencers can help you reach a very targeted audience
The best thing about influencers is that they can help you reach a wider, yet very targeted, audience since most of them focus on a specific niche: in fact, many influencers concentrate on software and digital goods. It isn’t always easy to find the right influencer to represent your product or company, but there are some online tools that can make the process easier, such as Social Bond or GroupHigh.
Influencers can be divided into the following categories: journalists, bloggers and vloggers, celebrities, experts and “regular” people who’ve attracted an organic social following with quality content. No matter what category they fall in, the best influencers to go after are the ones with high engagement rates on their social media presence. It isn’t so important for an influencer to have thousands of fans. Having an engaged and active community matters more. This is easy for you to check on social media: for example, just count the number of likes a post gets and the number of comments received.
Sponsored content is the key to success when collaborating with an influencer
One of the most common ways to collaborate with influencers is by publishing sponsored content in the digital space. Sponsored content comes in different forms and on different platforms.
On Instagram, sponsored content can be a simple post with an image or a video showcasing your product, or you could aim higher and go for the now-popular Instagram Stories. Time is of the essence here, though: make sure your content is succinct, as you’ve got only 60 seconds of fame to leverage.
YouTube works best with reviews or testimonials. In these videos, influencers can talk about the experience they had with your website or product and how it helped them. While these videos can be longer, remember that users usually pay attention to just the first 2 minutes or so. Try to catch their interest in that timeframe and get them hooked on the content. If your budget allows, you can even create a series of sponsored videos to keep users coming back for more.
Giveaways and contests are perfect ways to create awareness and engagement
Do you have a coupon site? Then create a unique discount code for each influencer you partner up with, so influencers can offer the codes to their audience. This helps you not only attract new customers, but also track the leads brought by that influencer.
Contests can be even more thrilling as they stoke the competitive spirit of the influencer’s fans. You can offer vouchers for the software products you are promoting as prizes in the contest.
While it can take time to find the right influencers and create the right content, it’s definitely worth considering influencer marketing as a viable option for growing your business. Get started and let us know how it goes!
