Did the last YouTube video you watch include the creator spending about one or two minutes raving about the perks of Hello Fresh? Are any well-known people you follow on Instagram posing with a certain product or talking about how great it is in the description? These two scenarios are examples of a phenomenon known as influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is the latest approach to online brand promotion that we will explore with you today.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing involves an online content creator, or influencer, collaborating with a company to promote their brand or product in hopes of said product or service reaching a wider audience. Products include meal kit services, apps, streaming platforms, website builders, and many more. Influencer marketing, when executed correctly, can bring lucrative results. The question, however, is how brands find the right influencers to promote their product online. To thoroughly answer the question, “what is influencer marketing?” let’s look at the steps involved in effectively using influencer marketing.
1. What Are Your Company’s Goals?
Before going down a rabbit hole of potential influencer collaborations, take a step back to consider your company’s goals. Are you trying to sell a specific product or service? What is the purpose of that product or service? Who is the product or service for? What kind of growth are you trying to achieve? Are you concerned more with exposure or increasing your customer base?
These are just a few questions that will help you determine the goal of your company. Make sure this goal can be expressed in at least one sentence, making your aims clear and communicable to anyone. Additionally, ensure that you and your company have the budget to execute an influencer marketing campaign successfully. You don’t want to get started only to come up short.
2. Who Is Your Target Audience?
The next component to think about is your target audience. Every influencer attracts a specific demographic, and you need to find one whose demographic overlaps with the target audience for your company’s product or service. One of the most successful influencer marketing campaigns is Hello Fresh. According to their data, most Hello Fresh customers are mainly young professionals and young families, so most of the influencers with whom they collaborate have an overlap in audience. Once you know your target audience, you will be able to narrow down your list of potential collaborations.
3. Find An Influencer With A Growing Audience
Now that you know your company’s goals and target audience, you are prepared to find the best influencer with whom to collaborate for a marketing campaign. After all, we can’t explore the answer to the question “what is influencer marketing?” without the influencer. While your first instinct might be to reach out to an established influencer to reach a larger audience, you will actually find more success by first collaborating with a microinfluencer. A microinfluencer has a modest following of thousands or tens of thousands of followers. Their audience is still growing, but their community is small enough that their engagement isn’t too difficult to track. As this influencer’s audience grows, so will the number of people seeing your collaborations.
4. Build The Connection And Collaborate
After narrowing down your list of microinfluencer contacts that share an audience with your target demographic, start reaching out to potential collaborators. You want to make sure that you are personable and understanding. The best approach to ensure that you truly are collaborating is by giving some creative freedom to the influencer and working with them to determine compensation. A successful partnership is based on truly working together, not micromanaging.
5. Make A Plan
Of course, while collaborating, don’t forget to keep your goal in mind. Make a plan with your influencer partner for what marketing will look like, the frequency of it, and a possible timeline. Depending on the influencer’s platform, you’ll want to discuss whether promotions will come in the form of in-video promotions on YouTube, Instagram posts documenting their experience using your company’s service or product, or something else. At the end of the day, keeping the goal in mind will lead to a successful influencer marketing campaign for your company.
6. Monitor Results
Finally, you’ll need to find a way to monitor progress and results throughout the influencer marketing campaign. Looking back at your goal will help determine the metrics by which to measure the success of your campaign. For example, if you collaborate with a YouTube content creator, they will probably tell their audience to take advantage of a unique promo code within a given time frame. Keeping track of how much that promo code is applied for your service or product is just one way to monitor the reach of your influencer marketing campaign. Now you have a complete answer to the question of what is influencer marketing.
ASAP Marketing Solutions Will Boost Your Online Presence!
We hope you and your company feel more confident about investing in influencer marketing to promote your service or product. Next time someone asks you, “what is influencer marketing?” you will be able to provide a thorough answer. If you are curious about starting an influencer marketing campaign or other ways to build your online presence, ASAP Marketing Solutions will not only bring you results but also success. Contact us today and launch your online marketing campaign!