According to businessinsider.com, the business for Influencer Marketing in 2019 went up to $8 billion and now expecting to increase to $15 billion by the year 2022. So, if you are interested in influencer marketing or want to be an influencer then this blog is for you.
Table of Contents
What is influencing?
Influence is a powerful effect on someone or something. It is the way to influence someone to change them or anything else but in an important way. Sometimes a person who influences doesn’t intend to affect anyone, but they use influence to benefit themselves.
Who is an influencer?
Any person who got their following in a particular niche that they actively engage with. Influencers’ follower size always depends upon the size of the niche. Influencers need to maintain the audience with their performance.
Influencers are real people who are viewed as friends who audiences feel a connection with, want to emulate, and buy into in comparison to glamorous ads. An influencer must have the right kind and the right amount of audience.
What are influencers in social marketing and what types of influencers?
Today the trend of influencers is increasing tremendously, especially in SMM creating more job opportunities in Social Media Marketing. Influencers in social media marketing are those influencers who have built their reputation based on their knowledge and expertise on a particular topic.
They make regular posts with the newest content on any topic which interests their audience. They share such posts on social media channels which generates a larger following of the people who are constantly engaged with them and pay close attention to their content.
Click here to know about Social Media Marketing Updates in 2019
Before we discuss different types of influencers let us get a brief idea about the difference between Brand influencers and Brand ambassadors, as many people get confused between these terms.
Brand Influencers are those who have a following in a specific niche that they engage with regularly. Because of this, they have the power to control their purchase decision.
Whereas Brand Ambassador refers to those who are under contract to help them achieve specific goals like increasing brand awareness and boosting conversions and sales. They work on a long-term basis (it may be several months or years).
Types of influencers
The majority of the influencers fit into the following category, but among these, the last one is getting more popular.
Celebrity
Celebrities were considered the root of influencer marketing. Many businesses have found for many years that their sales usually rise when a celebrity promotes their business. Still, there are many cases, mostly we can say for high-end brands who prefer celebrities as their influencers.
Industry experts and thought leaders
Industry leaders and thought leaders play a vital role here because of their experience, knowledge, qualifications, or their position about their expertise in their field.
These experts can be:
1) Journalist
2) Academics
3) Industry experts
4) Professional Advisors.
For instance, if you are gaining the interest of a journalist in a newspaper, who talks positively about your company or product, you will use him as an influencer, because he got a good writing skills by which he can write creative content for your product. And journalist probably writes their reports for FREE.
Bloggers and content creators
Blogging has become an important part of influencer marketing now. There are a number of influential bloggers this day on the internet now. If a popular blogger mentions your product on their postings, then their fan following would be willing to try your product. Of course, a blog is not only a kind of content.
A blog can be in any way in which you can create creative content. The blog can be in writing form, photoshoots, videos and the latest is also Audio content. Brands often align with popular YouTube Content Creators.
Bloggers and content creators are more likely to work with industry experts and thought leaders because by working with them bloggers also get benefited from their popularity on social media campaigns.
Micro-Influencers
Micro-Influencers are the real future of Influencer Marketing. Micro-influencers are those normal everyday people who have been known for their specialty in a particular niche.
They have gained a sizeable social media fan following that indicates the level of interest in that particular niche. Micro-influencers are becoming more common and more famous day by day.
Today, the maximum social influencer marketing is done through social media, predominantly with micro-influencers and blogging.
Industry experts and thought leaders are also considered influencer marketing. Then there are celebrities, who are the role models for influencer marketing, and still, they are leading a vital role in it, although their importance is waning these days as an influencer.
What is influencer marketing?
Most influencers run their own campaigns on social media whereby influencers are expected to spread the word through their social media channels. Influencer marketing has risen from the realization of brands about power, peer influence, and customer recommendations over other forms of marketing.
Since the trend of social media is increasing rapidly in recent days, people get influenced heavily by influencers. People try to follow the same trend that the influencer is using.
Once brands identify the influencers of their domain, it’s very important that they reach them with a well-thought plan to execute which doesn’t seem much commercial but still attracts the audience in a way that they get convinced to buy for that particular brand that they were looking for.
Influencers are those popular people who got a massive fan following on social media and people to get attracted to what they say and are more likely to follow the same as them.
Importance
Conventional digital marketing does not work anymore. Roundabout 66% of consumers are so overwhelmed by online marketing. Smart brands are combating this influencer marketing to create ongoing conversations with consumers, recognizing that they get easily influenced by different people at different times in different ways.
Influencer marketing reaches people and continues with engagement and conversation that drives commerce, and helps you to reach the business goals, such as:
-Attracting new customers
-Increasing repeat purchase
-Driving customer loyalty
-Maximising customer lifetime revenue
Marketers can’t ignore influencer marketing any longer. Content marketers have got the power that helps tremendously business to grow.
How to start influencer marketing?
The best way to start influencing marketing is to reach out to your own community and make people aware of your brand and start talking about your brand. Then reach out to such people who are too active on social media and ask them to post on your brand’s product. This will give you a fair idea of reach on social media.
If your product or service attracts people and they start to take an interest in it, then you may start the following:
1) Create a template. This is a little description of the product or service along with an image.
2) Ask your friends to post a picture with a few lines about your product by giving them some free products or samples.
3) Now start making friends of friends by giving them some special discounts coming with reference to your influencer marketers.
4) Try connecting to identify potential influencers’ friends and create networks in multiple cities and multiple countries.
5) You can also create ambassadors in various colleges and cities.
Benefits of using Influencer Marketing in your social strategy
Influencer marketing is one of the quickest ways to build your brand online and raise your awareness among the audience. Influencing marketing should be an active tactic in your social media marketing to increase brand awareness, create eye-appealing content, and most importantly generate new leads for maximum sales.
Here are a few benefits of influencer marketing to boost your social strategy
Quickly builds trust
Influencers have built relationships, trust, and credibility with their fans. People respect their content and recommendations. As you will share their content, they will too gain your attention and will share about your brands to the actively engaged audience.
Improves brand awareness
As already discussed influencer marketing helps to expand your business online. More and more social users will get to know about your brand, your story, etc.
Enriches your content strategy
Sharing the content of influencers will help to fill the gap in your own content schedule. This helps when you run out of content or it adds quality to content to publish on social channels.
Provides amazing value to your audience
Delivering your content will solve problems, educate, and inspires your audience as Influencers are already tuned with the needs of the people they serve.
Effectively reaches your target audience
This is the most important. Getting a relevant influencer will help you publish your content at the correct audience on social users as they are already interested in your niche.
You don’t need to spend additional funds for your audience as influencers have already fostered the audience on social media.
Builds a winning partnership
connecting and engaging with influencers may lead to a powerful relationship. In a long-term relationship, you never know where you and influencers would be landing. There may be possibilities that you can work in joint ventures, live events, or maybe you get another great opportunity at work.
How does influencer marketing work?
At a high level, it is a branded engagement where marketers connect with those who boast prominent social footprints. Their main is to plug into new communities and connect the brand to a new audience. Authentic content plays a vital role here, this helps to create trust.
People get attracted to the content that influencers because they value the content created by them. The brand must allow influencers the ability to be true to themselves while working on sponsored content.
Insincere or irrelevant content will erode influencers and they will lose the trust of their audience in them and will also lose their followers on social channels.
If a brand wants to share relevant content with customers, then they must approach media with attractive, engaged, and converting prospects which means they should meet consumers with content that interests them and create trust. Influencers are experts in online discussions, so the content they create on behalf of brands is talked about, shared, and reposted.
Online activity is the core part of the decision-making process. In today’s digital world people access information before they get to the brand site.
Therefore, the brand should prefer to make social media influencers their partners. Influencer marketers got the ability to share product and brand information that will help brands to increase sales.
Working with an influencer will help brands to add to their conversation rather than derailing it.
Platforms for influencer marketing
Once brands identify the influencers from their respective domains, it’s important that they reach out to them with them well-made plan which does not look too commercial but helps to connect to the audience. A lot of brands are outsourcing this job to various influencer marketing platforms in India.
Here are the 8 best influencer marketing platforms in India
-Plixxo
–Influencer.in
-Mad Influence
-Pulpkey
-Winkl
-Eleve Media
-StarNgage
-Blogmint
Conclusions
So, at last, we can say that Influencer marketing is going to be the future and going to take the place of traditional marketing. After a long discussion, it’s easily noticeable that influencer marketing is going to be very beneficial to start-ups brand or those brands that are still lacking in gaining traction on social media marketing.
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