Having influential people talk good stuff about your brand, company or service isn’t a new marketing strategy. We’ve seen actors, actresses, athletes, TV personalities and many other famous people speak on behalf of some product. The idea is obvious – the product wants to reach that famous person’s fanbase and appeals to his or her influence to do so. Basically, it’ trying to look cool just by hanging around the cool kids – being cool by association.
But with the Internet swooping into the marketing scene and changing everything forever, this kind of influence took an unexpected turn. Sure, famous people are still great to market product and services but the Web has empowered “regular” people to a point where they too can become influencers, albeit in the digital world. Thus, people with enough followers and leverage in social media are now being seen as key for marketing. That’s what influencer marketing is all about.
If we’re talking about “the age of influencer marketing” that’s because those “regular” people have turned themselves into essential cogs of digital marketing. That process begun when social media started increasing its popularity and consolidated recently when marketing understood that social media was a relatively cheap way to reach its prospected audiences. Now, everyone is talking about influencer marketing and you know why – because it works.
And how can you make it work for you? First, by defining the right audience for your product and identifying the perfect social media to reach it. Once you got that, it’s time to select the voices within that audience that are influential enough to spread your message. Of course, you’ll want to pick the people that have a certain amount of followers and whose posts generate the kind of engagement you’re looking for. After you’re done with that, it’ll be time to create a good content strategy to feed those influencer.
Naturally, the impact of influencer marketing can’t be compared with the effect of big marketing campaigns with famous people on them. But for a budget conscious brand (like your small business), it’s the perfect option to get the word going about you. Making people post photos talking about how great your products are or just using them can help a lot and will surely have some impact on the influencer’s followers.
The thing you’ll have to figure out is how you get those influencers talk about your product in the first place. You can give them free samples, let them use your service for free or anything you can come across. The idea is that they try them and talk about their experience with your product on their social media of choice. If your product is good, then the influencers will share everything that’s good about it – and you’ll have won a priceless partner that will provide you with great marketing results.
