How to work with influencer to promote your brand
“Working with the influencer as your marketing strategy might be the most powerful marketing weapon you’ll ever wield.”
Working with Influencer marketing means you work with an influencer to promote your brand rather than promoting it yourself. Influencer marketing is a handy marketing strategy to reach and engage your audiences. According to www.ion.co, businesses in 2016 generated $6.50 for every $1 invested in influencer marketing, and most marketers doubled their investments in 2017. Influencers are the brand's best advocates, they are social media users who have established credibility in a particular category. Influencers have the power to affect consumer purchasing decisions with their authority as opinion leaders.
There are 3 types of influencer:
- The mavens – Mavens are good at sharing what they find. They are the trendsetters in their circle.
- The salesman – Salesmen are persuaders with great charisma.
- The connectors – Connectors have a network with a large reach. They are good at communicating their thoughts to other people.
The level of mixture is in accordance with your company’s needs. Mavens are good when promoting avant-garde fashion items or hi-tech products. If you want to promote an online course, salesmen will be your best bet because they can directly convince people to join the course. Daily life products are best endorsed by connectors. They can connect your audience to themselves and create an important image for your brand.
Why Brands Rely on Influencers?
Influencer marketing is a quite new style of marketing compared to other traditional marketing types. Despite being new, it is a viable marketing method that continues to profit both brands and influencers. It works so well because of the social environment and technology we live in now. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most trusted advertising. Influencers have personas that make their followers trust what they said, promote, or endorse. More than that, social media allows people to gain information at a rapid rate. This allows brands to work with multiple influencers that endorse the same brand, creating a rapid information delivery that clings to the audiences’ minds.
How to Work with Influencer?
1. Identify the perfect influencer for you
To be successful, you should look at those influencers and relate them to your brand or product. If you sell niche product, pick influencers who are the experts on their fields. If you have a more generic product and aiming for more reach, work with the influencers who will carry you to your goal. You also have to look at their engagement rate. Gauge how likely it is that the promotion of your product will work with them by checking the comments and replies.
2. Build a solid relationship
Influencers are human first, business second. They are busy people who receive hundreds of endorsement requests every day. Before you ask favours, you have to build a healthy, solid relationship with the influencers first. You will want a long-term relationship with them. Make your business known to them before you make demands. Doing so will show that you respect their work. You're far more likely to build that long-term relationship by following the steps below:
- Follow their social media
- Share their contents
- Comment on their blog posts
- Ask them questions
- Join the conversations
3. Create the perfect pitch
You can pitch your ideas to your influencers after you have a solid relationship with them. In proposing your pitch, you have to ask whether the influencers would like to see your product, instead of assuming that they do. You have to make sure that the pitch you created is:
- Concise
- Less about you, more about them
- Pointing out that you've read their content
A several pitches you can propose to them
Updating their outdated content
Content update is a simple yet successful pitch. When you see influencers with outdated content, you can approach them and offer new contents for them to post. Try to sound helpful and appreciative towards them and their contents
Send over product samples
The advantage of selling a physical product is that you can make influencers endorse your products by giving them free samples to be reviewed or talked about. This is a win-win solution for you and your influencers: your brand will receive promotion while your influencers will receive exposure.
Let them know that you'd love to send over a sample of your product to them and then ask for their address. This strategy has a high success rate because people always like a free sample.
Creating exclusive content
If you want to be noticed quickly by influencers, exclusive content is the way to go. Many influencers like posting exclusive contents such as videos or infographics. Exclusive content is able to build links back to your site from a highly authoritative domain.
Writing a guest post
Another popular strategy in influencer marketing is guest posting. They help build exposure to your product and valuable links to your site. You should research the type of medium beforehand in order to be relevant in the topic.
Conclusion
The key to influencer marketing is to build the foundations of a long-lasting relationship. It may take a long time, longer than some other marketing efforts. Influencer marketing effort depends on mutual benefits, customer engagements, and brand and influencer image. Nail these things and your marketing effort will bear fruits of success.
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References
https://www.business.com/articles/how-to-get-influencers-to-market-your-product/
https://www.singlegrain.com/content-marketing-strategy-2/guide-influencer-marketing/
https://www.ion.co/essential-stats-for-influencer-marketing-in-2017