A study conducted back in 2015 revealed that more than 60% of the brands in the United States wanted to increase their budgets for influencer marketing. As more and more people gain access to the internet and spend more time on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, people who have gained a large audience on these platforms are proving to be invaluable to brands across the world.
Having an influencer marketing strategy seems to make more and more sense as ad blocking continues to grow. The following tips will help you to quickly increase the popularity of your brand with the help of influencers.
Make satisfied customers out of influencers
Finding the right influencer is the most crucial part of the process. As social media influencers have certain areas of expertise, they gather very specific target audiences. An influencer who posts content about fashion and make-up, for instance, can be a great choice for a fashion brand as you already know that their audience is interested in the field. The first step when choosing an influencer is to make them a satisfied customer of your business, as their enthusiasm plays a vital role in the success of the strategy. Studies have shown that more than 90% of consumers trust the suggestions made by a social media influencer more than they trust traditional advertisements.
Making an influencer a customer helps their followers view them more as a peer than an advertiser.
Focus on authenticity and the level of engagement
The primary reason that influencers are able to increase the popularity of a brand is because their audience trusts their content. Making advertisements look genuine and authentic helps in increasing the engagement it generates within the audience. Instead of only focusing on the number of people who follow an influencer, try to gauge how easily they are able to include your products and services in their posts without driving their followers away. Such influencers may have comparatively fewer followers, but they are able to generate much more internet traffic in the form of likes, shares, and comments with their posts than other influencers. The Instagram influencer marketing platform Ifluenz has developed an algorithm that allows marketers to make sure the audience of the registered influencers is highly engaged.
Monitor the performance of the influencer
As with any other strategy, monitoring the success of an influencer campaign goes a long way into the future of the brand. Just because an influencer has about 100,000 followers does not mean that information about your brand has reached each and every single one of them. Find ways to measure the reach of promotional posts and conversion ratio, which can then be used to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI). An influencer who has a relatively smaller fan base can still offer an incredible ROI if they are able to integrate your brand into their content effectively.
Building the popularity of a brand is becoming increasingly difficult as social media users are becoming more suspicious of the information that they find online. Any post that seems to be having an agenda is received with displeasure, and the more blatant the advertisement is, the stronger the negative reactions get. However, with the help of influencer marketing, it becomes possible to rebuild the trust of your target audience and provide them with more information about your business, without being too invasive.
If you use the right platform to find the right influencers and build a good relationship with them, you will find the awareness and image of your brand improving gradually, and steadily.