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Influencer Marketing: Directly Connect with Your Target Audience

Influencer Marketing: Directly Connect with Your Target Audience

Influencer Marketing: Directly Connect with Your Target Audience

At the turn of the millennium, no one expected the Internet to reshape the marketing industry. At the time, pop-up and banner ads dominated the digital marketing landscape. Then platforms such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram launched, and transformed how users decided which brands to buy into and which ones to unfollow. Brands soon found out that it wasn’t enough to market themselves. These organizations had to reach new audiences through everyday people with massive online followings utilizing influencer marketing strategies.  

What is Influencer Marketing?

An influencer is a person who drives user actions. With millions of people using social media at any second of any given day, it’s easy to build awareness about your brand. It’s quite another to inspire action, which is exactly what influencers do with their hoards of loyal followers. Influencer marketing combines the efforts of brands and online personas to deliver specific messaging to target audiences through platforms where massive followings already exist.   

Getting a celebrity to endorse your product or service is no easy task. However, collaborating with influencers is a far more straightforward process that is not nearly as costly. Your brand works with influencers to devise strategies for creating content that will cause users to take action, whether it’s making a purchase or signing up for an email list. Consumers trust influencers, as they see these influential digital personalities are reliable sources for information on topics that matter to them. If a well-respected influencer gives his/her stamp of approval to a specific product, his/her followers know they can trust this powerful recommendation.  

Influencer Marketing Best Practices

An uninformed influencer marketing campaign wastes precious resources. To execute an influencer marketing strategy to build a lead list and boost sales for your brand, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with these best practices.

  1. Create content: You brand and its chosen influencers are not advertising, you are providing the target audience with actionable, useful content. The copy, graphics, videos, GIFs, and other assets you create should address your target audience’s wants, needs, and pain points, not try to sell them something.
  2. Transparent relationships: Influencers should disclose their relationship with your company in every piece of content they make and promote on your behalf. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines for brands and influencers working together on sponsored content. Reviews these rules so people don’t feel as though they were misled.
  3. Multi-channel strategies: In 2017, Instagram was the number one platform for 92 percent of influencers. However, don’t neglect the powerful reach of other channels such as email, YouTube, blogs, and Facebook. Think outside of the box with your influencer marketing strategy to reach as many target audience members as possible.   
  4. Track analytics: Establish benchmarks and measure the results of your influencer marketing campaigns. Tools like TapInfluence and Upfluence offer influencer performance data that allows you to determine what tactics are working and which ones need to be improved.
  5. Build long-term relationships: You want your influencers to be your top brand evangelists. That means the relationship you have with them needs to extend beyond the transaction of the company pays them a certain amount of money to create a certain amount of content. Invest in your influencers, so that they do the same with your business. Consider influencers your partners in marketing your organization to thousands of more people than you ever could on your own.  

It’s not enough for you to be a brand evangelist for your organization. You need influencers onboard with your brand, so that you can connect with their network of followers. Influencer marketing strategies build on a variety of tactics such as social media, email, and content marketing. Contact Alt Creative now to learn how we can develop a successful influencer marketing strategy for your business.

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