On a faithful Monday morning, we were having our usual meeting on Monday. Suddenly, Bella Victor brought to our notice how necessary it was to integrate Influencer Marketing into our digital campaigns. It dawned on me how vital it is to always think about the influencers.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing implies that companies work with folks of influence to assist them with their online marketing.
Influencer marketing aims to spot the most influential people in your niche, and you’ll approach them to work with you to promote your brand.
What is an Influencer?
An influencer is someone who has the capacity to have an effect on the purchase choices of others. This term will do that as a result of he has authority, knowledge, position, and/or a special relationship together with his audience.
He is sometimes somebody who features a vital following in an exceedingly specific niche, and he actively engages with them.
The size of an influencer’s following can depend on the dimensions of the niche he or she chooses to work in. Thus, there will be more followers of fashion than there are devotees of Greek mythology.
As the internet has matured, certain individuals have established reputations as digital superstars. These areas unite the individuals we tend to concede to be influencers.
These influencers have engineered reputations for being consultants above all niches. They may have established a palmy diary on the topic.
However, they may have created videos and uploaded them to a relevant YouTube channel.
Typically, they need to operate active and well-liked social media accounts, wherever they offer opinions, ideas, tips, and recommendations concerning their specialist topic.
Influencers spend considerable time building their brand and cultivating their audience. If the influencers perceive that your product may benefit their followers, then they will be happy to work with you.
They are going to be ready to lend their name, expertise, and authority to promote your product to their followers. There is one caveat to the present, though.
Influencer promoting can solely work if you sell a top-quality product. If your product is shoddy, sub-standard, or worse than your competitors, then no quantity of bribing influencers can cause you to repeat sales. Indeed, no real influencer will want to work with you.
Why do you need Influencer Marketing?
According to a poll from Infolinks, half of the internet users never click on online ads and 35% click on less than five ads per month.
Perhaps you have tried social media marketing. This has some potential. People spend a considerable time nowadays browsing through their various Social media threads.
But there is a problem. Who is going to see your social media status? Unless you have built massive audiences, you are unlikely to have much reached.
Social media networks have made things more difficult for you. They want your advertising dollars, so they make it hard for you to reach people with organic posts. Recent changes to Facebook have compounded this further.
They have adjusted news feeds to favor status updates from friends and family and reduced the visibility of business pages. Most people on social media have a network of a few hundred “friends.” These people will have a wide range of interests and tastes. Often, their only common factor is that they are friends with the same person.
They may be a family member of that person, a friend, a work colleague. However, they may just be somebody who plays the same game, or who has a single interest in common. It can be difficult to market on social media.
Yet, influencers are different. They have cultivated audiences of like-minded people. In some cases, these support bases are gigantic and colossal even.
Imagine how many relevant people you could target with a quality influencer, then if you try a marketing method with more random targeting. The scattershot approach to marketing yields erratic results.
Some firms succeed in building successful online identities to the point they become influencers themselves. Red Bull has managed to scale the pinnacle of social media success.
But to most firms that is an elusive dream. It is usually much easier to find influencers and work with them. Afterward, you rely on their audiences to spread your message more than it is to build a substantial engaged audience yourself.
Influencer marketing is different from traditional advertising. One significant difference is the type of relationship you need to establish with your influencers.
Many businesses, notably large corporate organizations, have traditionally kept tight control over their brand and marketing. This approach is not overly useful in influencer marketing.
Influencers established their prestige before you ever came on the scene. Even if you operate a well-known brand, you cannot expect to leverage much control over your influencers. You may pay them well, but you do not employ them. Their followers want to hear what the influencers wish to say not your message. They are not searching for your “opportunity.”
This is one of the core differences between traditional outbound marketing and the new breed of inbound marketing. With inbound marketing, the customer comes to you. You can’t dictate the terms as you could before.
It is the organizations that try to keep tight control over their influencers who generally face the most disappointing results. The essence of successful influencer marketing is trust. You cannot get away from the core fact that consumers trust influencers more than they do brands.
Successful influencer marketing creates a win-win situation. You as the brand wins. The influencer wins. The followers of the influencer win. If you can achieve this triple strike, then your influencer marketing campaign will have been a success.
The Future of Influencer Marketing
In 2021, the future of influencer marketing looks rosy. It solves many of the issues faced by traditional marketing, for instance, audience fragmentation on conventional media, and banner blindness with online marketing.
In many ways, influencer marketing is still rising. But, It is still new enough to be considered innovative. It is in the rising phase of the product life cycle and is not yet at its peak.
A decade ago influencer marketing didn’t exist. You had a few celebrities promoting products, mainly offline, and that was the nearest we had to what we think of as influencer marketing today.
People with popular websites had no idea of the real worth of their sites. Active Facebookers (the other social networks were not really widespread then) did not realize the power they had over an audience. Brands certainly didn’t know about these people.
People we now consider influencers had no idea of the value of their online assets, and their audience.
In those days you still had people worrying that having your phone near your ear for too long would give you radiation poison. Parents discouraged their offspring from going near social media and didn’t consider using it themselves.
But all that has changed over the last few years. We have social media influencers with millions of followers. There are websites related to every niche imaginable, including parenting, and even some that focus on creating an online social environment for the elderly.
Even farmers spend time online now, comparing agricultural data, and weather and researching the best products they could use.
The top social media influencers are looked upon in awe by their followers – in much the same way as elite musicians, actors, and sportspeople.
This is not going to change anytime soon. Look at how your kids spend their time. Take note of who their heroes are.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is becoming a big trend in 2021 and beyond. Key trends include the growing popularity of micro and nano influencers, brands looking for ongoing partnerships, different types of social media platforms, more performance-based deals, and more.
