What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a term that is highly trending in the marketing niche. But what is it and who is an influencer?
Who is an Influencer?
Let’s take an example of celebrities. Many of you are big fans of them and are always following their lifestyle. Don’t you?
So, an influencer is a person that gains audience’s attention. People remain alert, when the influencers, speak, tweet or blog. With this, they can influence their audience to buy the products and services they recommend.
Basically, the social media users that have a large number of followers are called as “influencers”. It has always been important for brands to market their products via influencers.
What is Influencer Marketing?
When you identify, research, engage and support the people who create high-impact conversations with customers about your brand, products or services, it is called as influencer marketing.
Sounds easy, right? Today, brands face the challenge of selecting an influencer since there are millions of celebrities, bloggers and social media stars to select from. All of them claim to have a greater influence level over their audiences and are ready to charge for the opportunity to access them.
With influencer marketing, it becomes possible for the brands to combine their PR, marketing, sales, digital marketing, products and social media by communication that is powerful and relevant relationship-based. There is a huge improvement in the ROI and marketing potential of influencer marketing.
It is not that influencer marketing is a new concept in marketing. There is an increase seen in this field due to the drastically growing customer conversations and so, influences are playing a big role in creating relevant customer dialogue, breaking the online clutter and building trust for brands and marketers.
What are the Types of Influencers?
Celebrity endorsement has given rise to influencer marketing. It has been observed since many years that if businesses promote their product via a celebrity or when a celebrity endorses their product they earn good profit.
Since there are several traditional celebrities that want to participate in this kind of influencer campaign and they do take good amount to promote the products. This problem of finance will be resolved, if businesses offer products that a celebrity likes and uses them too. In such situation, the celebrity will be completely prepared to use tactics for influencing people about how good the product is.
There is one problem of using celebrities as influencers that they might lack credibility with the target audience of a product. If Justin Bieber recommends an acne cream, it might be highly influential but he won’t be able to influence the buying patterns of a group of people who are going to get retired.
No doubt celebrities have fans and huge social media followers. But, the influencer marketing by them depends on how much they really have an influence over their fans and followers.
Industry Experts and Thought Leaders
Qualifications, position or work experience helps the industry leaders and thought leaders to gain respect. Many times, they get this respect due to the reputation of where they work. For example, if there is a journalist who is working at a reputed newspaper firm, he isn’t an expert on the subjects he writes a news report on, but has the respect for being a good writer to work at such as important publication.
Such experts include:
- Journalists
- Academics
- Industry experts
- Professional advisors
See if you can grab the attention of a journalist working with a national newspaper who has mentioned about your company in an article. Then he can be used as an influencer in similar way as you would use a blogger or social media celebrity. In this situation, you get added benefit because it might be that the journalist will write the report for free.
Do you know that bloggers and content creators often work with industry leaders and thought leaders? So, it is very common to see them quoted in blog posts and as well as used in social media campaigns. So, the line between social media is getting blurred.
Bloggers and Content Creators
There has been a connection between influencer marketing and bloggers since some time. You will find many highly influential blogs on the internet. In case a blogger writes about a product positively in a post, surely the blogger’s fans and followers will want to try that product.
Bloggers in specific sectors have built up sizeable followers. For example, the internet comprises of highly influential blogs about finance, health, personal development, childrearing, music and many such topics which include blogging too. Respect of their readers is the one thing successful blogs have in common.
For variation in blogging, you can ask the blogger to write something that recommends your product through guest posting. In case you can get an opportunity to guest post on a large blog, you will be able to promote your product through content and also, place a link to your own site in your author bio.
You can also, buy a sponsored post on a blog that is large and influential too. Either you can write a post yourself or influence the blogger to write on your behalf. You will just have to pay for the sponsored post. Don’t worry this won’t have a bad effect on your business. The next generation particularly is likely to use the Sponsored Post tag and till the product is aligned with the core audience of the blog, there won’t be any problem.
That doesn’t mean that a blog isn’t the only popular content on the internet. You can also use video. So, video makers create a YouTube channel instead of having their own site. Brands tie up with popular YouTube channel creators for promotion.
It’s a very rare case when bloggers and YouTubers rely completely on their existing audiences to grab their attention to their site in the hope of new material. Promotion of new posts or videos heavily on social media helps these bloggers and content creators to become micro influencers as well.
Micro Influencers
Common people who have become popular for their knowledge about a particular niche are micro influencers. With this, they have actually gained good weight on social media amongst the devotees of that niche. It’s not that the number of followers that make anyone an influencer but it’s the relationship and the way a micro influencer interacts with his followers.
It might happen that a micro influencer isn’t aware about a company’s existence prior to it trying to reach out to them. In this case, the influencer needs to be convinced by the company about the importance of influencer marketing. Since micro influencers have build up some special followers, they don’t want to hurt the relationship they have developed with their fans, if they promote a brand.
The requirement of aligning the relationship between micro influencers and brands with the target audiences indicates that influencers are very selective about who they work with. Some micro influencers happily promote a brand without taking any fees but some do expect payments. Apart from this, an influencer will also avoid getting involved with a brand that isn’t appropriate for his audience.
There is continuous change in the nature of influencers. You can see that micro influencers are becoming common as well as popular as compared to the big ones. Some that have been mysterious are today the most well-known traditional celebrities. This is observed with the Generation Z that spends high time on internet instead of watching television or going for watching movies or sports.
The reality is that micro influencers are the ones that will keep on influencing in future too. The internet has divided the media into small niche topics. Though you might be into something anonymous, you will surely find a Facebook group or a Pinterest board related to it. And micro influencers firm themselves in such niche groups and boards as genuine influencers.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing has become vital for all brands and businesses for reaching to their target audience. So, don’t stay back, find your influencer and start marketing your brand.