Influencer marketing employs leading, niche content creators to improve brand awareness, increase traffic and drive the brand message to your target audience. Content creators already market to your ideal audience across different online platforms such as social media, digital & print ads, television, blogs, etc. that allows you to expand your reach across your buyer personas.

Influencer marketing has been a buzzword for a while now. Mainstream media regularly refers to it because traditional advertising has become less effective in attracting leads & customers.

What is Influencer Marketing?

 As an influencer, you have the power to affect the purchasing decision of others because of your authority, Knowledge, Position, or relationship with your audience.

You have Followers in a distinct niche with whom you actively engage. The size of the followers depends on the size of your topic of Niche.

Influencer marketing works because it uses Tactics, like word-of-mouth marketing and social proofs, which are now critical aspects of any successful marketing strategy. Customers trust their peers, friends, and people they admire more than the companies selling the products and services they buy & use. In reality, the audience does not care less about the brand. They only care about the opinions of their influencers. That is why it is advisable not to try & foist rules & Business practices onto an influencer because the audience is for the influencer and can walk away, taking their followers with them.

What works in Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is an investment- to get it right, you have to devote time to ensure you find the right influencer to promote content that appeals to your Target Audience.

You also have to spend money and or resources to reward the influencer more according to your marketing goals.

Carefully consider your approach to influencer marketing

Be organized, put together a strategy, plan, and budget, spend time on research

Decide on how you will find influencers – find them organically, subscribe to a platform, or work through an agency

Be patient and be human – people talking to people, not companies talking to companies

Develop a schedule

Does the influencer prefer monthly/quarterly/biannual calls or newsletters?

Integrate with your PR schedule, product release schedule, etc.

Send emails on behalf of key executives. Plan travel schedules for executives and arrange face-to-face meetings.

What Influencer Marketing is not

1. Influencer marketing is not just about finding someone with an audience and offering them money or exposure so they can say good things about you. Influencers spend time building their brand and cultivating their audience; they will be naturally protective of their reputation and the people who trust them. They are people who had the patience, focus to succeed in social media, one organic follower at a time—people like this are not interested in doing influencer marketing solely for the money.

2. Influencer Marketing is also not about quick results. It is the same kind of slow-and-steady approach as Social Media and Content Marketing, where your campaign is not about directly selling your wares. Instead, it is about demonstrating your authority, credibility, and thought leadership within your industry. It is about becoming synonymous with whatever it is that you offer, like when people say they are going to Xerox a document instead of photocopying it, or to Hoover the floor, rather than vacuuming it.

With Social Media Marketing, it is a slow game of acquiring the kind of followers who will be loyal and engaged. It is tempting to think that joining forces with an influencer will be an easy way into the hearts and minds of their followers—it is not that simple because to ally yourself with influencers, you have got to earn their trust and respect. But how?

One Simple Rule: Influencer Marketing is Marketing to Influencers

With traditional social media marketing, your brand can set up its identity on whatever platform it chooses, and, as time passes, your follower bases grow, you can see who your brand champions are. These are the customers who like and share your content or mention the brand itself in a post. Having Followers like these can be further nurtured through personal attention and part of a highly segmented group of all the brand champions. Efforts to market to this group focus on ways to keep them spreading the word.

One problem with this approach is that you may not have enough brand followers to make much impact. Most ordinary people on social networks do not. Most people have a small network of maybe a few hundred friends and associates representing all kinds of tastes and preferences. As a result, brands struggle to create content that they hope will resonate with their followers in some meaningful way, all while staying engaged with the day-to-day interactions. 

This scattershot approach to social marketing yields predictably erratic results.

Do not blindly grab likes and followers or throw various bits of content out to see what sticks. Influencer marketing tells us that our time is better spent in marketing directly to influential people whose likes and dislikes we already know — they align well with our own. It means engaging with these people across social accounts, following and liking, commenting, demonstrating knowledge and personality. It can also mean curating or creating content that is hand-picked to get the attention of influencers. So while your audience as an influencer is the ultimate prize, the target market for brands includes you as an influencer.

By laying this groundwork, you can achieve two things as a brand:

The first is that by merely interacting in positive and constructive ways on influencer’s social pages, you gain early access to their followers. Secondly, you are not promoting anything to them; but showing your face as a community member, adding to your credibility down the line.

The second achievement is that, eventually, when you propose some influencer marketing collaboration, they will already know you. Influencers are celebrities, per se, but their online life can look a lot like a famous person’s real-world one: lots of interruptions from people they do not know, wanting a price of their time, either to praise them or to pitch them. 

You will need to stand out from the noise of attention they get in the form of emails and tweets. This means that when you finally reach out to them, they will already know what you are about, and they will know whether you are a good fit for their audience.