Once you’ve found influencers, the actual influencer marketing part is just starting. Influencer marketing must not be looked at with a one-size-fits-all vision. The best campaigns are tailored for specific audiences. This helps the brand-influencer partnership and further develops engagement with all customers.[17]
Because true influencers are passionate about your brand, you want their voices and their positive opinions shared in cyberspace through content creation. Creativity and context are key.
- Content creation: For some goods and services, asking customers to upload photos of themselves wearing your clothing or eating your new menu item may lead to results. Other times, you may want content to be created by having product giveaways or discounts for the influencers who do a certain task, such as sharing a social media page or writing a review for your website. Generally, people like the opportunity to express their opinions and make their voices heard, so encourage your influencers to create content.
- Free samples/giveaways: Another way for influencers to talk about you is to give out free samples. While you always risk someone not liking your product or service, if you initially choose strong influencers to develop relationships with, then they are more likely to write a positive review.
- Mention influencers: On social media, mention influencers in your posts or retweet one of their tweets. For blogs, ask them to be a guest blogger or put their testimonials in one of your blogs. Like the two previous strategies, this builds the organization-influencer relationship by directly acknowledging an individual person.
Is influencer marketing right for your business?
While the prospect of having others who are already connected to both your brand and your target audience promote your product or service sounds risk-free, influencer marketing, like all marketing strategies, must be approached with caution.
Influencer marketing requires groundwork and extensive research before promotion actually begins. A business must identify potential influencers, reach out to those influencers, prepare those influencers in line with your marketing campaign, agree on terms of the relationship, follow the influencer and evaluate the influencer’s impact. The actual marketing campaign may begin after extensive groundwork, yet it may not bear fruit for many months, if at all.
Influencer marketing also requires businesses to trust influencers, which includes relying upon others and giving them some control. Are your identified influencers people you really want representing your business, or is your business more comfortable with controlling your own narrative and taking responsibility for any wrongdoing or missteps that occur? Whether you’re working with 10 influencers, 100 influencers or 1,000 influencers, each influencer is going to have his or her own opinion, platform and questions. In other words, working with influencers requires a business’s time and effort—time and effort that would otherwise be spent on other business-related matters.
If you’d like to implement an influencer marketing strategy, your business will soon learn of the challenges with tracking influencer marketing. Posts, presentations, tweets and other means an influencer may use to promote your product can’t be easily tracked directly for each influencer. Thus, unless your business has the time, energy and funds to invest in a sophisticated tracking system, knowing the conversion—or the success—of your influencers’ efforts may be difficult to measure.[18] Action, not just influence, is key.
The opportunities for engagement and developing relationships with influencers are endless. Understanding that influencer marketing is not a one-size-fits-all strategy is essential. Does your business have the resources to complete in-depth research to find influencers, develop a campaign and manage and grow those influencer relationships? If you believe yes, then what type of campaign is best suited for your business? Retail or fashion companies many find particular success with visually driven campaigns, whereas, a software company may find greater success with written content. While influencer marketing has brought success for many companies, your business’s success will be contingent upon your ability to create and grow authentic relationships with established and credible people—influencers—in your industry.
Influencer marketing is about relationships, and by constantly working to maintain loyalty and strengthen relationships, you will reap the rewards of this technique. Like with personal and professional relationships, influencer marketing relationships require continuous effort and can often be a slow process. Work to foster strong and authentic relationships, and your business will reap the highlighted rewards of influencer marketing, too.
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