The Power of Influencer Marketing

Today’s consumers are making informed purchasing decisions by turning to online reviews before checkout. “Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market” (tapinfluence.com). This marketing tactic enables you to put your products directly into the hands of the most qualified consumers, who in turn, will inform their network about their experiences/thoughts with it. Influencer marketing is tightly integrated with social-media and content marketing, as nearly every influencer campaign has a social/content component. Let’s break down how to form a campaign, kicking it off, and then reviewing what you can expect to see in the results.

To begin an influencer campaign, you must identify the product(s) you wish to use & identify the appropriate target market. From there, you can manually select influencers by reviewing bogs, vlogs, etc., or you can elect to use a platform (TapInfluence, Influenster).

A huge benefit to using a platform is the ability to leverage a community of well over 2 million ‘social savvy’ shoppers (influenster.com). These passionate consumers voluntarily review products & share honest feedback with brands and the platform community. They are well-informed and stay up to date on the latest product news and tips from industry experts.

Based on an individual’s profile, they will receive relevant complimentary products to test in exchange for reviews and honest feedback. Intelligent algorithms can select the most qualified influencers that fall into your target market. Based on the size of the campaign, you can make this pool as narrow or wide as you wish based on different qualification filters.

Once your influencers receive their free products, you can implement a secondary marketing campaign. This campaign is specifically for your influencers and should contain a  series of social media related tasks to then drive awareness to their networks. An Instagram or Facebook post, an online review, and a blog or video post are all wonderful ways for influencers to share their opinions on your product to promote awareness. Influencer platforms in particular easily collect data to show the success of both campaigns, though many social platforms make it easy to track what is being said about your brand, particularly through hashtags. You can also use Google Analytics to narrow in and see how sales have been impacted as a direct result of the campaign.

As today’s consumers continue to be well-informed buyers, help make the path to purchase easier by curating a strong online presence. By utilizing key influencers to create social posts & online reviews, potential customers will have a wealth of knowledge and trusted view of your brand which should aid in an increase in recognition and sales.