What Influencer Marketing is Not
This is an excellent time to point out that Influencer Marketing isn’t just about finding someone with an audience and offering them money or exposure so they can say good things about you. That’s what viral celebrities are for.
So what is Influencer Marketing?
Influencers are people who have spent time creating their brand and acquiring their audience. An influencer can be a famous fashion icon on Instagram, a professional blogger who tweets, or a respected marketing executive on LinkedIn; the list goes on.
How it all unfolds:
Generally, brand ambassadors are appointed by the brand when they are a complete fit and align well within the brand demographic. They will naturally want to preserve their reputation and the people who trust them. They are people who have the patience and focus to succeed in social media, one organic follower at a time.
Influencers, unlike celebrities, can be easily accessible. They can be anyone. What makes them influential is their massive following on the internet and social media.
The influencer must become a strategic expert on the brand or product to advertise and publish his or her cooperation with the brand on all social media channels. Within any industry, there are influential people; it’s just a case of tracking them down.
They are popular through what they represent and well known by the vast majority of followers, and that’s the type of target audience you need to comply with.
One Simple Rule: Influencer Marketing is Marketing to Influencers. It sources people who have an impact on potential customers and aligns marketing activities around these influencers.
In Traditional Social Media marketing, a brand would set up its identity on the platform it chose. As time passed monitoring the number of people who used their particular product or service became more clear, and they could see who their top brand achievers were. Who were the customers that were liking and sharing content? Or mentioning the brand in a post? These users would often be looked closely at, through particular observation and as part of a highly divided group of all the brand leaders.
5 ways to make Influencer Marketing effective:
- Consider your brand
- Allow creative freedom
- Find the right influencers
- Be systematic- put together a strategy, plan and budget, spend time on research.
- Be tolerant – people talking to people, not companies talking to companies.
