Brand Growth through #InfluencerMarketing

In David Schneider's video through Stukent, titled "How to Grow Your Brand With Influencer Marketing", Schneider discusses what influencer marketing entails, and how a company/user can use it to it's fullest advantage. There are five main points of the video: What is influencer marketing, how to find influencers, ways to partner with influencers, how to pitch influencers, and influencer marketing success stories.

What is influencer marketing?

As Schneider states, influencer marketing is all about the current state of the consumer. Most consumers know how to do research on the topics that interest them, and they are looking for recommendations if they find themselves posting queries for friends or family to answer on social media accounts. It is said that 80% of consumers said they would make purchases if they read positive recommendations on social media. This happens for many reasons. Social media offers a trustworthy online authority, regardless of if it is through family or friends, or if random strangers are answering questions to those asking.

To dive into what influencer marketing really is, there are many examples that can be used, such as bloggers posting about a product they enjoy, youtube creators making a video with a specific product being used, or a video being posted on Instagram or Tiktok promoting a new product and offering a discount code. This is all considered inbound marketing, which Schneider describes as marketing in a form that people are WANTING to be marketing to, rather than outbound marketing such as pop up ads and commercials, in which people are not necessarily looking to be marketed to.

How to find influencers

Once a company decides they they want to take part in this form of inbound marketing through the use of influencers, one of the first steps is to search for marketing blogs, in which most people do this step through google. Although this is a good place to begin, Schneider makes a point that this is not one of the most successful tactics. To summarize this second section of the video, the main point is social media activity, and searching for influencers through the use of comment sections, article links, shared posts, and keywords on websites such as FollowerWonk and Ninja Outreach (Schneider's very own website).

Ways to partner with influencers

Once these first two base steps are complete, a company needs to make the decision on how they can partner with influencers. A few commonly known tactics include offering affiliations, paying money to discuss a product, offering free access and copies to the influencer and their audience, and giving discounts. Regardless of how a company chooses to partner with an influencer to market their products or services, Schneider prioritized the use of the following graphic to help understand how brands should go about this strategy:

In this image, there are three main aspects, or points: Firstly, the influencer (then) and company (you) are very important things to consider when taking part in influencer marketing, but one very important aspect that may not be prioritized is the influencer's audience. By establishing a plan and partnership that benefits you as a company, the influencer, and the influencer's audience, the use of influencer marketing can result in large amount of success. Some examples of influencer marketing methods that touch all three of these aspects include guest posts, giveaways, product reviews, affiliates, social media exposure, and much more. Schneider also states that it is important for the company to be personal with the influencer, and establish a familiarity and personal connection.

How to pitch influencers

Schneider covers four main aspects of making a pitch to an influencer, it can be summarized in four words: Personalized, clear, credible, value.

1. Personalize it (personalized): Use the influencer's name, and reference their blog or website.
2. Be honest about what you're asking for (clear): get straight to the point in the pitch, and try to reach out for a guest post or product review.
3. Keep it succinct (credible): Show credibility through knowledge and experience. More partnerships means more credibility. The more you connect with influencers, the more this aspect will grow.
4. Offer something of value to them AND their audience (value): Reference back to the diagram to help in understanding. What do you and your company want EVERYONE to get out of this partnership or proposal.

To finish, Schneider gives a few short examples of Company success stories.

• Groove: This is a customer service application that turns large amount of revenue each month. This company uses a lot of influencer marketing and engages with this often, which allowed their company to grow exponentially over a very short period of time
• Buffer: Buffer is a very popular social media application in the marketing world, that states they acquired upwards of 100,000 users within the first 9 months of running, due to guest blogging. This was a gradual process, and the company did around 150 guest posts.
• NinjaOutreach: This company is David Schneider's. Although a smaller company, NinjaOutreach was able to grow their customer base by 500 and triple their usage traffic with no budget allocated towards paid advertising. This was all done through the use of inbound and influencer marketing.