Cash In Influencer Marketing To Boost Your Business

Gone are the days when digital marketers sat back and analysed details of every step. The digital world is moving at a lightening speed and so are the marketers. Nobody is leaving out any way of getting to the top. In the race to win, marketers are caught up in their own 'Digital Marketing Jargons'.

When we talk about Digital Marketing, thousands of things have popped up. And one of them is 'Influencer Marketing'. The internet is full of information about influencer marketing. But the cynicism here is how many of you really understand what it is actually?

Well, it is not that people are not really getting the crux of this marketing tactic. But the problem is half of them are not aware of the right way to implement this.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

There is so much hype about this new marketing tactic. But it is nothing more than an amalgamation of traditional and digital way of marketing. The concept is very simple. Endorsing a well known celebrity to spread awareness about your company/services is influencer marketing.

Now the question arises is why did the need arise to introduce the concept of influencer marketing. The probable answer to this can be personal disconnection.

Think of the time when we went for grocery shopping. We knew the owner of the shop and also probably some of the workers. But now that everything is digitised, your grocery is just a click away. You no longer have that personal connection with the shop owner. In fact, now you don't even know who really owns the place you are buying grocery from. You are not even sure if they even have a physical shop or not.

People were missing this personal connection. They are bored of seeing the same ads and videos of business promotion. Therefore to bring back this human and emotional touch, influencer marketing came into being.

Influence Of Influencer Marketing

Now that you know why getting an influencer was important, let us put some spotlight on how it works.

Influencers or call it the messenger angels of your business, use their popularity to influence their followers. Basically, it is Neil Armstrong talking about life on the moon. Now whatever he has to say about things back at the moon, people will believe it.

Similarly if a celebrity is talking about your brand, people will be influenced by him and follow your brand. Earlier, having a website was enough. But now more than a website, social media handles are the 'Marketing Gods'.

Yes! The social media platforms are literally ruling the marketing and deciding the destiny of any business. Here jumps in the role of influencers. Though social media plays an important role, but people often misunderstand influencer marketing and social media marketing as one.

These two things, sure go hand in hand, but are sure not the same thing. Like said earlier, social media is 'Marketing God', people blindly follow it. So the influencer that you chose to represent your brand has to have a mammoth of followers on social media. Now pops another question.

How To Find The Right Influencer?

Finding the right person to be your influencer is the success mantra of influencer marketing. You cannot ask Mark Zuckerberg to be an influencer for a fashion brand. So first, set your niche target and then find the right person to be your messenger angel.

Pro Tip: You can use Insightpool's universal search to find your right influencer. This tool helps you find your expert on the basis of topic, bio profile, location, conversation stream etc.

Do a thorough research:

Before finalizing your person, check his social profile on all handles. Check how many followers he has? Is he only retweeting and reposting or proving his own unique material?

Once you know, you can easily determine if he can be the superman for your brand or not. Following the tempting tactic of a single metric definition can be harmful. Do not only focus on the number of followers of your influencer but also pay attention to his worth.

Things to keep in mind:

The most important five things that you need to keep in mind while looking for the right influencer are:

1. Relevance
2. Engagement
3. Reach
4. Frequency
5. Authenticity

Check out his posts, blogs, content, anything that you can put your hand on. This will help you to find if he is really relevant for the type of person you are looking for. Next, keep an eye on the engagement. See if his followers are commenting, liking or sharing his content or they are just for namesake. Analysing his reach is also crucial.

Sometimes it is better to have only 10 healthy mangoes than 100 rotten ones.

The frequency of his posting is also an important deciding factor before finalizing. And of course, authenticity is something that is a must. You would not want any fake person to be your influencer.

Next in the list is -

How To Compensate Your Influencer?

Like stated earlier, there is much hype about influencer marketing and thanks to the internet for proving all the information. But despite being a part of the marketing strategy, 86% of them do not know how to compensate their influencers.

Well, of course, monetary compensation is one way. But there are a few other ways also to payback to your influencers. Some of them are:

1. Guest of honour to brand events: Invite them to brand events, give them special treatment and make them feel special. Nothing can be more tranquillising for a celebrity to be the center of attraction.

1. Give exclusive attention: Be it a new product launch or special access to services, your influencer should get it all. Making them feel special is always the key point.

1. Offer Deals and Discounts: Let your influencer be the first to try and test all your deals and discounts. This will be a two way win for you. Offering free deals gets you a happy influencer and happy influencer gets you free publicity.

1. Offer Special Trips: What better compensation for an influencer than offering him a vacation. This is always one way of expressing your gratitude by giving them a break to some exotic destination.

How To Use Influencers To Increase Your Brand Presence?

Hoping that by now it would be clear that influencers are not the second big film star or famous personality. They are the people who have build their own brand and credibility in a particular domain after much spent in time.

They are the people who build their own followers and reputation. So giving the reputation of your business in the hands of any such influencer may not be much of a risk.

Now the right way to harness the influence of these messenger angle is to utilise them wisely. Since social media plays a vital role in influencer marketing, the first milestone is reaching out on social platforms.

Being the influencer for your brand, he will of course promote your products/services. But you should also be doing that on your social platform pages. Tag your superman on your page, post positives about him, brag about him and do not forget to tag him.

This will show your posts on his pages which means it automatically reaches to millions of his followers. The secret is to target his audience/followers by targeting him.

This automatically generates traffic on your social pages. Isn't that interesting!

How to measure influencer marketing ROI?

Any businessman would think of the results at the end of any investment. So will be the same for investment in influencer marketing. Well, now how much return you are getting on this investment totally depends on the what are you looking for.

If you have invested in getting yourself a messenger angle to target more sales the results may be different. And if you have invested in an influencer with the objective to brand visibility and awareness, the results may be totally different.

Often people find it difficult to measure the ROI of influencer marketing compared to any other investment and it can be tricky sometimes. But it is not as difficult as it sounds.

You only need to keep in mind three thing before setting your foot into influencer marketing campaign.

• Set your objective - product/service sales or brand awareness
• Identify the campaign KPI's to measure these objectives
• Use the KPI's to track influencer's performance

Setting goals or expectations in advance is always a good idea because this pushes you to achieve those goals. The most important KPI's for influencer marketing can be:

• Engagement
• Reach
• Follower growth
• Traffic

You can keep a track of all these metrics with the help of many tools like, Google analytics, Insights etc. Another way of tracking the influencer campaign return is cost-per-action formula.

Some Facts and Figures About Influencer Marketing

1. 94% of marketers practicing influencer marketing find it effective.
2. Influencer marketing is believed to give 11 times more ROI compared to traditional ways of digital marketing.
3. 94% of marketers believe that influencer marketing increases brand advocacy.
4. 88% of digital marketers say that influencer marketing has helped them reach a new targeted audience.
5. Instagram is the most used and popular social media platform to practice influencer marketing.

Some Of The Top Tools To Find The Right Influencer:

• Klout
• Buzzsumo
• Kred
• Keyhole
• Influencer
• Topsy
• Followerwonk

Guess it is a lot of information about influencer marketing. And not just information but productive info which will help you plan your next influencer marketing strategy. So get on your heels today, start the search for your right messenger angle (influencer) and take your brand to another level.