Influence Marketing

We all noticed that our community is having a lot of people who have millions of followers, And you as a business owner or a marketing person when you need to have an infleuncer to talk about your brand or your products is a bit of challenge to choose the right influencer .

First lets discuss what is Influencer marketing? Influencer Marketing is a hybrid of old and new marketing tools. It takes the idea of celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign. The main differentiator in the case of influencer marketing is that the results of the campaign are collaborations between brands and influencers.

From my own experience as a business development employee for almost two years where i was dealing with more than 10 influencers from Iraq and outside too i found out some important points regarding this subject :-

• Am i dealing with an influencer or a celebrity ?
• Does my services or products audience matches the audience of this influencer or celebrity?
• Am i looking for publicity or conversion ?
• Do i care for this person reputation or not? Does the announcement that i want to make or the advertising is "to know more" as a brand-awareness or to build trust and more sells?
• Do i want a celebrity with millions of followers with a 20% engagements or a public figure with a 300k followers with 70% engagements ?

To answer yourself those questions will help you to choose the right celebrity/influencer .

If your service/Product is for everyone and it doesn't have a particular audience then choosing a public figure with a high followers is mostly the right decision for publicity, But if you need conversion you need to step back a little and study the public figure profile/Engagement and reputation ! because putting money and waiting for sells to grow via the public figures audience who their followers do not trust them is only a waste of time and money .

In other hand, Your service/product is for a specific audience that needs a good search for the right public figures to market your business that their audience matches yours and it would be interesting to know more from the followers perspective

How to utilize the audience of the influencer? An influencer is the one who can connect your business with your target consumers. When aligning with an influencer, they bring both their audience and their audience’s network. when searching for the right influencers to promote your brand’s message, you need to make sure that their audience will care what you’re going to say. You should think about the topic they would pay attention to.

Then what to do first to achieve that ?

• Build trust : People want to spend their money on brands they trust and worthy , That means even if you used 3 amazing influencers to market your brand you wont get the expected conversion you want if they do not trust you in the first place.
• Be honest : If you made a mistake with a customer admit it and apologize, Customers are smart and the competition is high nowadays ! if a customer didn't get the right service he will stop buying and choose another brand easily , To prevent that you need to be trust-worthy and admit your mistakes and correct them...Do not tend to delete bad comments but answer them and solve their problems .
• Be open : have communication with your audience and provide them with all the information they need as soon as possible.
• Be relevant : make your social media relevant, your posts and stories that will make people follow you and wait for the rest of the story .
• Be available : For companies that provide immediate responses to their users, it’s much easier to gain their audience’s trust. People will be grateful, if you answer their questions as soon as possible. “Develop trust. The more people trust your brand".
• Solve problems : treat your customers or followers as people who need to know more, Your content shouldn't be only about selling and marketing your brand but to be closer to your audience and share your experience and your solutions for their problems that will open the discussion and get more trust and engagement .
• Be the influencer that you are looking for : try to have a content that influence people who follow you and inspire them that makes you in the end of the day is the influencer that you are looking for.

To know more about Influence marketing watch the video :-

In the end, Hope you had some new information on one of the marketing effective types.

References :- YouTube and Google.

Zainab Amer

[email protected]