Social media plays a crucial role in connecting businesses with potential customers. Due to the growing presence of consumers on social networking sites, several brands and small businesses are taking over social media to create their digital identities. However, due to the increasing competition of business on social media platforms, the audience has become sceptical about the authenticity of products and services marketed online. Thus, it becomes important for businesses to gain the trust of their audience and build a reliable relationship with them. As people trust word of mouth more than advertisements many brands are using influencer marketing to build trust with their audience. In this article, we will discuss influencer marketing and how to choose the right social media influencer for your marketing strategy.
Who are social media influencers?
Social media influencers are socially active individuals who influence people through their engaging social media content. People follow social media influencers to get an insight into their lives and recommendations on relevant products and services. Social media influencers work closely with brands and agencies to promote their products and services. A majority of social media influencers are specialised in their area and create niche-based content. Based on their interests they publish content in different areas such as fitness, fashion, beauty, entertainment, food and parenting. Additionally, based on the number of followers and their reach, social media influencers are classified as nano-influencers, micro-influencers and macro-influencers.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing where businesses partner with social media influencers to promote their products and services. It is a widely used digital marketing technique as it helps businesses to target audiences from a specific niche. A common reason why influencer marketing works is that there is a high amount of trust between social media influencers and their followers. By leveraging with social media influencers, brands can increase their visibility and reach while building brand awareness and loyalty.
Depending on their needs brands can engage social media influencers to spread the word about their products through their content, social media accounts or website. Many times social media influencers also become a representative of the brand a regularly mention the brand in their content. Additionally, brands also tie up with influencers where they cover a brand’s event or new product launches in their stories or content.
How to find the right influencers?
Choosing the right influencer is extremely important to execute a successful influencer marketing strategy. Before you start your search for social media influencers, here are some tips that will help you to find an appropriate influence for your business.
- List your goals
Businesses use influencer marketing to improve brand awareness and increase their sales. To initiate your influencer marketing strategy, create a list of goals that you need to achieve with the help of influencers. For example, you can use influencer marketing to attract the audience from different demographics, to expand your audience base or to introduce a new product. As influencers have the skills to reach a particular audience they can help you in achieving your goals by connecting you with the targeted audience.
- Define your message
Although, influencers will guide you to portray your message in front of the audience, defining a message in advance will make the process of influencer marketing easier. Instead of a professional tone, social media influencers use a conversational and personal narrative tone. This helps the audience in differentiating authentic posts from sales-driven posts. While it is tempting to depend on an influencer’s creativity, defining a message will help influencers to pitch their content to complement your brand’s personality.
- Relevance
A relevant influencer can play a significant role in connecting you to the target audience. Thus, find an influencer who shares content that is relevant to your industry and business. Before you select an influencer, ensure that their audience aligns with your target market. Instead of looking at the number of followers, see how many followers fall in your targeted demographics. To see the relevance of the content of the influencers you can go through their old posts and see the type of content they post to engage with the audience.
- Engagement
Engagement is a crucial factor that determines how interactive an influencer’s content is. It also tells about the capability of an influencer to influence the purchase decisions of potential customers. To see the engagement of the influencers check how audience comment and respond to their posts. You can also ask the influencers to share their engagement metrics for the past few months. This will tell you if the influencer will be successful in helping your brand make meaningful relationships with potential customers. Engagement also
- Legitimacy
Before collaborating with an influencer, ensure that the chosen influencer is legitimate. Due to the increasing demand for social media influencers, there has been a rise in fraudulent influencers. These influencers often portray a false picture of themselves and deceive brands with fake followers and engagement. Thus, look out for potential red flags before choosing an influencer. Some of the common red flags include an abnormal spike in the number of followers, low engagement rates despite large follower counts, repetitive content, poor grammar and irrelevant demographics of the audience.
- Authentic content
The content of an influencer should not sound like a marketing pitch. It should be engaging and must sound authentic. Audiences rely on content that sounds authentic and not sponsored. Even if influencers are getting paid to promote a specific brand, their posts should appear as genuine recommendations and not paid endorsements. Tech-savvy consumers look forward to tried and tested products and believe in influencers who genuinely try products or services before promoting them.
Final thoughts
Influencer marketing is a powerful way to promote a brand and improve its social media presence. An influencer can either make or break your brand’s identity. Hence, before selecting an influencer conduct due diligence to ensure the authenticity and legitimacy of an influencer. Since influencer marketing is here to stay, invest in a long-term influencer marketing plan that will help your business grow.
Author:
Ellie Richards is an online Marketing Manager at PhDCentre, specialising in PhD research paper help. She specialises in research, content and article writing on various topics, including Education, Marketing, and Technology.
