What is Influencer marketing? Concept, Examples and Advantages

Influencer marketing is basically a type of marketing in which the focus mainly lies on using influential people in a particular niche in order to drive the message that a particular brand wishes to give. The brand owners instead of reaching out to the target audience would hire or influence a well-known celebrity so that they would talk about the brand to the large mass of consumers.

The influencer marketers prefer opting for people who influence the thought process of people rather than the one who just have fame. The concept proves to be really helpful to increase the potential customer base of the brand.

The Concept of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is basically accompanied by social media marketing along with content marketing. Most of the influencer campaign that takes place has some kind of social media and content marketing elements in it.

This is due to the fact that people nowadays are more active on social media than any other platform of entertainment.

The influential people can spread the message of the brands through their own social media channel and this leads to more people getting connected to the image of the brand.  Content marketing is also used widely in influencer marketing by either creating contents for the influencers so that they can market it to the consumers or sometimes the influencers create the content themselves and then markets it.

Even though influencer marketing goes hand in hand with social media marketing and content marketing but they are not synonymous. Through, they function in a well integrated manner.

Let us understand the definition of Influencer first to properly comprehend what Influencer Marketing is-

Who is an Influencer?

Influencer can be understood as someone who can change the purchase decisions or behaviors of buyers in any particular context. On the Social Media Portals, these influencers enjoy an engaged audience base with the help of content on particular topic.

What is Influencer Marketing?

By using Influencer Marketing, a business tries to harness the power of important individuals on the web or in particular industry for meeting any specific business goal. This is done through a mutually productive relationship.

How to make an Influencer Marketing Plan?

The influencer Marketing plan revolves around 5 key steps-

1. Defining your online audience that you want to convert by using an Influencer
2. Discovering the right Influencer for your brand who can help you in accomplishing your business goal
3. Monitoring your influencer for the different available opportunities. Monitor the existing content of influencers before finalizing him or her for your brand
4. Taking actions like following, linking, sharing, etc. and engaging with the influencer for building the trust that can be the base of mutually productive relationship of future
5. Measuring the results your influencer marketing. Checking how your influencers’ promotion is translating into tangible events

Examples of Influencer Marketing

In order to gain a better understanding of influencer marketing, we are giving some examples of influencer marketing

• The marketing of a new mobile model was done on Instagram- They used about 30 influential people to help them spread the word of the brand using their own Insta account
• Sponsoring an event by a brand – A local influencer was used to make an emotional advertisement which leads to much media hype and the video got around 5,00,000 views within a span of few days.
• The marketing of a Donut brand on the National Donut Day- the company endorsed its brand through 8 influential people on their SnapChat Channel on the eve of National Donut Day.

The Advantages of Influencer Marketing

• The whole concept of influencer marketing is engaging the customers so that they can get much more involved with the brand. Traditional marketing mainly focused on creating advertisements so that people get to know about the products, but now, people get frustrated with the concept. Here the whole process of social media marketing can prove to be really helpful in generating leads.
• Lots of people follow the influencer on social media, so when they would endorse the brand, it would bring a sense of trust among all the people. Moreover, the marketing would be highly focused and very relevant. For example, if you have a sports brand then you would hire a renowned sportsperson to endorse it and people who love sports would be the first one to view it.
• As the advertisement is more focused and relevant, it makes customer acquisition much easier. The influencers work on engaging stories so that their followers can relate themselves to the brand and gets drawn towards it.
• The influencer marking is an exceptionally focused concept and when the influencer is chosen right, it would spread the words of your brand to the people who are mostly interested in your products and thus you would be confident that you are mostly investing your money on the potential customers.
• It has been observed that influencer marketing even helps in boosting the SEO ranking of a particular website. This is because when influencers talk about your brand, more of their followers would also talk about it resulting in an overall increase in the brand visibility which in turn boosts the SEO rankings.
• Brand awareness and reachability goes to new heights with influencer marketing.
• Rather than considering high-end film stars or expensive  for promoting the brands, influencer marketing focuses on hiring social influencers who have a lot of followers in that particular field and hence the overall cost of hiring them is much affordable.

The Disadvantages of Influencer Marketing

• You have to stay really updated in order to make sure that influencer marketing would go the way you wanted it to be. Be sure about the influencers who are endorsing your brand. Their social media presence should be really good and it should not be volatile or exposed to any kinds of threats. This, in turn, might damage the image of your brand.
• The influencer marketing is basically a strategy that needs to be included in a larger marketing mix. In order to get success, the whole concept needs a lot of time, patience and dedication.
• This marketing strategy would not give you success by paying the influencers. It is mainly the influencers who would drive the whole process and generate creative ideas to accumulate more leads. That is why even though many companies invest in this marketing strategy but they severely fails in it.

Why would you need social influencers?

In the last few years, we cannot deny the fact that marketing has inclined more towards social media. Most of the populations are active on these platforms and hence the marketers have started investing much more time and energy on all of these platforms.

It has left all the forms of traditional media behind and hence business houses are keen on increasing their brand visibility on all of these platforms. Brands even battle it out to reach the top of the search engine or get noticed much more frequently on any of the platforms of social media.

The main reason behind this huge leap from traditional to social media is due to the fact that the latter is much more engaging. People get to interact with the brands directly rather than only talking about them. And as they are so closely associated with social media, when a social media influencer tells them about the goodness of a brand, they tend to incline more towards that and even starts developing reliability and faith towards the brand.

Hence partnering the correct social influencer who can develop the correct brand image for your business is really very important given the present situation. It would not only increase the awareness of your brand but would also enhance the organic conversations.

Things to remember about Influencer Marketing

People would always trust more when something good about the brand is talked about by the third parties rather than the brand themselves. And when it comes from social influencers, the person who is idolized by thousands then people starts relying more on the brand.

Think about yourself, would you prefer a brand that you know nothing about or would you prefer something that is promoted by the influencer whom you idolize? The whole idea of influencer marketing works keeping in mind this particular concept.

The influencers would promote your brand to their followers, increasing the overall visibility of your brand. The influencer has got a strong relationship with his followers and that power could definitely drive more traffic towards the brand. It would firstly increase the views and then the sales through your official social media channels.

How to Choose the Correct Influencer?

This is very important for marketing your business. Even though all the influencers have a great bond with their followers but choosing influencers who are relevant to your brand is particularly very important. Also, you would need to understand the impact the influencers have on the platforms. The image of the influencer would always be related to the image of the brand, hence choosing an influencer who not only has a positive image but also can convince people so as to generate a lead for your website which would, in turn, increase the sales is really very important.

To sum it up, the influencer for marketing your products need to have the following qualities:

Qualities that your Influencer Need to Have

A) Relevance

You need to remember that all the social influencers cannot be the perfect influencer who could market your brand. It is all about having the perfect relevance. For example, if you are into food business then an influencer who is into the industry and are associated with the allied services would be a great influencer for your brand.

B) Reach

Now that you know the influence factor, you would need to find out which influencer has the most reach towards their followers. You need to understand that which influencer can make the voices of your brand be heard the most to all the people out there. Selecting a famous Instagram model to market your beauty products can be a really good idea.

C) Engagement

The influencer would need to drive the marketing and would need to have the love for the brand. They would not only promote it to all of their followers but also are capable enough to engage them with the name of your brand. You would need to check that as well.

Best Influencer Marketing Strategies that you can try out to optimize your reach and appreciate the most relevant audience base are now being given here, so pay heed to these as well and try to incorporate them-

Here is a video by Marketing91 on Influencer marketing.

Best Influencer Marketing Strategies

• Using your influencer post on your brand page and coupling that with a coupon code
• Asking influencer to come up with branded blog posts
• Brand mentions are again a very effective influencer marketing strategy
• Giveaways or competitions can also be very useful in influencing people via influencer marketing
• Opting for Long term partnerships or Ambassador Programs
• Organizing an even then asking influencers to post about that event is very effective in boosting brand awareness
• Letting your influencer to takeover your brand page and do posting for sometimes on their behalf will be helpful in appreciating additional engagement
• Asking influencers to opt for guest posting
• Run a competitions amongst your influencers will empower your brand to enjoy better visibility

In Conclusion…

So, this was all about Influencer Marketing that need pay attention to for generating the expected outcomes in the most efficient and productive manner possible.

This will be helping your business optimize its reach in front of the most relevant audience base that is appreciated by your Influencers.

This kind of marketing is the new age marketing that is gaining lots of prevalence around the world just because of their power in targeting and converting the great number of people for different brands.

So, what is your plan of incorporating Influencer Marketing in your online marketing strategy?