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Have you ever watched a television commercial with a famous celebrity endorsing their product?
Testimonials have been a tried and true marketing idea for generations, but social media has changed the landscape, and it has become increasingly important to know these ways an influencer can help you grow your business.
The Basics of Influencer Marketing
While movie stars, musicians, and athletes are among the celebrities that will instantly garner attention for any business, influencers can fit into any niche at any level as regular people become stars on social media. While you might not be familiar with their work, they can have anywhere from thousands to millions of organically earned followers who believe what they have to say based on their authentic content.
Influencer marketing involves taking those old marketing ideas and evolving them into collaborative efforts between brands and influencers with content-driven media presented on popular social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
How Influencer Marketing Helps Brands?
Much like other marketing strategies, influencer marketing can be used for a variety of goals for a company, from brand awareness to direct sales. Determining your goals is the first step to influencer marketing, followed by researching your niche and finding influencers in your field with high follower engagement rates.
When you have the right influencers, you will be able to collaborate with them to create content that shows their audience what you have to offer and why it would be useful for their lives. Influencers have the unique ability to demonstrate how a business has helped them by displaying a product or service without the constraints of other advertising platforms.
Top Influencers Make a Difference
To truly understand what an influencer can do for you, it is essential to understand that every niche has its own way of reaching audiences, such as beauty bloggers who do makeup tutorials, fitness gurus that share their latest workouts, or travelers who show off the merits of their wanderlust.
Take for example Mona Farzam, whose YouTube channel Mona Moda features reviews of beauty and fashion products to a young generation of enthusiastic followers. She is able to feature products in her videos by trying them out herself, telling her audience what she appreciates about particular products, and showing how to use them.
Influencer marketing can work for larger brands just as well as up-and-coming businesses, as Subaru proved with their Meet an Owner campaign. Collaborating with twenty well-known influencers on Instagram, they were able to generate massive brand awareness and positivity while allowing their followers to take part in the program by showing off their own vehicle in the process.
For some brands, big-name influencers are not always the best route, and instead micro-influencers are more effective. Instead of depending on just a few big names to spread the word, you can reach a wide audience with social media influencers who have a following of anywhere from one thousand to one million within a specific niche, aiming at a relevant target to a less generic audience.
Now that you know how effective influencer marketing is in today’s social media world, you can leverage the authentic reach of influencers to expand your brand’s visibility.
Image via Flickr by sektordua.
