What is influencer marketing and why should your brand bother?

According to Forbes, influencer marketing will explode in 2017. Have you seen much of it so far? In this blog I will be telling you all about it, explaining why your brand should bother, and detailing what you need to consider to implement your own influencer marketing strategy.

This is how Tapinfluence explains the process:

"Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead inspire, hire, pay influencers to get the word for you."

For example, if yo're a fan of Love Island (like me) and follow all of the islanders on Instagram, you will see them constantly promoting clothing brands, cosmetic brands, basically any product you can think of on their social media feeds. 

An influencer marketing strategy could make all the difference to your brand's reach. Attract the right audience by working with influential individuals in your industry. To learn more, read our blog 'How can influencer marketing help to grow your business?'

However, there a few questions that you have to ask yourself before jumping straight into influencer marketing:

Who’s following the influencer?

First of all, you have to make sure that your potential influencer is highly engaged across social media, especially on the platform you are expecting them to use most. The kind of things you should be looking out for is whether they like and comment on other people’s pictures, posts and tweets.

You’ll also be looking to see if they tag their friends in posts or comments. This is important, as you need to see what kind of fan base they have before your brand starts working with them.

Does the influencer’s audience align with your audience? 

This is key for your brand because you want to be focusing on the people who will be interested in what you do and sell.

In this case, just because someone has over a million followers, it doesn’t mean that they will be a good influencer for your brand. They may post about very different themes, which means they will not have the kind of followers you want to reach.

What’s the influencer’s history?

It can be seen a good idea to follow potential influencers on social, maybe creating a secondary account dedicated to this research. This will let you focus more on the messaging of your potential influencers, instead of risking your own account getting too clustered.

You also need to have a think if the influencer has had any backlash in the past or a troubled track record. If they do, it may be best to stay away and find a different, safer influencer who be a risk to your reputation. 

According to research by PR Week, only 10% of influencers are professional, manageable and brand safe. As this is only a small percentage, you must make sure you work with talent that can be trusted, and have a top manager to keep them in line throughout their campaign. 

Who can you afford?

To maximise reach and engagement, you should be open to using a mix of influencers in your campaign. The different categories exist in influencer marketing include ‘celebrities’, ‘influencers’. ‘trail blazers’ and ‘micro-influencers.’

Even if the influencer has a great fan base, it’s still vital to research their social media statistics. This insight can help you out a huge amount when it comes to discussing a fair price.

What are your goals?

Before starting your research for influencer marketing, you need to outline what your KPIs are. This is to help you figure out what kind of influencer you want to be attracting in order to promote your product. It also gives a better indicator to the influencer and what kind of things you are expecting from them.

You will need to outline what tone of voice you are expecting, and which social channels you are hoping to get the most traffic from. It's always a good idea to prioritise your campaign based on awareness, reach, sentiment or action. 

How can Six & Flow help?

Influencer marketing forms a new and exciting part of inbound marketing as a whole. Building out personas is something we believe we are very good at, so it's great to expand our knowledge even further! If you have any more questions on influencer marketing then give us a call, we’d love to help.

An influencer marketing strategy could make all the difference to your brand's reach. Attract the right audience by working with influential individuals in your industry. To learn more, read our blog 'How can influencer marketing help to grow your business?'