Digital Marketing Agency – TIS India Blog

The voice of customers has always been a powerful concept of digital marketing and in the current scenario, social media sites act as a giant and a huge megaphone for transmitting that voice. In fact, social media platforms have fundamentally modified the balance between brands and customers as it facilitates peer commendations to play a vital role in buying decisions of the purchasers.

A recent study has shown that the marketing that is inspired by creating influence over the target audience generates twice sales than the paid advertisements, and the customers achieved through these influencing techniques have a greater retention rate as well.

Due to the increasing popularity of commendations through the social media platforms, a new term, called as “Influencer Marketing” has become a hot topic of discussion and implementation among the digital marketers. However, before proceeding with how it has positively impacted the overall growth of an online business, it is important to understand this term.

“Influencer marketing is a latest term used in digital marketing, which recognizes and targets the audiences with influences over the potential buyers.”

Gone are the days when business branding was completely depended on celebrities and famous bloggers, but the evolution of the influencer marketing has completely revolutionized the concept of revenue generation.

Only high quality content is not enough to get your business noticed by your target audience, and hence, you must find a way to put your words out and this is where, the influencer marketing comes into existence. It involves developing a relationship with influential people that can help in establishing your business identity among your well-established competitors.

How Influencer Impacts Your Business?

Until now, we have discussed what is influencer marketing, but now it is equally essential to identify the key ways an influencer can have a positive impact on your business.

• They can write an article or a blog post for your business and its services
• They can share information related to your business in their social media accounts
• They can permit or ask you to write guest posts for their websites or they may use a perfect blend of all these three steps to bring fruitful results through your online existence.

Moreover, an influencer always has a larger range of potential audiences that yours, which is essential for endorsing your products or services to a wider spectrum of consumers. The trust factor also defines a clear difference between you and your influencer.

For example, if you have a Twitter account with 100 followers and you shared a piece of content on your account, there are chances that 20,000 people see what you have shared, which might result in 20 additional shares and 10 links. When the same content is shared by an influencer having thousands of followers, those 20,000 people will be much more responsive towards this shared piece of content because of their trust on the influencer and this will further result in the creation of 50 additional shares and 50 links as well.

The trust factor of an Influencer is shown as follows:

As shown in the above figure, there is an immense advantage because the search engines also actively measure author’s authority and give priority to  the vote of the influencer.

Who Employs Influencer Marketing?

It is a proven fact that any business can benefit from developing a conversion around its products and services. Small businesses might employ inexpensive online strategies for connecting with their influencers. For example, a new restaurant could motivate or encourage its customers to write reviews online while a landscaping company can establish a helpful blog for its website. Influence is always created equally powerful both on local and national levels.

On the other hand, bigger companies can adopt comprehensive online tactics for implementing influencer marketing across different platforms. They could easily set up their lavish partnerships with celebrities to help in positioning their products and services. For example, a famous energy drink company might endorse a snowboarders or offer free drinks at competitions to create an influence of its products over the younger generations.

How an Effective Influencer Marketing Plan is Created and Executed?

The first step is to determine the goals for an effective influencer marketing campaign. However, the goals of influencer marketing are inclined more towards creating buzz and spreading awareness of your brand among the target audience than increasing sales. It is important for the companies to set their goals before searching and contacting the influencers. This is the very first essential of digital media marketing process.

Once you have established your goals, you can start recognizing the influencers of your business domains by researching target markets and demographics. Simple searches over Facebook and Google can also reveal the true influencers of your business domain. The goal is to develop an organic relationship with your influencers, which is not entirely dependent on selling and endorsing.

The following diagram displays which type of relationship developing methods are most personal and hence, carries the most value.

Once the company is ready to contact the influencers, they will communicate via social media or some other informal ways. Besides, marketers should reevaluate and revisits the goals every month for tracking the failure or success of the influencer program. If an already existing influencer program is not giving the desired outcomes, the companies must reach new influencers through different ways.

Effective Strategies for Influencer Marketing

Recognize the Most Pertinent Influencers – Digital tools like Appinions and  SocMetrics make it simple for companies to examine the social media background for recognizing the most influential profiles depending on category, geography, or other demographic data.

Develop a Relationship with Influencers – Strive to build a relationship with an influencer prior to soliciting them to sponsor for a company or product. An easy message on Twitter or Facebook can help grovel to a probable new influencer for the company.

Discover Your Influencers Preferences – Distribute advertising material and content to the influencers in a layout that is more expedient for them whether that be audio, video, print or some other layout.

Stick with the Regulations – While developing relationship with the influencers as devising influencer marketing program, it is essential to abide by the regulations to achieve maximum benefit through this technique.

Make it Simple to Access the Content – A content is more likely to be shared by the influencers with their followers if it is simple for them to incorporate into their Facebook posts, blogs,  and other major content sharing portals. The online tools such as SocialChorus make it uncomplicated for  the companies to allocate content to the influencers for sharing.

Don’t Ignore Small Social Networking Sites – There is a common tendency between majority of social media marketers to think only of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and YouTube when it comes to social media sites. But surprisingly, Instagram has 30 million users and it is continuously growing in numbers and hence, minor social media sites can also have a positive influence in the overall revenue through your online business.

Tips for the Digital Marketers for Effectively Implementing Influencer Marketing Tactics

• When searching for influencers to endorse your products and services, go beyond the demographic search for discovering the interests and passion of your potential influencers.
• Engage your influencers with the content of their interest as this will not only add value to them, but to also their audience, which yields better outcomes for your brand.
• Influencer marketing is not necessarily based on reaching good number of potential buyers but it is about creating a connection with your audience.
• Instead of serving your influencers as a marketing platform for your brand, put more time and efforts in developing a long term relationship with them to achieve better results.

Overall, learning to work with people with different dynamics over the Internet is a complex task, but developing relationships with influential people will always bring fruitful results to your business. An effective influencer marketing technique involves proper evaluation and development of relationship with the influencers because then only, we can accomplish the set goals of our business with perfection.