Influencer Marketing has been proved more effective than traditional advertising. The world of marketing, its impact and the ways of marketing are changing drastically.

These days marketers have a killer arrow in their marketing quiver and it’s called “influencer marketing”. In this post of top tips for social media influencer marketing, I am gonna list 10 of them.

What is influencer marketing and how it can leverage your business?

Simply influencer marketing is the way of marketing in which an influencer is hired for promoting services or products. The influencer should have a good social media presence with the higher rate of engagement with their connections.

Influencer marketing provides more eyes and ears to your product or service. Traditional advertising has its limitations but influence marketing has comparatively had a bigger reach.

But you can’t go to any of the influencers and say “hey bro, I want you to promote my products on your Instagram account or Twitter account, don’t worry I will pay you for doing this”. No, it is not simple as that.

The first and most important thing to be considered before starting an influencer marketing campaign is to choose the influencer wisely. But what you should look for in an influencer, only millions of followers? I have answered this in a better way which is featured in the first point below. So it’s time to have a look at the top 10 tips which will make your influencer marketing efforts more effective and fruitful.

#1. Know your “Influencer”

Finding a suitable fit for your brand is not easy. Actually, it is one of the hardest jobs for the internet marketers before starting their campaign. What are the things you should look for in an influencer before hiring him/her?

I) Relevancy – The influencer’s niche must be relevant to your product or service. For example, a fitness icon will not be a great fit for promoting blogging tools.

II)Followers Count – Followers count really matters but being a social media icon or celebrity is not enough. An influencer having more followers count will ask for more money.

III)Engagement – The engagement level of your influencer will decide the result of your campaign. Having big reach is not everything; if the audience doesn’t respond to the influencer it will be a disaster for your campaign.

IV)Social Image – Social media is loaded with hatred posts these days and these kind of contents are more viral in nature. If your influencer is one of them this will harm your brand’s image too.

V)Capability – Analyze the influencer’s capability with his/her past campaigns stats. This will help you in choosing an ideal influencer for the promotion of your products.

#2. Create a Blueprint

Influencer marketing is no doubt sizzling the world of marketing but it does not mean to hire a social media celebrity and jump to influencer marketing.

You must make strategies, analyze the behavior of the market, know your audience as well as your goals. Invest your time, money and resources to get best returns and without planning, you may not get expected success.

#3. Know your Budget

Be a smart investor and always make effort not to go beyond your budget. Influencer marketing is great but isn’t the guarantee of success.

Look for services that target your company or niche. Check if they already have a newsletter which promotes sales of related products. For example, the UK based parcel forwarding company already has a newsletter that promotes quality UK stores for their members to buy products from. Such sites are backed by influencers who look for sharing quality stuff – try to take such free rides and make the most out of your investment budget.

Investing most of your money only in influencer marketing will not be a great idea. Knowing your budget will help you in making better strategies resulting in the effective use of every single penny.

#4. Never say “Buy this Product”

Influencer marketing is totally different from traditional advertising. If you want to do influencer marketing just for saying, “hey I have a great deal, buy this product” or something like that, trust me it is not going to work.

Let your influencer do all the work and don’t force him for direct selling. He knows his audience better than you and he/she have better skills of engaging the mass.

If your influencer has a huge fan following and the audience also listens to him/her, there is a reason behind it. Your influencer just needs your help and cooperation. Let your influencer be more creative to do his/her best.

#5. Track your campaign

There is more to do in influencer marketing after creating and publishing your content. Tracking your campaign is also necessary. You must track the results and keep analyzing your campaign according to the goals you have set.

Don’t look for only shares and likes of your published content. Your sales count and site traffic will decide the success of your campaign. Tracking will not only help you in getting stats, it also helps in figuring out the elements which are not working.

Pin those dead elements and find the ways to resolve them. Doing this will help you in making better strategies for the next time.

#6. Listen to the Influencer

Your influencer have the marketing skills may be even better than you. Thus, you have to listen to your influencer. Your influencer may disagree with your strategies and may say “No”, don’t be surprised.

Don’t try to control the ways your influencer going to promote your brand. Let your influencer be natural, help him/her to resonate with the audience without faking.

Clearly, your influencer is not a salesperson who will work on a provided written script.

#7. Build Relationships and have Patience

Tradition marketing or advertisements are short-term game. The campaigns run pretty fast and provide results instantly. Influencer marketing takes time to generate results.

Your influencer will take time in creating content according to your product or service. The time taken by the audience to react is a little bit more in influencer marketing compared to traditional marketing.

Thus a healthy relationship with the influencer will be beneficial for your business too. You can rock in influencer marketing because of better collaboration with your influencer.

#8. Have more options in your pouch

Most of the internet marketers especially newbies get excited over jumping in influencer marketing and stop doing anything else. Yes, influence marketing will be a game changer for your brand but ignoring other marketing efforts will not be a great idea.

Once your influencer starts the promotion there will be chances of getting more visitors to your site. Before doing influence marketing, make sure your web pages are good and appealing.

#9. One or many influencers?

Who will be ideal for your business, an influencer with 3 million followers or four influencers having 30-40 thousand followers? You won’t believe but influencers having fewer followers count are more effective compared to those having millions of followers.

Clearly, if you are starting with a small budget then going with more than one influencer having small followers count will be great. Doing this will make your promotion more effective and it not goes over budget.

Followers count is not everything, an influencer having a small fan following with higher rate of engagement can provide best results compared to an influencer with huge audience count and a lower rate of engagement.

#10. Build trust

After a successful marketing campaign, your product got supported by huge customer community and they also look forward to your next line of products. Building a responsive customer community is not easy and if you have it then never break their trust with below average quality products.

Once people start believing in your products it becomes easy to increase sales and profit. Thus make a great effort in making new customers using great marketing strategies as well as provide them quality products too.

Final Note:

Influencer marketing has been proved as a great tool for increasing brand awareness. It drives more traffic resulting in more sales and profit compared to pop-up ads, paid advertising and other traditional marketing strategies.

Before joining the parties over influencer marketing make great efforts on researching your target audience. This word of mouth kinda marketing will surely help you in establishing your brand’s image effectively.

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