Businesses today are actively using influencer marketing to spread the word about their name, brand, or products. It is one of the fastest-growing strategies that you can add to your marketing campaign. Influencer marketing is a great way to reduce the cost of traditional advertising — however, there are steps that must be taken to ensure that your influencer marketing campaign is successful. Let’s look at what influence marketing is, and three ways to build brand awareness with this marketing strategy.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Image via Flickr by Infomastern
Influence marketing is actually quite simple. A business or company partners with an influencer to showcase their product or brand name via social media. Often, the business pays the influencer a flat-fee, a commission, or gives them free products. They promote the brand and the business then receives new customers who hopefully purchase their product.
The key to partnering with a good influencer is that they need to have a strong following of thousands, if not millions, of followers. You want them to promote your brand or product to as many people as possible. So, when you are researching influencers for your business, be sure they have active social media accounts with loyal followers. Adam Guild says “Social media is inarguably essential for marketing to Gen Z.”
Develop a Good Influencer Marketing Campaign
Before you even begin with influencer marketing, you need to develop a solid campaign. You also need to know when to archive that campaign when it is no longer necessary. Be sure to define the goals of your campaign. Do you want more visitors to a brick and mortar building or are you trying to increase brand awareness? Decide if you want to work with one or more influencers and always let them know what is expected from them. Reevaluate your goals as needed to make sure the campaign is working.
Create an Affiliate Program
A great incentive for influencers is to offer them an affiliate program. Whenever an influencer refers a customer to your business and the customer makes a purchase, pay the influencer a small percentage of the sale or a flat fee for each referral. Use tracking links to see how successful the affiliate marketing program is.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile Engagement
Most customers these days are busy and are online with their mobile devices. In order to capture this audience, you need to have your website optimized for mobile use and have a solid e-commerce platform. Mobile page speed is notoriously slow so be sure to work with someone who has the ability to increase the speed. Users will quickly abandon a page if the response time is too slow.
Make checkout easy by using a trusted third-party payment service such as PayPal so the user doesn’t have to try and type in credit card information in a public place. Scale down images and text for mobile use, and be sure to include a call to action on the webpage that can be viewed on the mobile device.
Influence marketing is growing stronger by the day. Influencers are valuable content creators and are a great way to build brand awareness, so consider adding influence marketing to your advertising campaign today.
Featured Picture of Markus Winkler by Pixabay
