If you are reading this, you probably want to know a bit more about what this new influencer marketing is. Maybe you already have some kind of idea, but you are not sure, and you are very certain that you do not know enough about it to go to your boss and present to him or her a brand new marketing strategy. But FEAR NOT! Here you can read a little about this new phenomenon.
What is an influencer?
An influencer is – as the word implies – a person who has influence on other people. They can be everywhere. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube or Snapchat. Some of them also have a blog, where they write about their daily life. You might even know some of them yourself, if you e.g. follow famous people on social media.
If you know them and follow them, you might also know that they often have many followers. That is what we call “macro influencers”. The probably have a couple of thousands followers. If they are really famous and have more than a million followers, you can call them “mega influencers”. The important thing is that the ones who follow the influencer trust him or her. That means that they trust what he or she says is reliable – even if the promoted product is sponsored by a brand.
In the other end of the scale you have “micro influencers”. Those are the ones with under about 10.000 followers. You might not have noticed these because they can be everyone. Maybe you yourself have the potential to be an influencer of this size. Often they haven’t done anything in specific to get their followers. They just take great photos and use the right hashtag. They are regular people. Therefore they can be a smart investment in your business.
How do I use influencers for marketing?
If you are a brand, you should seriously consider using influencers in an influencer marketing strategy. And especially micro influencers. You don’t have to think of it as an entirely new campaign for influencers alone, but maybe you already have campaigns with aspects that influencers can use to promote your product through their reach.
Maybe you launched a new product last year with flyers, social media campaigns, etc. but it just didn’t work the way you hoped. To bring the product back to life, you can pitch the product to 3 or 5 big influencers and encourage them to use the product in their daily life. In that way your product is shown to their followers, who believe that the influencers’ word is law.
Or you can bring the product back to life by the use of micro influencers. In this way 3 or 4 are not enough, but you might need 10 or 30 to get your product out in the open. Simply because these influencers have less followers. But because of that the credibility is bigger with these regular people.
If the product and the influencer are great, hopefully many will buy the product and increase your profits. Without having spend that much money on the influencer marketing.
Now you might need some tools to find the right influencers for your brand. Click here and read how to do that.