Are you looking for a new strategy to take your digital marketing efforts to the next level? If yes, then you need to learn all about influencer marketing – a highly effective form of marketing that uses the power of an influencer to promote a particular product of service.

With the ability to grow your audience online, increase brand awareness, boost brand trust and cut the cost of your paid advertising efforts, read on to find out everything you need to know about influencer marketing and how it can help your business.

What is influencer marketing?

As mentioned briefly above, influencer marketing is a form of marketing that uses the power of online influence to promote a product or service online. However, what exactly does that entail?

Although many people think that influencers are just celebrities who use their influence online to sell products that they have never tried or know nothing about, it is so much more than that.

When it comes to answering, what is an influencer, one can be defined as:

• Someone who has the power to influence the purchasing decisions of others due to their online authority and relationship with their audience.

• Someone who has a strong following in a particular niche and who actively engages with this following.

Unlike with a celebrity influencer, these people have spent time and effort engaging with their audience and developing a strong emotional connection. This means that they can offer a much more real and trustworthy experience that will reflect positively on your brand.

What are the different types of influencers?

As well as celebrity influencers, there are several other types of influencers that you can choose to work with as part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

These are follows:

Nano influencers

• Nano influencers have 10,000 followers or less.

Micro influencers

• Micro influencers have between 10,000 to 100,000 followers.

Macro influencers

• Macro influencers have 100,000 followers to 1 million followers.

Mega influencers

• Mega influencers have more than one million followers.

Although you may think that the more followers an influencer has the better for your marketing strategy, this is not always the case.

How to create an amazing influencer marketing strategy

If you are new to this highly effective marketing strategy, then you will be pleased to hear that getting started is not as hard as you might think.

Simply follow the below steps and your brand will soon be collaborating with some of the top influencers within your niche.

Step 1: Identify your goals

Before you embark on any new marketing strategy, you first need to identify your goals.

Are you looking to launch a new product or service? Do you want to increase your social media following? Or perhaps you need to increase trust in your brand?

Whatever your marketing goals, you need to determine exactly what you want to achieve from working with an influencer.

Step 2: Determine your audience

The next step in creating an amazing influencer marketing campaign is to determine who it is you want to influence. As in who is your target market?

The easiest way to do this is by developing audience personas, which will then allow you to match their qualities with the right influencer.

Step 3: Find the right influencers

When it comes to finding the right influencers for your first influencer marketing campaign, there are three elements that you need to consider: relevance, reach and resonance.

A relevant influencer is one that share content to an audience that is relevant to your industry. They need to have the same target audience as your business.

Reach refers to the number of people that you could potentially reach by partnering with them. Again, it is not always the largest reach that is the most effective, as smaller, more relevant reaches are often more successful.

Finally, resonance. You need your chosen influencer to be able to effectively engage with an audience that is relevant to your brand. This is arguably the most important factor you need to consider.

Step 4: Carry out extensive research

Once you have found a few influencers that you think would be good to work with, it can be beneficial to look into them in more depth before you approach them.

Take a look at their most recent posts. Do you think this content will appeal to your target audience? Can you see how your products or services would fit in with their brand voice and message?

Also, take a look at what channels they are posting on? Will these resonate with your target audience?

You should also see what other brands they work with as you don’t want to approach an influencer who is already working with one of your direct competitors.

Step 5: Reach out to your chosen influencer

If you have not reached out to an influencer before, then this can be a daunting task, especially if you really want to work with celebrities.

As a general rule, you should start engaging with an influencer by simply liking or commenting on one of their recent posts. Make sure that you are genuinely appreciative rather than too salesy.

When you are ready to suggest a collaboration, then a personalized email is the best route rather than a generic DM or mass email.

Make sure that you share all the key information about your brand without bombarding them with too much too soon. Also, remember that a partnership is a two-way street so ensure that you showcase how you can help them as well as how they can help you.

Step 6: Develop great content

Once an influencer within your market has agreed to work with you, you now need to develop great content together in order to make this marketing strategy worth your time and effort.

While you are more than within your rights to suggest guidelines on what content they create that will be aligned with your brand, make sure that you do not stifle their creativity as this is unlikely to go down well.

Instead, work together to create content that is beneficial to both parties, as well as to the intended audiences.