Influencer Marketing Promote your brand with Influence

In this digital age, it is hard for any brand, individual or SME to keep track of the trends on the digital promotion platform. Putting these new tactics into play is a whole other story. However, there are a few top tips that can help your business reach the maximum potential which you definitely need to keep an eye out for.

One of these has to be Influencer Marketing.

Let’s start with the basics

What’s better than getting someone else to do your outreach for you? That’s where ‘Influencer marketing’ comes into play. With this, you can focus on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Let’s face it, it gets really tedious to build a brand from scratch or re-market to audiences that you can’t provide new content to anymore. So take the easy way out and let someone who already has a fairly significant audience (that matches your target audience) directly market to a large group of consumers, while you inspire or (when that doesn’t work, money always does) pay influencers to get out the word for you.

With a social media or content strategy in place all you have to do is find the right ‘Influencer’ and you’re set! An ‘Influencer’s’ personal social media is the best of the best when it comes to channels to promote through. Sometimes you may have to develop the content yourself, but if you’re lucky or your cause is just that inspirational, they may create the content themselves.

As you probably already guessed, celebrities are the most sought after for these types of promotions. It works the same way that advertisement branding works but without the sky-high costs or production time.

The ‘Influencer’ in turn gains access to a product or service that your company/brand offers, exclusively. If your cause speaks for a social issue then, they gain respect or goodwill and that is something that is unquantifiable.

But first.. you’ve got to do some work

You first need to win the approval of the ‘Influencer’ so that they whole-heartedly are willing to stand by your product, brand, service or cause.

For this, the majority of your time and effort is necessary. You will have to come up with a marketing campaign that will appeal to that specific individual and get their attention. Once that is done, you can tweak and test your content plan to match their image and proceed with market optimisation at its best!

Influencer Marketing v/s Word-Of-Mouth Marketing

Often confused to be the same, there are some key differences between the two. The biggest being with ‘Influencer Marketing’ you are targeting one person to speak your message and their audience becomes the Word of Mouth channel. With Word of Mouth Marketing, it doesn’t have to be a single individual and can, but is not always, driven by ‘Influencer Marketing’.

For Example

Barilla Pasta sent out “Test Kitchen” packages that contained pastas, sauces, and any other Barilla products to recipients (Influencers) who would need to host a dinner party. Those same recipients then cooked the food, served it to their friends, and uploaded real photos of the gathering to a website. This was a way to organically spread the word about Barilla pasta. The photos that were submitted were used to create authentic looking advertising that featured real Barilla customers.

And finally..

For SMEs, strategies like ‘Influencer Marketing’ is huge blessing as it is one of the more inexpensive online strategies to connect with influencers. Not to leave out the big guys, larger companies have an easier road to these ‘Influencers’ and can develop comprehensive strategies that stretch across platforms.

Shortcuts, like ‘Influencer Marketing’ are huge boons to help you get the word out at a fraction of the cost. So get started!