The term influencers or social media influencers loosely translates to a person having a huge number of followers. The said person can easily please the audience with his/her creative buds and content. This individual can encourage a significant group of people. Hence various brands seek out this marketing opportunity to use their following for endorsements of their brands. Major brands have certainly caught the value of employing influencers for social media activities. Here we will know how influencers work.
Types of Influencers:
- Mega-influencers: These are the influencers having millions of followers, earning them respect as social media celebrities.
- Macro-influencers: They have a following of about 1000000 and 999999. They focus on a particular niche like beauty, gaming, fitness, fashion, or business.
- Micro-Influencers: Their followers range from 1000 to 100000. Since many influencers come under this category, this is the most preferred type of influencer.
- Nano-influencer: These are the influencers who have a following of 500 to 1000. They are usually hyper niched and have a very close-knit audience group.
Why Are Brands in Need of Influencers?
- They increase the social media exposure of the brand and drive traffic to their websites.
- They sell products by storytelling recommendations.
- The influencers connect personally through personal experiences.
The Influencer Benefit:
- Influencers are entitled to their pay incentives and paid sponsorships.
- Influencers can establish brand awareness and promote brand deals with various other companies.
- Influencers help to improve the sales of brand products and services by a huge margin.
Cost effectiveness of influencers:
The various other marketing channels require regular payments from the brand budgets. For instance, if a brand is eager to advertise through search engine marketing, then there must be a popup account of the brand on the said platform. This account requires top-up from time to time and that requires money. If not paid, your ad disappears from the search engine result page. A well-thought influencer can be the perfect marketing strategy in order to cut down the cost. Influencer marketing can contribute to your brand by helping to grow brand awareness and online
presence. Depending on your brand objectives, you can choose different types of influencer marketing campaigns.
Types of Influencer Marketing:
- Affiliate takeover of the brand’s handle
- strategic marketing
- Sponsored content
- unboxing
- Brand ambassador programs
How Influencers Earn Money?
One of the best ways to make money from social media platforms is through sponsored posts. An influencer can sponsor posts containing the brand’s products and post recommendations. Sponsored posts are designed in various ways like:
- Informative posts
- A certain product reviews
- Featured posts and tags
- Single or multiple product descriptions
But these are only applicable when you have a huge follower list.
How Influencers Work:
The first and foremost step, in this case, is to choose your niche of interest. This helps you to create beautiful and healthy content. The certain points to remember:
- Keep in mind that the topic of interest which you chose and will be working with the said topic for a long period.
- Things which you can have fun doing without getting paid.
- Issues that you resolve for people selflessly.
- A skill that you have mastered and which works as a solution for various other people.
Some of the popular domains to consider:
- beauty
- Motherhood
- Fashion
- fitness
- gaming
- Home decor
- love and relationship
- Haircare
- Family and home
Optimize your brand identity:
- If you already have a profile on social media, switch to a business account to unlock various useful features.
- Remember to put up a cover photo.
- You must create a fresh and trendy biography for your profile visitors. You can provide them with a brief story with all relevant details.
How to work with brands:
- Make a list of all the brands you want to work with.
- Downsize the filter and list. Keep the brands, which aligns with your brand.
- Get the contact of the influencer marketing for the brands of your choice and get their contact.
- Pitch your brand to various probable markets.
Creating a content strategy:
An influencer must select a content strategy that his/her audience would love to consume. This way, the influencer can make the content engaging and attract loads of people. Some influencers even post about their personal lives and post on their respective niches for a certain personal touch. Furthermore, you need to research new and varied topics to stay up to date. Focus on the queries and issues raised by the audience to create contents that answer their doubts. Open up about the stories of your struggles and fears and how you have overcome them. This can inspire your followers to be more connected to your content. This humanizes your brand and creates a tinge of brand awareness.
Building Your Community:
Apart from the growth of your follower base, concentrate on your return on investments and engage with your audience. The key is to include the audience and provoke them on return of your investments. Apart from this, you may also:
- ‘Ask me anything’ event: As an influencer, a lot of benefits come from these sessions that offer the edge of engaging the audiences and encourage them to ask questions about the brand products or perhaps your personal life.
- Announce a giveaway/contest: This will add more followers to your already existing follower base. Likewise, you can also promote influencers with whom you want to collaborate in the near future.
- Contest: A contest is very similar to a giveaway. The only difference lies in the fact that your followers have to upload with the required hashtag.