In our article, What is an Influencer we defined an influencer as being someone who has:. One of the biggest mistakes that traditional media makes is a failure to see the difference between celebrities and online influencers. It is also important to realize that most influencers have systematically built a keen and enthusiastic audience.
It is not accidental that these people follow influencers rather than a brand. The audience doesn't really care less about your brand. They only care about the opinions of the influencers. Don't try to foist rules and business practices onto your influencers. The audience is theirs, and they can simply walk away, taking their followers with them. Influencer marketing involves a brand collaborating with an online influencer to market one of its products or services.
Some influencer marketing collaborations are less tangible than that — brands simply work with influencers to improve brand recognition. He teamed up with the makers of a horror film set in the French catacombs under Paris, creating a series of videos in which he underwent challenges in the catacombs.
It was pitch-perfect content for PewDiePie's 27 million subscribers and received nearly double the views as the movie's trailer. Everybody won. That's a simple example. It's easy to imagine a celebrity teaming with a company to pitch a product—even if the pitch is a series of minute videos instead of a second television ad.
But people wouldn't be talking about influencer marketing—you wouldn't be at a website called the Influencer Marketing Hub reading about it, either—if it didn't have a much broader set of applications. And the key is in that word, influencer. Influencers, unlike celebrities, can be anywhere. They can be anyone. What makes them influential is their large followings on the web and social media.
An influencer can be a popular fashion photographer on Instagram, or a well-read cybersecurity blogger who tweets, or a respected marketing executive on LinkedIn. Within any industry, there are influential people—you just have to find them. Some will have hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers. But many will seem more like ordinary people. They may only have 10, followers, less in some cases.
Yet, they will have developed a reputation for being the experts in their field. They are the go-to people who provide the answers to people's questions. Depending on their sphere of expertise, they are the people who make the most engaging social posts on their specialist topics.
They share the best pictures, make the most entertaining videos, and run the most informative online discussions. See all stats in our latest Benchmark Report. Influencer marketing isn't just about finding someone with an audience and offering them money or exposure so they can say good things about you.
That's what viral celebrities are for. Influencers are people who've spent time building their own brand and cultivating their audience; they will be naturally protective of their reputation and the people who trust them.
They're people who have the patience and focus to succeed in social media, one organic follower at a time—people like this aren't interested in doing influencer marketing solely for the money.
Influencer Marketing is also not about quick results. It's the same kind of slow-and-steady approach as Social Media and Content Marketing, where your campaign isn't about directly selling your wares.
Instead, it's about demonstrating your authority, credibility, and thought leadership within your industry. It's about becoming synonymous with whatever it is that you offer, like when people say they're going to Xerox a document instead of photocopying it, or to Hoover the floor, rather than vacuuming it.
With Social Media Marketing, it's a slow game of acquiring the kind of followers who are going to be loyal and engaged. So it's tempting to think that joining forces with an influencer is going to be an easy way into the hearts and minds of his or her followers—it's not that simple, though. Because to ally yourself with influencers, you've got to earn their trust and respect. Build influencer outreach templates using fill-in-the-blank canned responses. The meat of your outreach emails is going to be the same from influencer to influencer.
The rest — your intro and signoff, personalization throughout, and things like that — you can use a fill-in-the-blank format for. It literally takes two clicks. Influencer pitches can be long, but templates make it so that each one takes just a few seconds to customize. Time to embrace the cloud! Instead of attaching documents and images to each individual email, create a shared folder in Dropbox or Google Drive , and include a link to it in your email template.
Cloud magic! Ever have a hard time remembering to follow up on the emails you sent last week? Me too, for both counts. But FollowUpThen helps. OutreachPlus in an email outreach tool that will help you manage your outreach efforts. You import a list of your influencers and then set up a campaign to send a series of highly personalized emails. OutreachPlus tracks opens, clicks and replies and you can process and track all responses through the inbox.
Make sure you have a way to keep track of it all. In that case, a Google Sheet shared between your team will do the trick just fine. It lets you keep track of anyone your team might be working with. Nowadays, video is perhaps the most popular kind of content for influencers to make when it comes to promoting products. However, with the growing popularity of podcasts and the advent of audio-only apps like Clubhouse, it makes you wonder what the next big trend in influencer marketing will be.
While we might not know that answer, we do know it will continue to evolve. Ecommerce brands can be prepared to take advantage of new, innovative platforms and content by joining these new platforms as they arise. If you are already building a following on a particular platform, influencers will be more likely to want to work with you. In many ways, influencers are going back to their roots. Instead, they want to see reality. They want to see influencers make mistakes and have bad days and pick themselves back up again and keep going.
Because of this open transparency, even more people are trusting and following influencers, which means that there are more people to see and buy from sponsored content. Influencer marketing is working for all kinds of businesses. Big brands work with celebrities to promote their products, and entrepreneurs who are just getting started find a way to work with influencers who are still growing their platforms.
Promoting an online store is probably the most common and most obvious way that ecommerce brands can use influencer marketing. Tip: Create a code or provide influencers with specific links to your page. Another great benefit of influencer marketing is having user-generated content UGC that you can share. People trust other people more than they trust brands, by and large.
However, it can feel like a challenge to find images and content from people outside of your team. When you work with an influencer, you can request the use of their content on your page.
Tip: Create a plan for sharing UGC so you can fully maximize the benefits. When you work with an influencer, you can capture their testimonial and their story. Tip: Outline what kind of testimonial you want from the influencer at the beginning of your campaign. This is the best way to ensure that they capture all of the content and ideas you want to see in their testimonial. First of all, like we mentioned earlier, having a discount code specifically for that influencer will allow you to track their conversions.
Beyond that, though, many people will strongly consider making a purchase if they can save some money while doing it. Sometimes that can be the tipping point that really inspires someone to click through to your shop and make the purchase. Tip: Alongside a base rate, you can negotiate with the influencer to offer them a percentage of each sale made with their code. This can encourage them to be thorough when creating their campaign.
We alluded to this a little earlier, but working with micro influencers is certainly the way to go, especially for ecommerce brands. Tip: Always look for the engagement rate on their posts. This can be done in a variety of different ways. You may offer to provide content for their blog or you may request that the influencer profile you, or interview you on their podcast. The strategy of promoting your brand and how it is carried out should always involve the influencer. While you might feel a bit sensitive to advice that could differ from your original plan, be open-minded to the extensive expertise that the influencer has to offer.
For example, the influencer might completely change a guest blog post that you wrote for their site. Remember that they already know their audience and what works. They know how and when to promote information for the best response from their audience. Content that the influencer creates for their own blog to talk about your brand has to be written in their own voice and style, as this is what their audience has come to expect. Allow influencers to participate in and even dictate the strategy of promoting your brand and giving you more exposure.
Listen to their suggestions. The audience already trusts them, and they have a good idea of what will bring you the most benefit. All marketing strategy requires that you spend some time looking at the process and how effective it is.
This will involve both influencers that you were able to establish a relationship with and those who never became interested in engaging with you. Strategies of influencer outreach may be unsuccessful with certain influencers who are not receptive to building new relationships or who dislike your approach.
When approaches are unsuccessful, see if you can identify what went wrong. When influencer outreach has resulted in meeting the goals that you were hoping to reach, such as publishing a guest post on a top blog or being interviewed on a well-known podcast, see what impact this strategy had on your traffic or your email list.
Track social media shares and posts, and see which influencer had the most impact on your goals. Evaluate what you have learned from this strategy and if there is anything you think you should change in future influencer outreach campaigns.
Using influencer outreach can be one of the most effective types of marketing.
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