While influencer marketing may seem new, its concept has been around for decades. From athletes on cereal boxes to celebrity sponsorships, using an individual’s built-in following to boost your brand to new heights is nothing new. However, with the rise in social media accounts and the emergence of online influencers, more people than ever are becoming “influencers.” Picking the right influencer for your business’s marketing campaign can take time and effort. So let’s take a look at the benefits of influencer marketing and how you can choose the right influencers for your brand. 

How to Get Started With Influencer Marketing

Before you jump head-first into influencer marketing, it’s time for some business analysis. We promise this business analysis level requires much less math than you’d expect. Instead, you want to take a moment and determine your target audience. Figuring out what customer niche you’d like to target through influencer marketing is crucial to getting the best returns out of your marketing campaign. 

Finding an influencer that fits your business involves finding someone who carries the right tone for your company while also targeting the right audience. While some influencer marketing services and companies try to pair you with their built-in library of influencers, your best bet is a manual search to find an influencer that works right for you.

When looking for the right influencer, you want to keep a few things in mind:

• Is their content style in line with your brand identity?
• Are they legitimate?
• What is their engagement rate? 
• Are their followers real? How about their likes?
• Do they review any product they see, or do they pick and choose sponsorships that actually make sense for their audience?

These questions can help narrow down your influencer choices. For example, if you find an influencer who matches your brand tone but gets little to no engagement despite thousands of followers, you may have found someone who did not naturally gain their following. On the other hand, if someone has only a few hundred followers but an incredible engagement rate, you may have found yourself the ideal influencer for targeting that customer niche. 

Once you’ve found an influencer you like, reach out to them via email or direct message. Before committing to the deal, you want to discuss deliverables and pricing, and get a contract signed. Having expectations laid out can help protect your business and protect the influencer. Once they sign the contract, track analytics and monitor deliverables received. 

Keep track of your customer engagement before and after hiring an influencer, and pay attention to any shifts in overall brand recognition, purchase history, and customer base. While influencer marketing can take some time to grow, you should eventually see returns throughout your business. 

You should also pay your influencer on time, as they are a valuable part of your marketing strategy! 

Creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy

Creating an influencer marketing strategy involves more than just working with one influencer. Working with more prominent influencers can have different benefits than targeting micro-influencers, namely that micro-influencers work on a smaller scale but target niche audiences you may not reach any other way. Conversely, the larger the influencer, the larger their reach, but you may get less engagement from a large follower base than loyal micro-influencer followers. Finding the sweet spot of influencer marketing depends on your business needs, so consider your options.

Another thing to consider is you don’t have to stick with just one influencer. Having multiple influencers link together their recommendations can help boost their follower reach and power your influencer marketing campaign to new heights. Also, depending on your business needs, you can contract an influencer for a single post versus recurring posts.

For example, if you’re looking to market a single promotion, you may only need a few posts, while marketing your brand as a whole may require a different strategy. 

Influencer VS. Affiliate Marketing

We’ll discuss the similarities and differences between influencer and affiliate marketing so that you can get an idea of the two strategies. Influencer marketing uses a personality to introduce your brand to their following. In this situation, you are likely paying for a post directly, though you can have an affiliate-like agreement with the influencer in the case of a referral code. On the other hand, affiliate marketing directly links to your products and advertises them to their customer base for a portion of your profits. 

The difference between the two is that influencer marketing uses the strength of personality to recommend brands to customers. In contrast, affiliate marketing uses its traffic for advertising your products to customers while receiving a kickback from sales. 

While both are effective forms of marketing, influencer marketing is great for building brand awareness without pushing for direct sales, while affiliate marketing is good for leveraging a single product. 

As you can see, developing an influencer marketing strategy, pouring over lists of influencers, and setting up contracts is a lot of work. But, if you’re a small to mid-sized business owner, your time is precious and usually spoken for. Let us take care of the complex parts of influencer marketing so you can focus on growing your business. Here at Planted Marketing, we put our years of marketing experience to work for you, so you can spend less time fretting over advertising and more time growing your business. To find out more or schedule a consultation, contact us today. 

Planted Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in content marketing and organic solutions for woman-owned brands. We create and manage influencer marketing programs for a variety of brands and have seen so much growth for each business! Wondering if influencer marketing is right for your business? Let’s talk about it – info@plantedmarketing.com. Talk soon!