Marketing as we know it has evolved over the years. Many businesses have emerged across several industries and the competition is steep and fierce.
To be top of mind to your target audience, your marketing strategies must be direct, frequent, and effective. The ‘top dogs’ in business are pulling all the stops to ensure that they retain existing customers and attract new customers. Hence, these businesses have also incorporated influencer marketing into their marketing alongside other marketing.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Before we address what influencer marketing is, it is best to define who an influencer is.
An influencer is any person who has a large following online, is recognized or known for their creative content, and is able to affect the purchasing power of the community they have built for themselves. Now, it is important to note that not all celebrities are influencers, and certainly, not all influencers are celebrities but influencers can work their way up to becoming celebrities.
Influencers are online sensations popular for their ability to create engaging content that keep audiences glued to their pages. Influencers care about their reputation & online community, and will most likely only endorse or collaborate with brands they trust.
Influencer marketing is a collaboration between a brand and an influencer to promote a product(s) or service. The influencer creates creative content that their audience can relate to, and will influence them to either purchase the specific product or use the service.
The whole point of influencer marketing is for brands to reach existing or new markets in a more personalized way than digital ads; using the services of influential people in the industry they want to target. Influencers will usually have a niche. These niches include lifestyle, fashion, education, etc.
Reasons for Influencer Marketing
There are several reasons why a brand should engage in influencer marketing. The top reasons will include to:
- Create brand awareness
- Market a new or existing product
- Illustrate the use and importance of a product or service
- Amplify the effectiveness of a product or service
Is Influencer Marketing Effective?
In the end, business owners just want to know if the risk is worth taking.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub, influencer marketing was worth $13.8 billion in 2021, and businesses are making about $5.78 ROI for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. That sounds unbelievable, right?
But there has been a 465% increase in searches for the phrase “influencer marketing” on Google alone since 2016. 90% of survey respondents believe influencer marketing to be an effective form of marketing. 67% of brands use Instagram for influencer marketing. 1360 Influencer marketing-focused platforms and agencies entered the market in the last 5 years alone and every other day, someone is trying to start a career as an influencer.
How to Grow Your Business with Influencer Marketing
With all the information in this blog post, you are probably wondering how you can start using influencer marketing to grow your business and we’ll share that in a bit.
The first step to a successful influencer marketing campaign is understanding which influencer is suitable for your marketing campaign. Without this, the campaign might be ineffective and capital investment wasted.
By choosing the right influencer, we don’t just mean the person but the influencer category. The individual is also important but that is a minor challenge compared to choosing the wrong category.
After determining the suitable influencer for your campaign, launch your campaign in the following ways:
- Engage the influencers or use an influencer marketing agency such as Bookings Africa.
- Create an influencer brief stating the deliverables of the influencers
- Distribute the products to the influencers
- Initiate posting on social media
- Track the results