What’s an Influencer?

Influencers can have a huge impact on the branding and overall marketing of your product. They can be instrumental for a business that is trying to form meaningful and lasting connections with its customers. They can offer entirely new platforms for advertising, allowing businesses to reach many more customers than they could before.

So what’s an influencer?

An influencer is an individual who has already earned the trust of their followers. Generally, they specialize in a particular niche, such as food or fashion, and they communicate in ways that are unique to social media, such as sharing pictures and videos and posting reviews. If you use it wisely, influencer marketing can be instrumental to your company’s marketing plan.

What Do Influencers Do?

A person can be termed an influencer if they have an “influence” over a certain audience. On social media sites like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and others, this is often a person who is expected to be an authority on a certain subject.

By the time you decide to form a relationship with an influencer and secure their services in selling your product, they will already have a built-in following. These followers will look to them for advice on products, and when an influencer endorses a particular brand, it can be instrumental in the success of that brand.

Influencers exist at every scale of social media that you can imagine. Celebrities with worldwide reach, such as athletes and pop stars, are often referred to as “mega-influencers.” Below this level, there are leaders in various industries: this could be anything from educated “experts” to restaurant critics and other respected persons in their corner of the market.

On the smaller side of the scale, bloggers and content creators are sometimes termed “micro-influencers.” While they won’t reach the same audience that a rock star does, the audience that they do reach is incredibly loyal and more likely to purchase from a sponsored post. Those followers are also very likely to share content and spread your message even further.

How Influencers Reach an Audience

As we’ve mentioned, there are several ways that influencers can engage with their audiences, and each of these can be effective for sharing information about your product. An influencer might post a picture of themself using your product on Instagram, and below the photo, they could include a caption mentioning the product. Their followers, who are already in the market for products similar to yours, could then follow links to learn more.

Influencers may also produce video content. Some influencers have become successful by running YouTube channels that specialize in product reviews. Customers watch these channels specifically trying to find new product recommendations, so if your product is mentioned in a favorable way, it can “influence” those customers to seek your product out.

Getting to Know Influencers

Integrating influencer marketing into your overall advertising plan begins by finding influencers that are active in your market. Consider the type of product you are selling and its target audience.

Searching for similar products on various social media sites can help you to narrow down who the content creators are with the largest audiences in your specific niche of the market. What’s an influencer that could help you to reach this audience?

Once you have done so, decide if their overall vision aligns with your own. You should also see if they are using social media on platforms your business hasn’t reached yet.

The next step is to go about forming a relationship with an influencer. It’s not as simple as just “placing an ad” as you do with more traditional forms of marketing. Since influencers provide a more organic method of sharing information with audiences, it means you will need to communicate with them on some level before you begin asking them to endorse your products. It’s more important to establish a strong relationship with one or two influencers than to just try and message as many of them as possible to get them to mention you.

Before approaching an influencer and asking for a collaboration, look at their content. Engage with a few of their posts. See if their voice is something that aligns with your brand and its voice.

When messaging an influencer for the first time, it’s a good idea to let them know why you chose them specifically. What about their content and style do you admire? Why do you think they would be a good choice to help customers engage with your products? What is it about your product that you think will appeal to this specific influencer?

Starting an Influencer Based Marketing Campaign

Once you have begun engaging with a few influencers in your specific market niche, you can begin trying to integrate them into your marketing campaign. One way that companies do this is through the process of “gifting,” where they send free samples of their products to known influencers in their industry. The hope is that these influencers will then review these products directly on their social media channels and get their customer base interested in them.

The liking and sharing of content should go in both directions: occasionally, you will like and comment on the influencer’s page, and occasionally, they will post on yours. In this way, customers will notice the relationship that your company has with the influencer, and will begin to connect the two of you in their minds.

Producing High-Quality Content

Hiring an influencer to star in a video that advertises your product is another way you can use their marketing power to connect with audiences. Short, engaging, and very high-quality content made by a studio like Pretzel Logic Productions (the video production arm of InnoVision Marketing) can reach your audience at a higher level than ever before.

Since influencer marketing is a more organic method of interfacing with customers, you may have to relinquish a certain amount of control over how your information is communicated. That is to say, using influencer marketing is not like filming a commercial with a script. While you may give your influencer an outline, with specific bullet points to address, they may prefer not to say scripted lines that are written for them.

At InnoVision, we are well-versed in many forms of marketing, including influencer marketing. We would be happy to show you what we can do for you. Reach out via our website to set up a meeting.