What is influencer marketing? And how can it help you grow your business? If you spend any time on social media, you’ve probably seen influencer marketing without even knowing it or recognizing that’s what it was.
What You Need to Know About Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a word-of-mouth marketing technique that uses key leaders to share your brand’s message with their followers to increase your market. While some of these influencers are well-known celebrities, many are popular Instagram and YouTube personalities with a large following. They share your product, oftentimes by showing it in use or talking about how they use it, on their social media channels.
Now, since these influencers are your marketing channel and they are offering you the opportunity to get in front of their large audience, there is almost always a fee paid for this service. For professional bloggers who are sharing your product with their followers, they call it sponsored content. And, they are required to tell their followers that the content is sponsored, i.e. paid for by the brand.
Building Trust
Influencer marketing builds more of a trust factor than other types of marketing because the influencer’s audience trusts their opinion and recommendation. In fact, because it is seen as a more authentic type of marketing, 92% of people trust the recommendation over other types of advertising.
It is so popular in fact, that a British supermarket chain did away with all of its TV ads and replaced them with online campaigns that feature real-life moms. Influencers who are popular on social media. They teamed up with YouTube influencers to promote their products in a more authentic way. It resulted in an increase in their approval ratings. In fact, their approval ratings rose from 10% to 80% with their new campaign.
Finding the Right Influencer
Influencer marketing isn’t going away anytime soon. Instead, its popularity is growing by leaps and bounds. Soon it will be influenced by artificial intelligence. AI is making the process of finding the right influencers for companies to partner with easier and faster. It’s helping to identify influencers with strong engagement, fewer fake followers, and a higher possibility of generating a return on your marketing investment.
Finding the right partners for your product is key to getting a good return. You can find partners that might be a good fit for you by following hashtags on various social media sites. Determine which hashtags best relate to your product, then follow them on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Influencers use hashtags to reach a larger audience, but you can use them to find people to partner with.
Building Know, Like, and Trust
Influencer marketing is a great way to build the know, like, and trust factor of your company and your products quickly and easily with a few authentic campaigns. And these campaigns will help boost your sales and your online reach.
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