By Sam Makad
Learning how to interact and build a relationship with social media influencers is increasingly important for your continued success in the business world - social media influencers are becoming the primary way businesses advertise their products and build their brand.
Sadly, the social media space is vastly different from traditional ad spaces and requires new approaches to ensure maximum success.
When trying to enter the medium, a lot of businesses make simple and easily avoidable mistakes - this article aims to remedy that. This is a list of tips that you can use to escape the common pitfalls and ensure a more productive time using social media influencers to build your brand.
Table of Contents
Build Long-Lasting Working Relationships
Evaluate The Influencer’s Potential
Empirically Measure the Results of Your Campaigns
Look for Influencers Pertaining to Your Niche
Have Social Media Presence as Well
1. Build Long-Lasting Working Relationships
The first thing you need to realize about social media influencers is that they are people and working with them is much more personal than the traditional ad agencies. Many of these influencers won’t even have a stable income and would rely on your company among others to feed themselves. That’s why it is important to cultivate a personal, yet also professional, relationship with these influencers.
This will ensure that they’ll perform better promoting your brand and products, and it will make it easier to work with them in the future as well. Also, building a brand for yourself among influencers for being easy to work with and understanding would go a long way to ensure you always have influencers eager to promote your services and products.
2. Evaluate The Influencer’s Potential
Not all influencers are created equal - some influencers have way more reach and are much more effective when it comes to building a brand. You can’t tell by just looking at their number of followers either, you need to delve deeper:
● How much interaction do their posts get: a much better measure than their number of followers is how much comments, likes, shares, etc. their posts get. There is a slew of influencers with very large followings that have a dead fanbase, so don’t let that number deceive you. The amount of interaction with their posts presents a much better metric.
● How are they doing on other platforms: most influencers have a presence on multiple platforms. How they do on these platforms can significantly change their performance at advertizing. For example, Youtubers who have used startups like Fourthwall to build their own e-commerce platforms will probably do better-advertising merch.
● How do they present ads: ad presentation is a kind of art - some influencers always find funny and interesting ways to present ads, and others present it in a monotonous and uninteresting way. The way the influencer presents the ads will have a massive influence on the success of those ads. It always pays to watch the influencer, takes in their personality, and see how they present ads, and if this is compatible with your brand and products.
3. Empirically Measure the Results of Your Campaigns
Online campaigns are tricky, and you want to make sure you know when you’re wasting your money and when you’re hitting the jackpot. That’s why it is paramount to ensure you keep track of key indicators and data points and observe how they change during the period of the marketing campaign.
If you found out that your campaign had no visible effects on those key data points, it is obvious you’re doing something wrong.
Furthermore, you should always document your previous campaigns and compare your current campaigns to them - this way, you can be sure that you’re improving with each campaign and you’re using your capital more effectively.
4. Look for Influencers Pertaining to Your Niche
No matter how much mass appeal your company has, there is still a core demographic your company will be most effective in. This core demographic is your niche, if you want to increase your revenues and grow your company, you need to appeal to your core demographic - ads will work much more effectively per dollar spent.
One of the massive advantages of online marketing is that you can target potential clients much more effectively - traditionally, when you’d place an ad in the newspaper or on TV, you had a very rough knowledge who would get to see it. You knew basic demographic and age data, and that was it. With the proliferation of influencers on the internet, there’s a niche for almost anything nowadays.
That’s why with enough research, you’ll be able to come up with a list of influencers that have the exact demographic you’re looking to market to. If the influencer is an authority on the subject, it is bonus points as his viewers will listen to him more. That’s why you should always make sure you know your niche and you contact influencers that are relevant to your niche.
5. Have Social Media Presence as Well
It is really easy to convert someone from an influencer’s social media to a follower of your social media. It is certainly easier than making them buy your products or subscribe to your newsletters, etc. Having a large social media following can reflect positively on your business in a few ways:
● It’ll drive constant organic traffic to your website, which means you won’t need to constantly spend thousands on marketing campaigns just to get some clicks.
● A large social media following is considered a positive ranking factor by many search engines - that means that your website pages will rank higher on Google and Bing due to your large following, which also increases organic traffic and generates a ton of revenue.
● When you want to announce a new product, a new service, or a new store location, you have a vast pool of people you can freely notify. You don’t need to worry about changes to your business going unnoticed. Due to the versatility of the social media platforms, you can make announcements in text, image, or video formats. This gives you a great way to keep your local followers up to date and even hold regular promotions to keep your customers interested and ensure consistent sales figures.