An Entrepreneur’s Guide To Getting Started With Influencer Marketing

The word “influencer” has become the hot new buzzword thrown around the digital marketing world.

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However, influencer marketing has been an ongoing activity for a long time, albeit under slightly different scenarios. From celebrity endorsement in the 90s to reality TV shows like “Keeping up with the Kardashians” and “Jersey Shore” in the early 2000s, influencer marketing has taken different forms and given rise to the present-day influencer marketing that we’re all familiar with. The growing popularity of social media platforms provided everyone with a chance to showcase their day-to-day lives, interests, hobbies, and more. Some profiles quickly rose to influencer status by garnering a high following due to the engaging content that they put out. Alongside having a raving audience is the relatability factor, making these people all the more authentic to the mass public.

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Cut to the present, influencer marketing has become a regular brand-building activity for all brands — big and small.

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And rightly so!

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For every $1 spent on influencer marketing on average, brands make $18 in return! If you too want to board this train and make the most of it, then hop on!  

In this blog post, we’ll help break down the ins and outs of influencer marketing and also guide you on how to get started with it.

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What is Influencer Marketing?

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Influencer marketing is a collaborative form of marketing wherein a brand leverages an influencer to advocate for a product or service to the public. 

Influencers are experts in a chosen niche who’ve built a loyal, close-knit community of followers through engaging content, relatability, and authenticity. In simple terms, influencer marketing works like a domino. A brand reaches out to one solid influencer who has a swaying effect on a larger customer base. It could be either: with free products to sample and review or it could be a paid gig to continuously create sponsored content.

When they sample the products and recommend them to their community their opinions are often highly trusted by their followers. As a result, this leads to a probable conversion and more importantly a higher brand awareness and trust.

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Why do you need Influencer Marketing?

1. Reach Your Audience Directly

One of the major benefits of influencer marketing is that the majority of the work is already done for you. When you partner with an influencer you get a direct access line to a larger group of people who are interested in your niche. There is no additional task of manually reaching out to your ideal audience because with influencer marketing you are already placing your product on your ideal customer’s radar. 

However, that is the case only when you pick the right influencers for your niche.

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2. Stand out from the Crowd

With surmounting ad fatigue, influencer marketing is the relief pill that most marketers and business owners use today. While paid ads are intrusive to consumers’ attention, influencer marketing comes across as organic and natural. The solid connection that the influencer has built with the audience allows you to market your product with less friction. 

As a result, your target market would be more considerate and receptive to your product. Consumers who have never heard of your brand before, now see you. It helps you shine a spotlight on your brand thereby creating brand awareness while improving brand visibility.

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3. Build Brand Credibility

People buy from people they know, like, and trust. 

When it comes to influencer marketing, the whole transaction lies on this fundamental truth. In today’s marketing landscape, building trust and authority are of paramount importance. When trusted influencers promote your product, the credibility of your product and brand also increases, consumers’ guards are lowered and, as a result, are much more welcoming to give your product a shot.

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4. Generate new customers

Influencer marketing helps you cast a wider net over the market. When you pair up with an influencer, your product is showcased in front of a larger volume of potential leads in one go. Speaking of leads, did you know that a whopping 49% of customers rely on influencer recommendations to make a purchasing decision? Tapping into the influencer goldmine presents a huge opportunity for your brand to generate new customers.

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5. Affordable

Influencers can bring you the biggest bang for your buck and are a much safer bet when compared to advertising. With a flat upfront fee, influencers charge for the amount of work they do — nothing more, nothing less. With the right influencer, you can pull off a massive influencer campaign that’s more eventful than paid advertising with its bidding auctions and ad budgets.

Influencers and UGC (User-Generated Content) are a force to be reckoned with, they provide you with tangible results like follower counts, website visits, and ROI as well as intangible results like improved brand awareness, overall making it cost-effective, affordable, and ultimately a worthy investment.

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How to get started with Influencer Marketing?

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Now that you’ve understood the basics of influencer marketing it’s time to learn how to get started with it.

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1. Define your goals and target market.

First and foremost, an effective and successful influencer marketing strategy starts with your goals. While creating goals don’t just stick to the obvious ones of sales and revenue. Working with influencers can reap significantly more for your brand. These goals could be quantifiable such as  — growing your following, generating new leads, and bringing in sales, or they could be qualitative like improving brand awareness. Be thoughtful and strategic when you set them.

Once you have your goals mapped out you need to ensure that you’re speaking to the right audience. And this requires some homework on your part!

The first step is to get crystal clear on your ideal audience. You can do this by building out customer personas. This is a research tool that helps identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your audience. Once you’ve built this out, it will help you better understand the influencer that you’re looking for.

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2. Choose the right influencer

Once you’ve identified your target audience and mapped out your goals, you need to scout for the right influencer. Many factors go into choosing an influencer like their relationship with their audience, reliability, authenticity, aligned personal values, and more. 

There are nearly a bazillion influencers out there, and with such huge numbers comes the added challenge of flaky influencers. Watch out for unscrupulous accounts that purchase fake followers and bots.

Get a feel of the comments and reactions and do an overall vibe check on the engagement. Is it positive or negative? If you feel something is off even in the slightest, then most often it is. 

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Now that we’ve got those warnings out of the way, let's focus on finding the influencers that are going to help you reach your goals.

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Based on followers, influencers generally fall into three categories:

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Micro-influencers are people who have a following of less than 20,000. 

Macro-influencers are people who have a following of between a hundred thousand to a billion people.

Mega-influencers are people who have billions of followers like artists, sporting legends, and reality TV stars.

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PRO TIP: Choose influencers that have an engaged audience even if their community isn't as big.

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Many brands have a notion that in order to execute a successful influencer campaign… you need to hire a mega influencer. But it's quite the opposite.

Tying up with nano and micro-influencers (1000-50,000 followers) that have an engaged community is exponentially more effective than tying up with a mega influencer who has no engagement with their audience.

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Where to look for influencers

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The first one needs no explanation but a plain old Google search could do the trick for you. Simply type “industry/niche + influencers” and see what comes up. You can even set Google alerts for the keywords that are synonymous with your brand and niche.

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Next, you could do a simple search on social media sites using relevant hashtags such as #influencer #ad #influencerlife #contentcreator, etc. You could even consider looking for influencers in your existing customer database. Go through them and look for words such as influencer that may be included there. Or you could partner up with marketing agencies and marketplaces to help set you up with the right influencer.

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Make a list of all the potential influencers that have caught your fancy and evaluate them before reaching out.

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3. Content Planning and Creation

Now that you have your influencer picked out, you need to first communicate your goals with them. Join heads together and come up with a content strategy. 

It is imperative that you include them in this process because you don’t want to have mismatched messages and ideas throughout your campaign. Therefore it is always a good idea to provide some guidelines about what you’re looking for and ensure that you both are on the same page.

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Some of the topics that you can brainstorm are:

• What specific topics are you going to cover? 
• What kind of content are you going to produce? And what kind of posts resonate with your audience?
• Which platforms are you going to post on? 
• When and how often?

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To help make this process easier, create a content plan and lay it all out. A content plan helps you coordinate, and schedule the content flow ahead of time. It also allows effortless collaboration with other influencers working on the campaign. Give your influencers the freedom to do their job. Most influencers are also avid content creators and hence are beaming with ideas to help showcase your product in a new, creative light.

Never compromise on the quality of content, high-quality influencer content should either educate, inspire, entertain, or all of the above.

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4. Measure and Analyze

All your efforts go in vain if you don’t take the time to measure and analyze your campaign. With influencer marketing, it can be beyond exciting to see the numbers racking up quickly. However, don’t be falsely carried away with them. Ultimately the success of your campaign should depend on the performance objectives that you’ve set in the first step.

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There are a number of ways to measure your campaign’s success, such as:

• Specific Social Media Hashtags
• Referral or Affiliate Discount codes
• Unique Tracking Links

You can keep a close eye on the campaign by assigning these individual identifiers to each influencer. This gives you a clear picture of the results generated and also the contribution to the bottom line. As you measure the performance of your influencer campaigns you are likely to find loopholes and areas of improvement in your strategy. Go back to the board and revise your strategy so that it reflects the needs of your audience.

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Conclusion

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In surviving and thriving on digital e-commerce, entrepreneurs should keep a close eye on brand visibility, consumer trust, and market growth– especially since there are more competitors in the market now, as compared to the previous decades. Although it takes great marketing effort to stand out, there are easier ways to promote your brand and attract your target market, one being influencer marketing.

Now that we have walked you through the basics of influencer marketing, we hope you got some value out of this blog post.

If you’re looking to boost your brand reach with influencer marketing but don’t have the bandwidth to do it all by yourself, then reach out to Growthhub.

At Growthhub, we’re obsessed with helping businesses like yours get the growth it deserves. 

Get in touch with us and we can match you with savvy influencers in as little as 24 hrs. We screen and pre-vet the marketers on our platform, so you don’t have to. Book a call with us today!

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