Social media has become one of the most powerful ways businesses can generate leads, drive growth, interact with customers, boost brand awareness and market their products and services.
There are many ways you can use social media to promote your business, including influencer marketing. By working together with trusted social media personalities, you can capitalize on an influencer’s established credibility and audience to promote your own business.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a social media marketing strategy where businesses collaborate with social media creators to promote their products and services.
Influencers can act as trusted authorities on certain topics, and can promote your business in an authentic way that resonates with their audience. Influencer marketing can help you to reach a wider audience, establish trust in your brand, and drive engagement.
Why working with influencers can be effective
Partnering with influencers can prove to be an effective marketing strategy for small business owners. Here’s a few reasons why:
1. Established trust: Influencers often have a close relationship with their followers, who trust their recommendations and respect their opinions.
2. Targeted reach: Influencers usually specialize in a particular niche – for example, M ikayla Nogueira is a top beauty influencer with millions of followers across various channels. This allows businesses to target highly relevant audiences.
3. Authentic content: Recommendations and promotions from influencers can often feel more genuine than paid advertising.
4. Creative expertise: Influencers are skilled at creating dynamic, visually appealing, and compelling content that connects with their audience. That’s why they’re influencers, after all.
How to identify the right influencers to work with
Finding the right influencer for your campaign is critical. Remember, it’s not just about how many followers a person has. Their image needs to align with your brand, values, and products and services.
Know your audience
In order to hunt down the perfect influencer to begin working with, you need to know your audience. How old are they? Where do they live? What are their interests? Knowing your target audience inside and out will help you find an influencer who truly resonates with them and will encourage them to engage.
Evaluate a range of influencers
When you have a thorough understanding of your target audience, you can begin evaluating potential influencers. Some of the criteria to consider includes:
- Relevance: Does the influencer’s content align with your business, industry and values?
- Engagement: Do they have high levels of genuine interaction with their followers? For example, do they post frequently and reply to their followers’ comments?
- Audience: Do your audience and the influencer’s audience overlap?
It’s important to do as much research as you can to make sure you find someone who aligns with your business.
How to create a collaborative strategy
Creating a collaborative strategy with a social media influencer involves careful planning and clear, open communication to ensure a successful partnership. Once you’ve found the right influencer to work with and approached them about entering into a partnership, it’s time to get into the details of your influencer marketing campaign. Follow these steps to get started.
Step 1: Set clear goals
Start by identifying exactly what you want to achieve. Do you want to boost website traffic, drive sales, or increase brand awareness?
Step 2: Develop a campaign concept
Collaborate with the influencer to create a campaign that will achieve your goals while also fitting in with the influencer’s style. For example, Judner Aura is a tech influencer who posts videos unboxing and reviewing tech. If you were to engage an influencer like this, you could consider getting them to do an unboxing and product review of your product. Some other ideas include running a giveaway competition, giving a tutorial, or starting a branded hashtag challenge.
Step 3: Set clear guidelines
It’s important to provide a clear and detailed brief to the influencer so they know exactly what you hope to achieve. Your brief should include as much information as possible, as well as campaign expectations, deadlines, deliverables, key messaging and anything else you feel they need to know.
Step 4: Establish compensation
Agree on fair compensation for the influencer’s work, whether that’s monetary compensation or free services or products. To formalize things and avoid miscommunication, detail everything in a contract and include legal details such as exclusivity clauses and usage rights.
Step 5: Maintain open communication
Check in regularly with the influencer to make sure they have everything they need, or if they have any questions. Open communication helps establish a respectful, collaborative working partnership.
Step 6: Review and adjust as necessary
Once the campaign has wrapped up, make sure that you analyze the performance metrics and gather feedback to make sure you get the desired results. If you didn’t hit your targets, then it’s time to adjust and optimize your strategy for next time.
Things to look out for
Collaborating with a social media influencer can be highly rewarding, but there can be risks. Here are some of the things to look out for:
- Misaligned values: If an influencer’s content or messaging conflicts with your brand’s values, partnering with them could hurt your reputation and potentially lose you customers.
- Controversial history: While doing your research, look for any past controversies involving the influencer, such as a history of inappropriate behavior or divisive opinions.
- Overly promotional profiles: Influencers who post a lot of sponsored content may lose credibility with their audience, meaning the effectiveness of your campaign will be reduced.
Mitigate your risk with business insurance
To help protect your business, check whether the influencers you partner with have the appropriate insurance coverage or not. You may also want to consider purchasing insurance yourself to help mitigate risks. If your influencer partner posts something inaccurate or defamatory, then a third party could potentially launch a lawsuit against both of you. Professional Liability insurance protects your business against claims of negligence, misrepresentation, or mistakes and can provide you with peace of mind.
Ready to launch your social media influencer marketing campaign?
Working with social media influencers can be a powerful way to promote your business and connect with new audiences. By identifying the right influencers, creating a collaborative strategy, and keeping an eye out for common pitfalls, you can build an authentic partnership that gets you the results you want.
On the other hand, if you’re an influencer looking for insurance, then make sure you take a look at our insurance for social media influencers and consider purchasing cover to help protect your budding business.
