Influencers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other content distribution channels can tremendously maximize your business reach. You can tap into wider audiences and share the content created by the business to draw potential customers closer until they convert.
The greatest benefit is that you can expand your marketing globally with influencers. Some of them have a global reach while others possess intercontinental influence and that is very beneficial for the business. What can business owners do to scale their content strategy using influencer marketing? Here are 7 tips on how to do this.
Identify customer personas
Identifying customer personas is just as important as sourcing the appropriate influencer. These two factors need to complement each other, the influencers you source have to fit the customer personas preferences. Therefore identifying what users engage with on social media will help the business in getting customer service right and collaborating with the right influencers.
You need to know what type of influencers to use for the business to meaningfully engage with customers. For example, 70% of teens trust influencers more than celebrities and knowing this can help you well-structured your influencer marketing strategy.
With this information, a business would know to avoid using A-list celebrities but rather macro and micro-influencers. Also, knowing what kind of content the targeted audience consumes will help the business engage with potential customers meaningfully through influencers.
If the targeted audience has different consumer personas, you can source multiple influencers that fit the varied criteria. Before you even begin sourcing influencers, ensure that customer personas have been identified and documented.
The results of that will be a well-implemented influencer marketing strategy that meaningfully engages with the targeted audience.
Source appropriate influencers
Sourcing appropriate influencers is the cornerstone of improving your content strategy using influencer marketing. You should find the appropriate candidates that well-represent the business’ brand and have great social engagement.
There are many factors to consider when sourcing influencers and they include the number of followers, individual post engagements, and niche.
Many influencers have large volumes of followers but do not engage appropriately with their audience. You can pick up on this shortcoming by going through follower engagements, did they share the post? How many liked it? Did the followers comment? These factors can help you identify the impact that influencer will have on your content.
Michael Gardner, the reputed data analyst from Best assignment writing service notices that the digital marketing team there chose some of the best student influencers who talked about education, online courses, and assignment writing on their social media pages. It is important to carefully pick only those influencers who are niche-focused and category oriented rather than being generalists.
Influencers that seem to have various niches at one time regularly do not get the desired engagement. That stresses the importance of searching for influencers that stick to one niche that resonates best with the brand you are promoting.
The step of sourcing and finding the perfect influencer can be challenging for businesses. As per studies, 61% of marketers admitted to this step being quite challenging for them. Although that is true, it is worth and will save the business a lot of resources in the long run.
If you are having trouble with finding the right influencer you can consider the option of hiring the person who will be in charge of it. Some great sources such as Jooble with lots of relevant listings and candidates have been practicing this approach for a long time.
Develop a content creation plan
After finding the most suitable influencers and have engaged with them, you will have the opportunity to discuss your working arrangement. The working arrangement you will have with influencers includes who creates the content and how often it will get posted.
You might want to assume control of the entire content creation plan but that might be detrimental for the marketing campaign.
Therefore, a lot of influencers prefer creating the content they will share themselves. Whereas, some influencers might prefer that you do all the heavy lifting and they just share the content provided. The initial arrangement seems to work best for a lot of businesses because influencers know their audience much better.
Thus, it will be much easier for them to create content that speaks directly to their followers. You just have to nudge the influencer in the right direction by telling them what the end goal is.
When you have difficulties with the content creation process, you can always choose the content tools, which would be the best for you, trying one be one.
For example, if you would like to use influencers to get a higher conversion rate since 49% of customers depend on influencer recommendations, communicate those goals with them. If they need help with content development or you need to come up with your own, the writing service will be the best recommendation in this case.
Repurpose content
Influencer marketing content can be repurposed, especially if you are the one who developed it. For example, you might have created an infographic to share on Facebook and Instagram and that content can be repurposed for other channels. The infographic can be turned into an article and be shared with influencers that have a largely followed blog.
Alternatively, an article can also be converted into an infographic to boost the business’ visual strategy on social media channels. Motorola successfully did this because they marketed their new Moto Z device family on all social media channels and repurposed the content for YouTube influencers.
You can follow their lead by repurposing content for different distribution channels instead of focusing on each one individually. Repurposing content helps with creating consistency across all distribution channels used by influencers.
Therefore, regardless of the influencer or channel customers discovered your business on, they will easily identify it anywhere else.
Above that, you will save considerable amounts of cash by repurposing content instead of creating new material for each channel. It is the best way to simplify your influencer marketing strategy and is quite efficient if you are the one creating the content that will be shared.
Establish realistic goals
Goals are what take people from where they are to their desired destination and this also applies in influencer marketing. Businesses need to have clear set goals that will guide their strategy’s growth. With the goals you have set for your influencer marketing campaign, it will be much easier to determine KPIs to monitor its performance.
To set goals related to influencer marketing, you must identify the reason why this outreach strategy is necessary. Does the business need to implement influencer marketing because it needs higher brand awareness? Is the intention to get a higher conversion rate? Would you like to get more users subscribed to your email list?
Whatever the reason may be, clearly identifying it will help you develop relevant and realistic goals.
For example, if a business owner would like to increase the conversion rate, he will set milestones and the overall target amount of conversions.
As time goes on, he will reference these metrics to see if the current influencer marketing strategy is working for him. The same applies to brand awareness and to increase the business’ email list, you must set a target of desired social media followers or subscribed individuals.
Budget financial resources
If you intend to successfully run your influencer marketing strategy for the longest time, it is important to budget. Finances are everything in an influencer marketing strategy because they enable the business to gain access to the best in influencers there is to offer.
Although that is true, it might be easy to blow away the budget too fast without any proper good results.
Thus, as a business owner, you have the great responsibility of monitoring the spending budget of an influencer marketing strategy. The key is getting a great return on investment and not spending money on inefficient influencers. Therefore, you should check up on the KPIs that were predetermined to identify each influencer’s performance.
The KPIs will help you identify the most successful influencers and those that underperform. Cutting loose the underperformers will greatly benefit the budget because the recovered expenses can be wisely used on effective influencers.
Do not keep on paying influencers that fail to produce the results you expect from them because they will bleed the business dry as time goes on.
Have a transparent relationship with influencers
Once you have sourced influencers and engaged with them, it is essential to be transparent with them. Withholding information can result in your influencer marketing strategy going sideways. You must communicate all essential information with the influencer, including the business’ goals and story.
Letting influencers know where the business is coming from and its reason for existence can help with the marketing strategy. Influencers can implement brand storytelling that is accurate and resonates with the business’ image at large.
Even after the wheels have hit the tarmac, you should maintain an open and transparent spirit with influencers. Whenever there are new developments you would like to implement, keep them on the loop.
Cutting them out by not being transparent can negatively impact the relationship with them and that will affect their devotion to promoting your content.
You can also ask them to be transparent with the business in terms of what they think about the branding and other marketing elements. That interchange of opinions can result in exceptionally innovative solutions propelling the business to success.
The bottom line
Content marketing can be amplified using influencer marketing and these tips can help you successfully do this. The most important practices you should implement are sourcing the appropriate influencers and maintaining an open and transparent relationship with them. Fostering this working arrangement can result in an influencer marketing strategy that meaningfully reaches the hearts of consumers.