Your Guide to Influencer Marketing
What is Influencer Marketing
If you haven’t heard of influencer marketing, you may think of it as merely another branch of marketing – perhaps even a short-term fad. But influencer marketing is more than that. It is becoming an essential way to publicize your goods and services online. Why? Because it is now the most genuine and authentic method of marketing.
Businesses are making an average of $7.65 for every $1 spent on Influencer Marketing. Medical Aesthetics Practices can see those returns too.
Influencer marketing is one of those terms where the name means what it says. It implies that businesses work with people of influence to help them with their online marketing.
Influencer Marketing aims to identify the main people who act as influencers in your niche so you can approach them to work with you to promote your brand.
So, what is an influencer?
An influencer is somebody who has the power to affect purchase decisions of others. An influencer can do this because he has authority, knowledge, position and/or a special relationship with his audience. He is usually someone who has a significant following in a particular niche, and he actively engages with them.
The size of an influencer’s following will depend on the size of the niche he or she chooses to operate in. There will be more followers of fashion than there are devotees of Greek Mythology.
Influencer marketing grew out of celebrity marketing. Celebrities have promoted products for years – for a hefty endorsement fee, of course. Online celebrity marketing is still an example of influencer marketing, but modern influencer marketing is so much more than a movie or sports star pushing some unconnected product to his fans.
As the internet has matured, certain individuals have established reputations as digital superstars. These are the people we consider to be influencers.
These influencers have built reputations for being experts in particular niches. They might have established a successful blog on the subject. Perhaps they’ve made videos and uploaded them to a relevant YouTube channel. Or more often, they have operated active and popular social media accounts, where they give opinions, ideas, tips, and advice relating to their specialist topic.
How Can Influencers Help Your Practice?
The level of help you can expect from an influencer depends on the type of working relationship you can establish with him or her. If you use influencer outreach and an organic approach, you will probably receive less help from an influencer than if you pay them for a distinct influencer marketing campaign. Of course, the cost will be very different too. Influencer outreach may result in an influencer helping you out for free (or at most the price of some free product). A formal paid influencer marketing campaign could cost you a great deal, depending on the influencer’s star power – but you will receive more in return.
Typical ways that an influencer with whom you have built an organic relationship could help you include:
- Creating an article/blog post, or video about your product or service
- Sharing information promoting you on their social media accounts. For instance, they might share a post publicizing an article you have written for your own blog
- Giving you access to their site so you can write a guest post
Paid influencers will be more proactive in promoting your brand. They might write or film promotional items. They could post pictures on Instagram or videos on YouTube showing them using your product. In this situation, they are not merely helping you out because they built a relationship. They are earning the money you pay them.
Of course, you can’t expect influencers to provide you with unequivocal praise. They are only influencers because of their authentic relationship with their audience. Any real influencer is unlikely to want to deal with you at all if they don't like your product.
How to Get Started
There is no point engaging in influencer marketing just because you read somewhere that it was trendy. You have to have a purpose for your campaign.
This is probably no different from any other facet of business. Ask any successful business person for the secret to their success, and most will admit that it was down to goal-setting.
For influencer marketing to be successful, you must have quality content. A 500-word blog post, written to meet SEO criteria will struggle to attract an influencer’s attention.
For people to notice your content, it needs to be
- Accessible
- Actionable
- Visually appealing
You need to provide real value to the reader.
The most common places for influencers to make their name are:
- Blogs – blogging influencers have spent time (often years) building a successful, popular blog covering a niche that interests your target audience. While many of the best-known fashion influencers have gained influence over a wide range of platforms in recent year, many of them won their initial fame due to the quality of their blogs. You could choose to work with quality bloggers in a range of ways:
- Social media – quite a few influencers (even those who run quality blogs) have huge followings and engagement on their social media accounts. Your aims here could include: Receiving positive mentions in social posts, retweets or shares of your social media posts, posts showing the influencer using your product (for instance an “unboxing video” on an influencer’s YouTube channel, creative social posts promoting your products/practice.
A major decision you need to make before you start is which path you should follow to find your influencers. There are three options:
- Organic – you search for and build relationships with influencers in-house. This is the cheapest, but most time-consuming method
- Platforms – you pay to use one of the specialist online platforms to find your influencers. Many of the platforms provide systems, which make it simpler to manage your influencer campaigns
- Agencies – you pay a specialist influencer marketing agency to help you with influencer selection and management.
Conclusion
The common saying, “failing to plan is planning to fail” applies as much to influencer marketing as to other areas of your life. There is little point taking on influencer marketing without first setting goals.
It is impossible to find the right influencer if you don’t know who you want them to influence.
You may already know your ideal target customer. If so, then keep that persona in mind when your search for influencers.
Similarly, if you have undertaken successful PPC or paid Facebook advertising in the past, take a close look at how you targeted your campaigns there.
For influencer marketing to be successful, you need to work with influencers who influence your target audience.
It is important that you keep monitoring your campaign. Influence can be fickle. You don’t want to be tainted by working with an influencer who has lost his or her respect.
For influencer marketing to succeed, brands have to trust that influencers will represent them appropriately. The solution comes back to influencer selection. If you choose influencers who have followers with a close match to your target market, you have created odds of a successful campaign.
influencer marketing works hand-in-hand with content marketing to be the most successful way to market your products this decade.