How to Find the Best Influencers to Promote Your Brand
The best influencers are people who are active on various social media platforms or blogs and who command a significant number of following or engagement.
Consumers tend to trust a product/service recommendation from a third party than a sales representative. That is, when their mutual friends can actually vouch for a specific product, service, or professional, e.g., a website creator, they are more likely to trust it.
When it comes to online marketing, this mutual friend is always an influencer. They will connect a brand to specific consumers. It could be through generating content (e.g., photos, texts, or videos) or just a positive comment about a brand.
When you bring in an influencer to promote a specific brand or product, they will come with both their loyal audience and network. That is, they will become part of the conversation surrounding your brand. As a result, you will get more leads or traffic that can be converted into loyal customers.
For any influencer marketing to be successful, you need to have a strategic plan on how you will go about the entire process. Here are three steps you can follow.
For an in-depth list of Instagram influencers follow this link.
1. Define target customer and identify your goals
Any marketing program will only be successful after you have identified your target market.
That is, aim to narrow down your targeted customers as much as possible. This will enable you to create a relevant and personalized message for them.
Assuming you have identified your specific customers, the next step is to state the goals you wish to accomplish through an influencer. Your intention could be to:
- Make your product go viral.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Increase conversions in terms of purchases or signups.
At any given point, you should be able to measure the performance of influencer marketing campaigns. You can do this with the help of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Some of the most common KPIs include:
- Website traffic
- Engagement rate, or
- Number of sales.
2. Get the right and the best influencers
One mistake most small business owners make is choosing an influencer based on a single criteria — e.g., popularity.
Not everyone with a big following can boost your brand awareness. Some actually buy followers to fool advertising people.
Thus, you need to identify specific elements that make you feel a particular influencer could be good for your business. You need to pay attention to the following key aspects.
Reach. How many people will an influencer reach? Normally, this could be based on the number of followers and/or engagements on their page.
Relevance. Is there any relationship between your influencer and their target market or customers? The product should be aligned well with the audience for you realize possible success.
Resonance. The product should not only be important to the influencer, but also to their audience. A perfect combination of relevance and resonance will definitely guarantee success.
Now that you know the key aspects to consider, how do you get these influencers to boost your brand?
There are a quite a number of tools you can use to identify potential influencers. Some of these tools include:
- Buzzsumo
- VizSense
- Klout
- LittleBird
When you have these tools, you don’t need to visit social media platforms searching for influencers. That can be a tiresome and demanding task.
3. Monitor and build a working relationship with the best influencers for your brand
Before you approach an influencer, you need to monitor their daily activities. This will help you identify the audience or brands they resonate with. The main purpose of this stage is to ensure influencers are actually aligned with your business goals.
With this, you can begin to build a relationship with the influencers before opting for any partnership.
Start by engaging them in conversations. You can ask them questions, or share with them any content you believe they will enjoy reading.
In short, getting the right and the best influencers to boost your brand can be the most challenging task in online marketing.
To make it worse, most of these influencers get a lot of offers that make it all the more necessary to build a personal relationship with them first. Try to make your first message to them personal and prove to them that a partnership with you can also be beneficial to their brand.
With the right approach, getting the best influencers to promote your brand will be the best decision you’ll ever make as a small business owner and website creator.
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Original Post by Bookmark can be found here: https://www.bookmark.com/blog/find-the-best-influencers-to-promote-your-brand