Influencer marketing for beginners

Why is influencer marketing important?

As we discussed in our last post, influencer marketing might be the go-to in 2022. If you are new to marketing, let me explain what influencer marketing is in simple terms. Imagine you have a pizza shop. You want to shoot an ad for marketing purposes, so you hire Victoria's Secret supermodel and she holds your pizza for a few photos. You then pay her a handsome fee, create, edit, optimise the content, and upload it to your social media pages. You also request the model to post it on her page.

But what if I tell you, it's not going to get you as many sales as you want?

As a social media manager and content strategist, I would rather advise you to target your niche influencers, like food reviewers, pizza fanatics, foodies, food photographers, or even home-based cooks, to visit your shop and give an honest review of your pizza. They get the organic traffic (engagement for their content) and you get the free publicity from influencers who have your target audience as their followers.

While a Victoria's Secret supermodel would be the best choice for fashion and beauty-based products, you have to make sure the influencer you collaborate with has your potential customers as followers.

Here is a list of things you can use as a checklist before you decide to collaborate with an influencer:

Niche Marketing:

Make sure the influencer is related to your niche. Niche is just a fancy word for your area of business or interest. Like in the above example, there is no use hiring someone for publicity when the publicity will be wasted on people who are not your potential customers. Additionally, you can even collaborate with someone who has the same business as you in another location. 

Assume you live in Korea and own a pizza shop; thanks to social media, you may have followers from the United States as well. If you collaborate with a pizza shop owner in the US, you can both reach organic traffic, increase followers, and even potential customers from your respective locations.

Engagement and Popularity

This is a hard pill to swallow, but we've got to do what we got to do. What kind of digital marketing blogger would I be if I didn’t help you with what’s essential?

Not all the influencers out there have honest and organic followers. Bulk buying followers are prevalent nowadays. Even though social media platforms, try their best to prevent this, bots are everywhere. So before you choose an influencer, you have to make sure they have organic followers who will later become your customers, hopefully.

How do we find the authenticity of Influencers?

Check their engagement rate. There are many engagement rate calculators available on the internet. Engagement is nothing but the likes, comments, shares, and saves of the content of the creator. This tells us whether the influencer is legit or not. Also, please remember that the number of followers should never be the judging factor. 1k of genuine organic followers is much better than 10k of bots. Always check their credibility and engagement before collaborating.

Values and policies:

Make sure they align with your product and service. For example, don’t waste time collaborating with influencers who have hateful opinions. We live in a society with a "cancel" culture. Collaborating with someone who can get "cancelled" (getting cancelled is a pop culture reference where a particular is boycotted for their hateful opinion, homophobia, racism, or anything that’s harmful) will only ruin your brand’s reputation. So, make sure you are not associating with an influencer who can potentially harm your brand value later.

A good social media manager can do ample market research to find the best content creators in any particular niche with organic followers and good community support. It is simple but time-consuming, and it requires some platform experience.

Our next post will discuss how to decide which type of influencer collaboration you should choose depending on your business. Also, if you want ideas on how to grow your brand in SM without anyone’s help, all on your own, comment down and get in touch. Until then, happy marketing to you all. Have fun.

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