Tips to Use Influencer Marketing to Grow Your Business

The strategy of leveraging someone else’s reach, celebrity or database to grow your brand or bottom line isn’t a new one. However, social media has changed the game of what we now call influencer marketing. Here are a few tips on how to utilize influencer marketing to grow your business.

Create Your Influencer Marketing Goal

It is pretty obvious that the goal of influencer marketing is to get in front of more people. But you want to have a clearer outcome for how you what that to convert to results in your business. Are you looking for greater brand awareness in the form of increased visibility and recognition in your industry? Do you want to increase your lead generation? Or are you looking for higher sales? Your desired end goal will dictate how you proceed in building your relationship with each influencer.

Get Clear on Your Target Audience

This is an important step for ANY form of marketing. Who are you solving a problem or serving a need for and where can you find these people? There are certain businesses that do better when they focus their social media energy on Instagram or Facebook because that is where their audience lives. The same is true of LinkedIn or online networking platforms. Who are you serving and how are they finding and consuming information that they then use to make decisions on how to spend their time and money?

Identify Relevant Influencers

The most effective people for your influencer marketing strategy are the people that are already in front of your audience. If you are a company producing toys and games, you want to target people who have audiences that listen to their reviews and opinions about these types of products. But they must also have reach on the platforms where you have identified your audience lives. Keep in mind, being an influencer is not the same as having the most followers. The key is that those followers, fans and subscribers listen to and take action based on the influencers’ input and recommendations. Not sure where to start? Use alerts and notifications to find people talking about topics that align with your business and your offerings.

Determine Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

In utilizing influencer marketing, you are creating advocates for your business/brand. As such, it is important to establish a mutually beneficial relationship. How can you strengthen the influencer status of someone who is promoting your business or brand? Do you have access to relevant and reliable information not found elsewhere and do you have access to it before anyone else-therefore increasing the influencer’s credibility? Does it make sense to create a joint product where you are bringing something to the table the influencer does not yet have? Are you offering to pay influencers to share, promote or endorse your business or product/services? Although non-paid support of your business is looked upon more favorably, businesses are increasing budgets for influencer marketing because they understand the potential ROI when invested wisely.

The Take Away:

Catalyzing your growth by leveraging the databases and audiences of influencers is viable way to grow. In order to be successful, establish a clear strategy where you create a long term win-win relationship with influencers that will be advocates for your business and your brand because they truly believe in it.