So what IS influencer marketing, anyway? And why should you use it? Both are valid questions, and asked more and more business owners looking to diversify how they get the word out about what they’re marketing.
Influencer Marketing: A marketing tactic that makes use of online personas (who generally has over 1,000 followers) known as influencers to promote products, launches and brand messaging on their owned channels.
Influencer marketing can be a paid and unpaid tactic, however, as it’s become more and more popular, the unpaid influencer posts are becoming less common. Keep in mind, these unpaid posts generally utilize “in kind” payment, meaning the influencers are often compensated with products.
I’ve broken this up into two blogs. The first speaking to marketers and those looking to use influencer marketing to help promote their brand/product and the second speaking to influencers and how they can utilize influencer marketing to grow their influence and their business (click here to get notified when this is published!).
INFLUENCER MARKETING FOR BUSINESS OWNERS
There’s a lot of discussion about influencer Marketing as it’s prevalence is growing. Where does it sit? Is it advertising, marketing or PR? Either way, you’re likely going to have to incorporate it into your programs at one point, so here’s how it relates to you:
- How are you going to use them?
- When you’re planning an overall marketing campaign, keep in mind how you’d be able to leverage influencers to promote the campaign. For example, if you’re launching a new hair care product think about the types of posts/content you’d like to see from the influencers. (Do you want “Top 5 Hair Care products”, or “Here is my hair care routine” or a “Get Ready With Me”?)
- Will your, or your clients, legal department sass you?
- This applies more for freelancers working for large corporations. Think about the feedback you’ll get from your, or your client’s legal department. This is crucial, especially if you’re working with a large corporation their legal department might have specific guidelines your influencers have to adhere to.
- Get Creative Direction
- Think about a few pieces of creative direction you can give the influencer. It’s important to know what they want, so that you don’t send them an email and they reply saying, “That’s not what I wanted.”
- Give Clear Instructions
- On that note, be clear on what you expect from influencers! They’re putting in the effort and the time to create content, you should be clear in what you want them to create. It’ll make everyone’s lives easier and help cultivate strong relationships.
- Do you have the budget to work with talent agencies?
- If you’re aiming to work with influencers with solid numbers, likelihood is, they have an agent representing them. One thing to keep in mind when working with agencies is their prices are likely higher than someone representing themselves. If you’re building a budget for a campaign, maybe reachout beforehand and get a sense of what your ideal influencer candidates will cost and price the program from there.
- What’s your contract like?
- I’m an advocate for contracts in influencer marketing, especially if it’s a paid partnership. That way all of the deliverables are laid out neatly and if anyone has any questions, or the campaign gets passed onto another person, they don’t have to rummage through old emails, they can reference the contract and everything is taken care of.
There are tons of other tips when it comes to influencer marketing, for those of us who are on the marketer side. So, if you’d like to learn more about Influencer Marketing for Business Owners, or just get some more online business tips in general, drop your email here and I’ll send you the hottest tips, tricks and industry news (once a week, tops)! That way you don’t have to search the internet for relevant information, it’s dropped off in your inbox with a nice little bow on it. 🙂
Are you looking to develop your blog as a business and become an influencer? Stay tuned. Or better yet, need help developing your influencer strategy? We can definitely help you with that! 😘
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