Social media has taken the internet by storm. Do not take my words, the following statistics by Cio will reveal the power of social media.
Facebook users’ share 31 million posts every minute, 347K new tweets are posted every single minute, 50K photos appear on Instagram, and more than 300 hours of video content is published every minute on YouTube.
It is nearly impossible for businesses to get noticed without the help of an influencer.
An influencer, by definition, is someone who is considered an authority in the niche, someone whose tweets, posts, videos, photos, opinions, and even jokes spread like wildfire throughout the internet. They have millions of followers and anything they post has the potential to go viral.
An influencer sharing, promoting, or even talking about your business will result in traffic, leads, sales, and profit. Their followers trust them and do whatever they say.
Targeting an influencer is an indirect but an effective way to reach your target audience. Getting customers through an influencer works because 92 percent people prefer referrals from someone they know than unknown sources.
Quick Facts and Reasons for Targeting Influencers
- Only 3% of the social media users control the 90% of the social media activities. While trying to become an authority in your niche is a good idea but getting help from an influencer will give a nice push to your business.
- Businesses earn as much as $6.50 per dollar invested in influencer marketing. Isn’t it a good idea to invest your dollars in influencer marketing instead of wasting on other marketing channels?
- More than 51% of the people trust influencer endorsement, 27% trust brands, and only 22% trust ads.
The list can continue.
A powerful influencer can turn the tables.
So how you target influencers?
The following guide will show you how to target influencers who matter for your business.
Developing an influencer marketing strategy
Before you find influencers in your niche, you have to develop a strategy.
Here is a list of some common questions that you should answer before moving to the next step.
- Does your brand need an influencer? Is it the right strategy?
Not every business needs influencers. If you are running an affiliate blog or a gambling website, it is unlikely that an influencer will think of working with you. Yes, they care what they are promoting or recommending and they have a reputation to maintain so be sure that you have something worth promoting.
- Is your website worth sharing?
Influencers promote products and brands through social networks, therefore, content matters. The content on your website must be worth sharing. It must be awesome.
Do not expect influencers to share content that does not add value.
- Do you have a plan, budget, and a team to achieve results?
What are you expecting from the influencer marketing? What is your budget? How long you expect to run the campaign? Do you have a team of experienced professionals to support the marketing efforts?
Leaving everything on the influencer is the worst mistake. You must keep everything ready at your end. The influencer will not check the landing page, CTAs, etc. A lot has to be done by your team.
Influencer profile
It is time to develop an influencer profile so that you target the right type of influencers.
Influencer-brand fit
What type of influencers fit your brand?
Not every influencer out there will go well with your business. For instance, Katy Perry has 93 million followers but she will not be a good fit for your HR software. Her followers are mainly interested in music.
The followers of the influencers must potentially be your target audience. This fit is a must, else it will turn out to be a big fail.
Develop influencer profile
Define the profile of the influencer as to what type of influencer you will target. This includes defining the personality, industry, niche, topics, and reach.
Personality: Do you need an activist, a celeb, an authority, or someone else for your campaign?
Industry: The industry of the influencer should relate to your industry.
Niche: Get more specific and choose a few niches. For instance, not every musician talks about pop. Similarly, influencers in digital marketing will have different niches such as some of them strictly talk about conversion while others about analytics.
Topics: Choose the topics that the influencer talks about a lot and see if they match to the type of content you publish?
Reach: What type of reach you expect from the influencer. If you need to increase your twitter followers, your target influencer must have a massive follower base on Twitter.
Finding influencers
This is the crux of influencer targeting.
Though you can find huge lists of influencers in every industry with a simple Google query but it is not a good idea.
There are other sophisticated ways to find your target influencers.
Tools
Let’s make your life easy by using software that will automate the search process to a significant extent. Here is a list of some nice tools that are designed specifically for businesses to find influencers.
Do it manually
Not interested in using a software? Fine, try one of these methods to find your target influencer.
- Scanning social media will reveal some of the best influencers in your niche.
- Monitor social mentions and hashtags.
- Set Google alerts based on the influencer profile to receive daily updates.
Reach out
Finally, it is time to reach out to your target influencers on their preferred social media network. Here are a few tips to get this right.
- Refrain from sending an email right away. You will not get a reply.
- Engage with them. Read their content. Comment, share, promote, and get noticed. If they have a blog, subscribe to it, read every new post, and be the first one to leave an awesome comment.
- Do not hesitate to share your best content with the influencers. This is how it works.
- Do not always expect from your influencers instead you should talk about them on your blog and social accounts. At times, sending heaps of traffic to their websites works as they always return the favor.
- Stay updated. Don’t miss anything about your influencers.
Conclusion
Eimear run ten websites for Powerpoint Engineering and knows that influencer marketing is a massive industry. It is growing rapidly. This is the right time to get started with it because once it starts working – there is no stopping.
