Ultimate Guide to Grow Your Business with Influencer Marketing

Have you ever bought something because someone you admire vouched for it?

Probably so, right?

That is how influencer marketing can help you promote your products and increase sales. According to 80% of marketers, it is effective to use influencer collaborations for sales growth, particularly if you can promptly reply to client inquiries.

You should collaborate with content creators and influencers in your niche to promote your brand. They already have a targeted following and can help your brand reach more people.

These influencers induce curiosity in their followers about your products and create awareness. They also offer you an opportunity to reach markets you wouldn’t have reached on your own.

But how can you leverage influencer marketing to grow your brand?

We’ll answer this question in this post. But first, let’s discuss why you should use this marketing tactic.

Why Should Your Brand Leverage Influencers to Grow?

Well, for one, it works.

According to 80% of marketers, it is effective to use influencer collaborations. It can help you bring in qualified traffic and new buyers. Influencer marketing can give a better return on investment (ROI) when compared to other marketing channels.

Image via Mediakix

But that’s not all.

Previously, brands used celebrity endorsements to promote their products. But the world is changing.

To become their own bosses, people are leveraging the internet and social media to build and grow their personal brands. They are tapping into their entrepreneurial instincts in a quest to escape the draining 9-to-5 work routines.

Many of them have become influencers. They’ve become experts in particular niches and built large followings. They continuously engage their audiences with valuable content.

This has helped them earn the audience’s trust and gain the power to influence the purchase decisions of their followers.

How can they help you?

By collaborating with influencers, you can use tactics like social proof and word-of-mouth marketing to promote your products or services.

What does this mean?

They don’t just tell their audience to use your product. Instead, they share relatable content as they use the product and showcase how it has made their lives easier.

With influencer marketing, you can easily promote your products to a wider audience who is likely to trust the influencer and make purchases.

How can you use influencer marketing to grow your brand?

read more.

How to Harness the Power of Influence to Grow Your Brand

Like all other types of marketing campaigns, influencer marketing takes time and effort. But it has the potential to generate great results if you implement the right strategies and collaborate with the right people.
Here are the steps you can use to leverage influencer marketing for your business growth:

1. Create a Plan

Before you can run a successful influencer campaign, you need to lay the groundwork.

Clearly define:

Your target audience: Create customer profiles that identify the needs, problems, interests, and pain points of your audience.

Your influencer marketing campaign goals: What do you want to accomplish from the campaign? Determining your goals can help you identify the best tactics and content types to use.

Metrics that will help you track campaign performance: These will depend on your goals and tracking them can help you identify what works and what doesn’t.

Platforms you will use: On which platforms is your audience active? Which ones receive the highest engagement and reach?

2. Identify Influencers

When choosing the right influencer for your brand, you should consider:

• The type of content they share
• How it relates to your business
• Their target audience
• Engagement rates
• Authenticity

Refer this blog to know how to find local influencers

Why is this important?

Your goal is not only to reach a wider audience but to reach an audience you can sell to. You want to engage people who are interested in what you have to say and offer.

Examine each potential influencer’s profile and audience demographics to determine if they are a good fit for your campaign or brand.

Secondly, find out if they are legit. There are so many fraudsters posing as influencers with fake followers and engagement rates. Working with them would mean wasting your time and money without getting expected results.
How can you find the right influencers?

You should leverage influencer marketing tools or agencies to find authentic influencers. You can also set up a strict vetting process to assess the authenticity of all potential influencer profiles and identify fake influencers.

Here are some ways to vet an influencer:

• Check their engagement to follower ratio. If they have many followers but low engagement rate, the chances are that their followers are fake accounts.
• Analyze the quality of interactions on their posts. Lots of spammy and irrelevant comments could be a sign that they are buying comments and likes.
• Check for a sudden spike in follower growth that remains stagnant after.

Once you have a pool of influencers you want to work with, determine how you will compensate them and pitch them about a collaboration.

3. Manage the Relationship

Once you find influencers to work with, provide them with information about your brand, the campaign, and their role. Outline all the topics, keywords, requirements, and deliverables. You can also invite the influencer to share their ideas to make them feel vested in the project.

Then, create a content plan that ensures the effective promotion of your brand, products, and services.

Some of the marketing tactics you can employ include:

• Have the influencer tell your brand’s story.
• Collaborate with them for contests and giveaways.
• Give them creative control.
• Make them your long-term brand advocates.
• Ask them to use specific and relevant hashtags.
• Ask them to create interesting content and videos.
• Have them honestly review your products.
• Ask them to contribute to your blog with original content.
• Allow them to take over your social media accounts for a day.

What’s more?

You should give influencers new updates and information about your brand so that they can meet their content creation commitments.

For example, you can:

Share a new sale or offer with them to promote on social media.

Share eye-catching graphics and impressive product photos and videos with them.

Another way to boost your campaign ROI is to share their content on your social accounts. Doing this can help highlight your collaboration and boost credibility.

If you want their created content to reach more people, you can leverage Facebook. It allows you to directly promote creator content as it appears on their page without sharing it first. You can also promote it to custom audiences to reach more people and drive results.

Image via Facebook

Facebook also allows you to authorize influencers who can tag your products, services, and brand in their content.

4. Evaluate Influencer Performance

Real success doesn’t lie in the number of brand mentions you get on social media or the number of people who took part in your event. It is determined by whether you achieved the defined goals.

How can you track performance?

Track the progress of each influencer you work with from the start of the campaign. Document their strategies, engagement, and results, then compare it with that of other influencers.

You should give each influencer a unique URL or discount code so that you can easily track the traffic and sales they drive.
But this is not enough.

To fully access the performance of each influencer and maximize the ROI of your campaigns, you should leverage insights from the social media platforms you use.

Facebook Insights can help you track the engagement rate, reach, total spend on your branded content. Other than the built-in analytics feature, you can also use other Facebook tools to get in-depth reports about the effectiveness of your campaign.

Another option is to use advanced influencer tracking tools such as Traackr, Klear, and GroupHigh to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Using these tools can enable you to:

• Invite influencers to join campaigns.
• Share messages and briefs.
• Identify the tasks influencers have accomplished and the ones they haven’t.
  Prioritize tasks.
• Identify the top-performing partnerships.
• Analyze earned media value.
• Receive real-time notifications when influencers post content.

These insights can help you quantify the performance of each influencer. You can also use these analytics to identify growth opportunities and improve your strategy.

Leverage Influencer Marketing for Business Growth

Influencers can offer you long-term benefits that can help your business reach new heights. Leveraging their influence and power to persuade people to take action can help you boost your campaign ROI. And if you want to close more sales, you need a formal sales proposal, which is why you should use proposal templates to get your clients’ final approval.

But with a saturated market, you need a proper plan and a stellar marketing strategy. You should use this 4-step influencer marketing strategy to run effective campaigns and grow your business.

Do you need help launching your influencer campaigns? Connect with me in the comments section below.