Influencer marketing is slowly gaining more and more popularity across all social media platforms as a digital marketing tool used for boosting engagement. The goal of increasing this engagement can be restricted to something as simple as getting more likes on your post to raise the conversation rates for a website selling some product or service. The higher the conversion rate, the more effective your marketing is in prompting action by the followers’ towards purchasing the product/service being sold.
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that allows businesses to reach out to influential people including celebrities, bloggers, market trendsetters, product/service reviewers, technical experts, famous social media personalities or even one of the loyal followers who might resonate with the target audience. While influencers can be used to market one’s business on any platform, marketing through social media is more attractive to companies as it provides a lower cost solution, at the same time reaching thousands of target audience. Engaging an influencer to endorse a product through a YouTube video drastically cuts the cost that the business would have to incur in a non-digital marketing place. A celebrity modelling for a TV commercial would not present the same cost as a YouTube video review.
Social media influencer marketing is the most effective when done right! It is essential that businesses must reach out to the right influencers, who are well known in their field of expertise and can get an audience to pay attention to the market. Find an influencer that will not only disseminate knowledge about your business but can also affect their buying behaviour!
According to experts at VM Interactive and Healthy Links here you find your influencers and can reach out to them
Direct Message
The first and most straightforward way of reaching out to your chosen influencer(s) is by direct messaging them on social media or by sending them a polite email requesting them to collaborate or endorse. This might be simple but it inevitably requires you to spend some time on your research. While Google search is always the option to research about your potential influencers and the magnitude and nature of influence they have on the audience, tools such as AllTop and FollowerWonk are also designed to provide you with the information that you are looking for. AllTop gives you a list of all popular blogs when you search a keyword. FollowerWonk lets you search influential twitter personalities by categories and also ranks them by Social Authority: their influence. You can look for similar tools in your google search as well. Once you know who to reach out to drop them a message in their inbox, if you are reaching out using direct message, it is best that you check out the message response rate on their account first. If it is too low, which is the case with many celebrity accounts as they lack direct engagement with their followers, there would be a little chance of you getting a response. If the response rate is high, you stand a better chance of being acknowledged!
Use Tools
The second and much easier way of finding your influencers on the internet are the tools designed explicitly for influencer marketing such as Upfluence. With a database of 1 million influencers, Upfluence provides a platform that allows its users to identify influencers, create lists and reach out to them on a significant scale all by using one platform. Moreover, filters such as geolocation and language help you in making sure that you are targeting the right audience through your influencer campaigns. Such influencer marketing tools also give you the opportunity to study influencer statistics such as their engagement rate and assist you in strategising and managing all your influencer campaigns using the same tool. Such tools are typically accessible on a subscription basis.
Marketing Agency
Thirdly, you may hire an influencer marketing agency to connect with your influencers. Influencer marketing agencies act as a middleman between businesses and the influencers who have signed up to their database. These agencies would understand your business’s activity goal: whether you want to increase brand awareness or influence conversion rates. Using this information they help you find your best match and reach out to the influencer(s) for your behalf. Further services include assistance in strategising and designing and executing business campaigns and influencer management. These agencies also keep tabs on the performance statistics of all social media influencers in their database and give you more profound insights into the rankings derived from their influence. Unlike the two options above, outsourcing to an agency means that your business will have to spend less time researching and strategising. Understandably, getting this service costs more.
