In our last article, we talked about influencer marketing and how it can really help ~enhance~ your social strategy. It’s not a need to be successful online, but it definitely can help..if you do it right! In this article, we will go over 9 benefits of influencer marketing and hopefully will give you some food…or pretzels…for thought for your 2023 social strategy!
Working with influencers is like casting a wide net of friends with lots of other friends. As we’ve talked before, community is so important and influencers are top notch in creating communities.
When you work with an influencer, you get the special invite to talk directly to their community. Like, c’mon! This is GOLD. Being able to speak directly to an audience that has been curated with people who all have some common interest is a marketers dream.
This is why knowing who your audience is (or who you want to speak to) is so important. This is what should drive how you choose who to work with. Not only should you be aligned with the creator, but you should be aligned with their audience. How do you do that?
Take a look at the comment section of their posts, their other ads they have done. See how their audience supports them!
Word-of-mouth marketing is so last year. Influencers are the new talk of the street. Now that influencer marketing has become a lot more smarter, influencers will not be promoting things that they don’t already use/love/have positive things to say about.
This is so important!
Why would we pay an influencer to talk about Auntie Anne’s if they are gluten-free or don’t enjoy pretzels (yes, there are people out there like that). Influencers want to work with brands they love and this is just *chefs kiss*.
This allows influencers to talk authentically about how much they love what they are promoting, which then gives their community the green-light to also enjoy it.
This is also a great way to manage your brand perception and reputation online. People will sh!t talk your brand and that’s okay. Not everyone will love you..and that’s life.
But having a good hand on your brand reputation online is really important and using influencers (with clout) who have nothing but amazing things to say about your brand is a great way to navigate away from the hate.
Similarly to the first bullet, influencer marketing helps bring EYES to your brand. We are all chasing the video views, the comments, the likes, the shares, the positive brand sentiment.
Influencers bring those people to your brand name and your brand pages. Influencers are an extension of your brand team. They are a trusted source to their followers, so having them speak on behalf of you, to their extremely engaged audience, you reap the benefits of all of those brand new EYES.. It’s a win-win for everyone.
This idea is really based on the type of influencer work you do. One way to work with influencers is to have them make content to post on their own pages.
Another way is to have them create content to post on the brand page. By having this human element on the brand pages, shines another type of light to what you’re selling. For example, when influencers do page takeovers, this is a great tactic to bring the influencers community to the brand page.
This helps increase engagements, views, and maybe follower growth. Another great tactic is a collab post on Instagram. Being able to show the same content to two seperate audience is a great startegic play.
When influencers talk about your brand, it is highly likely that people will head to your brand pages/website to check you out. This can lead to community growth, sales, link clicks, subscriptions, etc. The more eyes, the better. The more eyes, the more engagement. The more eyes….you get the idea.
The beauty of working with influencer is that they know what their fans want..and it’s usually things for free or a discount. Let me introduce ~discount codes~ to the chat.
One way to really track the success and ~influence~ of the creator you’re working with is by giving them a trackable code. You can see how many people clicked the link, how many people used the link, and what you’re really worried about..how much money you made from the link.
If you’re in the business to use influencers to sell things, trackable links is the upmost important thing to include. You can really see how perceptive their audience is to the partnership and how their opinion influencers their fans
CONTENT IS KING and influencers put on the crown. Influencers are creators that really understand the art of what people want to see on the internet. They understand the assignment, so why wouldn’t you tap into these creators who do this as a living?
There are many ways to utilize influencers to make content for your brand.
This is a great way to generate content that the younger generation wants to see, without spending an entire production budget. You can also tap into their aestheric, their knowledge on trends, and it just adds some personailty to the content.
Who doesn’t love a long term relationship? (a rhetorical question lol). You don’t have to stop working with an influencer the moment your campaign is over.
This is your time to make a lifelong fan out of someone with some clout!! There is nothing better than having an influencer talk about your brand organically and when you nurture these longer term relationships, the likeliness of this happening gets higher and higher.
Not all brands are built the same. This includes resources, budget, objectives, goals, business challenges, etc. This means that some brands might put a heavy emphasis (and larger $$$) toward influencers than others…and that’s okay. There are ways to make influencer magic happen with no money!
When I first started at Auntie Anne’s, I really wanted to work with influencer to help support our college basketball campaign. I had 0 dollars. What did I do? I shot my shot (pun intended) and slid into the DMs of influencers who love the brand but also love basketball.
I had influencers with over 1M followers post on our behalf in return for free products!! I couldn’t believe it! My strategy was to find influencers who genuinely loved us and sent a friendly DM and made it happen. All for the price of some pretzels.
You don’t have to be an Abercrombie or an Aerie to work with influencers. There are niche influencers that are waiting for their moment to be seen. It ranges from kitting, to sports, to fashion, to hunting, to IT, to coding.
With TikTok being the platform where you can authentically be yourself, it has proven that interests can get nicher and nicher and people become influencers in these niche markets.
You could be a furniture moving company and offer to work with an influencer you saw online talking about moving. You can slide into their DM and offer your services in return for a review on their social channels and BOOM. You have an influencer talking about your not-so-sexy service. And BOOM. You have people reaching out to use your service with the code TRIPLE WHALE.
Not only does Triple Whale help you visualize, measure, and optimize influencer marketing performance, but with Affluencer Hub, you can track, manage and analyze all your affluencers (influencers & affiliates) across every platform using a combination of Discount Codes, the Triple Pixel and a Post Purchase Survey.
Grab a call with one of our strategists today and see how Triple Whale can help amplify your influencer marketing performance.