A few years back, the influencer marketing field was limited only to celebrities and a few dedicated bloggers. Presently, it appears as though we’ve seen influencers rise and saturate the market. Organizations are presently intrigued to collaborate with influencers as opposed to celebrities. As they have come to understand the fact that influencers are authentic and can bridge the gap between their target audience and brand.

Influencer marketing is leveraging the reach of an existing influencer who has built a huge reputation and strong brand in a particular niche to support your brand, promote your product, or co-create content, with the aim of increasing brand awareness and sales. It is a form of collaboration. A business collaborates with an influential person to promote a product, service, or campaign.

Influencer marketing works as a result of the high measure of trust that influencers have developed with their following, and recommendations from them serve as a form of social evidence to your brand’s potential customers. Influencer marketing is gaining rapid popularity as a strategy to increase brand awareness and audience engagement.
If you are asked to name an influencer, who comes to mind? Then you think that all influencers are the same type of person, but there are actually different categories of influencers.
    • Celebrities: These are people who are well known and get lots of public attention, from other people. They are constantly promoting and endorsing products through social media, TV and other media forms.
    • Social Influencers (YouTubers/Instagrammers): These are people who have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic on their preferred social media channels. They generate huge following because of videos they take or photos they post. They are more authentic and relatable than celebrities.
    • Industry Influencers: These are significant people within your industry. They can be bloggers, social figures, or business leaders. These are people who are viewed as an authority in your field and have a following.
It’s easy to see why influencer marketing is hot right now, but where is it heading? And more importantly, how can you capitalize on it for your brand?
1. Set clear goals and objectives: First of all, define your goals and objective. What would you like your campaign to accomplish?
You need to know what you are trying to achieve before you enlist the help of an influencer. You can set goals such as:
    • Build brand awareness: Influencers create content that resonates with their audience and helps them establish a sense of bonding and trust. Partner with influencers that create engaging content that matches your brand value, this will help you build your brand awareness.
    • Attract a new target market: For this, you need influencers who can build and drive targeted traffic to your brand to attract a new target market for your business.
    • Facilitate sales: Everything leads up to this: more sales. When influencers offer buying suggestions, their audiences trust them and make purchasing decisions based on them, this, in turn, means more leads for your business.
You want your goals to be achievable. It’s important to set goals so you can accurately measure the effectiveness of your influencer marketing.
2. Invest in finding the right influencer for your brand: First of all, you need to look for influencers whose audience is made up of people within your target demographic. This means you need to make sure the influencers you work with can influence your target audience. To find the right fit between brand and influencer, you’ve got to find someone who is aligned with your brand’s vision, mission, and identity.
However, you must make sure that you collaborate with influencers who belong to your niche. Let’s take for example:
You sell fashion accessories through social media. Fantastic!
You decide to do some influencer marketing and pay for a Chef Guy(because you love him) to promote it on his social media.
While Chef Guy has a lot of followers, they are not your audience!
People that follow him on social media are not interested in fashion accessories but anything food, so the likelihood to increase your sales by using him as an influencer isn’t great.
If you sell real estate, then find a pool of influencers interested in real estate. If you are a fashion brand, then find an influencer that reflects your brand’s style.
3. Create a strategy: As with anything else in digital marketing, an influencer marketing strategy requires planning and proper analysis. Strategic, well-executed influencer marketing campaigns can extend a brand’s reach with desired audiences, build credibility/social proof that prospects rely on in their purchase decision-making process, and aid in getting potential customers into a sales/marketing funnel, helping generate better bottom-line results.
Here are 5 key Influencer marketing strategies that you can adopt to help boost sales;
    • Ask Influencers to Create Instagram Stories
    • Get Influencers to Create Testimonial Videos
    • Collaborate with Influencers for affiliate marketing
    • Ask Influencers to Review Your Products
    • Offer a Discount Code Through Your Influencers
Conclusion
Influencer marketing has become one of the most popular marketing strategies in the current situation. Businesses worldwide are using it for reaching a wider audience and if you aren’t doing it then you’re probably missing a big piece. Incorporating influencers into your marketing strategy is wildly beneficial to your brand as you have great opportunities to increases sales and establish your brand in new markets.
So what are you waiting for? 
As a marketing agency who understands the need to help businesses grow, we’ve teamed up with some of the industry-leading influencers to help clients build their influencer marketing campaigns.

Contact us today to speak with a strategist.