What is Influencer marketing? There are two fields of view.
The first is where you build a large audience on social media and then use that influence for marketing purposes. The second is to hire social media influencers to spread your marketing message.
This article discusses how influencers may be used to generate more business and more positive PR.
It also discusses the ways that influencer marketing can affect customer relationships by putting a positive spin on various business aspects.
Paying An Influencer To Outright Market Your Products
There are two ways you can go. You can pay a lot of money to a very powerful influencer, or you can pay far less to several smaller influencers.
If you opt for the larger influencers, then be warned that they are divas. They will fail to turn up to your $30K photo shoot because they have a headache.
On the other hand, the smaller influencers will “Always” overestimate their influence and therefore overestimate their worth.
They have seen the YouTube and Rumble videos of people making hundreds of thousands off their Instagram profiles and they want that sort of money.
The Trick To Saving Money When Hiring Influencers
Search out smaller influencers. They are the sort of people who have thousands of followers but are not being featured on home pages or being hunted down by popularity bots.
If you were to rank influencers are lead, bronze, silver and gold, where gold is a recording artist celebrity, then hunt around the bronze level.
The best trick, and one you should use for YouTube and Rumble too, is to offer the influencer merchandise and let them market your goods on their social media channels.
For example, if you create custom leather belts, then give the influencer your overtly most expensive versions. Perhaps four of your $300 each belts; while knowing that you only paid $45 each to manufacture them.
The influencer thinks he or she is getting a great deal and has something to promote and create content with on their social media channels. You then offer them a discount code where they receive affiliate money if their followers click the link and make a purchase.
The goods, along with the affiliate link, mean they have every incentive to make the content and to offer a positive experience so their followers click the affiliate link.
This is a great tactic that is considerably less expensive than offering influencers money. Just make sure you have the influencer’s full agreement before sending the merchandise.
Don’t just send it out to influencers with the hopes they will start posting content because you are setting yourself up for failure.
Buy Influential Instagram Accounts
Going back to the lead, bronze, silver, gold scale, there are people out there who have thousands of followers, who we may call bronze influencers. They have tried and tried, but they just cannot turn their tens of thousands of followers into hundreds of thousands.
These people are not making the sort of money that Internet get-rich-quick videos have taught them, so they want to sell their accounts for some quick cash.
They go to marketplaces like FameSwap and they put their Instagram profiles up for sale. Small and medium sized companies can come along and buy Instagram accounts that already have a following.
This allows the small business to promote and market to the new audience without the expense of having to build the audience themselves.
Some companies grow the accounts they buy, and some draw as much value from the audiences as they can before disposing of the accounts.
Either way, it is a solid way to use influencer audiences for your own benefit.
Putting A Positive Spin On Various Business Aspects
A good marketing company will set expectations in a way that best benefits the company. They will manage expectations and then spin any potential negatives into positives.
The problem is that even marketing companies need to get the word out there to the target demographic.
If you are influential, or if you are paying an influencer, you could get the word out there. You could have them put a positive spin on some potentially negative business aspects.
For example, let’s say you are having trouble shipping out your orders. You could have the influencer tell people to expect delays because good quality takes time and your quality control standards are very tight.
On the other hand, you could have an influencer tell customers that the orders take such a long time to be shipped because there is great demand for the products and your company is having trouble keeping up with the massive demand.
Do not rule out this form of influence because some social media influencers are very successful simply because they pull down companies and services.
They run scathing pieces of companies, their services and their products, and people believe their content because they have no reason to disbelieve it.
Influencers And Customer Relationships
Let’s say that there is something about your product that prompts a lot of questions. It could be something silly, like how some of the options in your settings tab should be in your preferences tab.
People are asking the same question, and your customer support department keeps getting messages asking the same thing. People are not paying attention to your FAQ section, and you are getting frustrated.
You could start answering people on Q&A sites and on Reddit with the hopes that the post goes viral and ends up on Google’s first page.
However, no matter how much you try, you just cannot address the problem with any sort of permanence.
So, you hire an influencer to offer up the answers people keep looking for. When influencers add things to the Internet, it is more likely to reach the top of the Google search engine results, especially if they are answering a commonly asked question.
In many cases, the influencers will find a way to spin it to their benefit. Like telling people they have found a product “Hack” or exploit.
If you are having several problems in this area, you could have the influencer run an “X things you didn’t know about product X” session where the influencer lays out a few of the most common answers to frequently asked questions.
Influencers Who Offer Up Good Reviews
We all know you can pay people to give good reviews, and influencers have a lot of power to affect the reputation of your products and services.
Paying for reviews can be tricky because you need to offer guidelines and you need to strike a good price.
Don’t forget that if you have a good social media following, then you can offer more than just money. You can offer to share their post on your social media platforms too.
Influencers like money, but they love free promotion from other people’s social media profiles.
For many influencers, offering to share their content through your social media profiles is as good as offering money.
Use the promise of social sharing in your negotiations to lower the price of the good review.
Answer The Questions And Comments On An Influencers Post
If you are paying for higher tier influencers for things like tutorials and reviews, then check out their posts and reply to the people who comment. People who watch/read the post will have comments, thoughts and questions.
You should reply to them, and even try to convert them into sales.
You could even strike a deal with the influencer to allow you to post links in the comments when you answer the questions on their social media posts. This will make it easier to convert the commenters into buyers.
Some people try to pay the influencer to answer the comments, but there is nothing stopping you from posting comments to reply to other people’s comments and questions.
Popular influencers will often receive hundreds of comments on their social media posts. These comments are coming from people who are interested in the products and services being talked about in the social media post.
Many of them are potential customers, so when they post comments on the video, you should be the one replying to them.
This allows you to continue affecting your reputation for the better and may offer more and more ways to sell to the influencers’ viewers long after the video or content was posted.
Don’t Try To Hire Celebrities
Even minor celebrities are unable to promote your products or services. They are tied into contracts with massive agencies, and each have their white and blacklists of products and services they can and cannot promote.
Even if you were to get through the bureaucracy to finally speak to a PR agent, they are going to charge you a stupidly high fee and put a lot of restrictions on what can and cannot be said.
Stick to less popular influencers, like people with fewer than one millions subscribers or followers. You can hire tens of them for the price of a more influential influencer.
Plus, it is easier to nail down the target demographics of smaller influencers, which means you can pick influencers who are more likely to attract your target audience.
