Influencer marketing used to be reserved for major brands with loads of money. Hiring celebrities and famous YouTubers to promote a brand was a true luxury. Fortunately, social media has grown tremendously over the past decade and with the surplus of influencers in every niche imaginable, working with influencers has become attainable for large and small budgets alike.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Simply put, influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing, where the influencer promotes a product on their social channel for all of their followers to see. This could be as simple as wearing a clothing store’s t-shirt in a social post or it could be more complex, such as hosting a giveaway for a brand’s product.
The goal of influencer marketing is usually to help grow the brand’s own social media channel while also driving traffic to their website.
How to Use Influencers to Your Advantage
There are many useful ways that you can leverage the use of influencers for your brand. However, the first and most popular way is to promote a product. This is usually done by sending the influencer your product free of charge and having them post on their social channels about it. This could be an unboxing post, a review post or even just a regular image while they wear or use your product.
What this does is it reinforces your brand recognition. If the influencer has a million followers and just 10% of those followers see the post, that’s 100,000 people who will see or learn about your product. Add a link to your website in there and you’ll notice an instant increase in website traffic.
There’s a large variety of ways to promote your product or services with influencers:
- Unboxing posts/videos
- Product review posts
- Testimonials
- Giveaway events (influencer gives your product to a lucky follower)
Make the Most out of your Influencer Marketing with Giveaways
Just a regular post doesn’t incentivize the followers to follow your account or even visit your website unless they absolutely love your product. The best way to get the most out of your influencer campaigns is to have the influencer host a giveaway.
How this works is you send the influencer your product and they post an image of them using the product. They would also announce the giveaway in that post. Usually, you’d want to make sure that followers need to follow your account and tag a friend to enter. This is the best way to leverage influencers in your favor and get the most amount of followers without spending a fortune.
How to Find Quality Influencers
Finding influencers isn’t always as easy as it seems. First and foremost, you’ll need to make sure that the influencers you work with are within your target audience. If you’re selling baby products, you’ll want to work with new moms – if you’re selling sporting goods, you’ll want to find athletic influencers.
Another thing to note is that for every 100 influencers you contact, most of the time, you’ll only get interest from about 10 of them. Some might also want you to pay them for the post along with getting your product for free (especially when they have a massive amount of followers).
In most cases, you’re better leaving the outreach and influencer management up to the professionals. Here at Olympus Marketing, we can easily find the best influencers for your brand and manage them entirely, from the early outreach stages all the way to providing you with insight reports after the post goes live.
Schedule a call with us today to learn how we can help you get started with influencer marketing!