4 Step guide to using Influencer Marketing for e-commerce.

Influencer Marketing is a type of marketing that includes hiring influencers to spread your brand message and its products/services to a large group of people.

Influencer Marketing and word-of-mouth marketing are two different things. While the former engages key people to spread the word among other people, the latter is the nature used in this marketing. 

Influencer Marketing is often done in close association with social media marketing and content marketing.

1. Understanding the rise of Influencers

This new age has seen tremendous growth of the internet and hence social media. This, in turn, has given a boost to the online presence of brands which is very vital these days. The rise of influencers is very evident in these past few years, especially on social media. 

Influencers are people who have a huge fan following and with whom they share a friendly bond. They’re people who show expertise in their functions. There are various kinds of influencers namely bloggers, celebrities, journalists, photographers, reformers, etcetera. They are not mainstream but have most of their lives like open books on the internet, which helps people connect better with them. This wins people’s trust and influences their choices. And since almost everyone has access to the internet, the aspect of influencers has risen these days, which has made them like role models.

2. Building relationships with the customer base

Marketers believe that influencer marketing helps them reach a more targeted audience, which brings better results.

An influencer is a person who has established his reliability for his followers and who maintains it. This makes them worthy for the brand to persuade their customers into direct sales.

Influencer marketing gives a third-party endorsement, that helps the brand see from a different angle rather than their own, which helps market in a whole new way and thus attracts a whole varied set of customers. This helps build the aspect of reliability for your brand.

The way that a customer thinks might be different than how a brand thinks. Now, an influencer can act as a middle person. As the influencer is a friendly approach to their fans, it helps to know how a customer thinks and what they want. This becomes beneficial for the brand to understand its customers better.

3. Finding the right influencers for your brand

As it is important to target the correct audience to market your brand to, in the same way, it is important to find the right influencers to do it.

These 3Rs are vital to keep in mind while doing so:

1. Relevance:

Any influencer can’t just represent your brand just because he/she has a huge fan following. It is very important to understand your target audience and then decide on a list of influencers that best suit the field. It is very common to look for influencers whose followers match your target audience, instead, you should go for ones who might want to gain more knowledge about your brand, because that’s the motive of influencer marketing- expanding reach.

2. Reach:

Reach is very important in influencer marketing, but only when it is of the right kind. The influencer’s connectivity to their followers must be checked- like whether he/she is truly able to reach them and convey. Not just in terms of likes, but comments and CTA should be checked, of the sponsored brands done by him/her whose values match your brand.

3. Relationship:

One cannot choose an influencer solely based on numbers, but also on the kind of relationship developed with his followers. You need to know if the content they convey is effective and how the followers respond to it, whether they can keep consistent the trust established with the people, and how they build that trust. 

It takes time for a brand to build trust. Hence, when you choose the right influencer for your brand, it helps gain the trust of potential customers through the right conveyance of the brand value. The right influencers help maintain that trust consistently.

4. Using influencer reach on different platforms

Influencers have taken over different platforms like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Twitch, etc.

Facebook is the largest social media site that can reach a huge targeted audience. An influencer can encourage its audience to like and share posts that can reach beyond its audience through different groups.

Youtube is the video platform that allows influencers to convey their content through short or long videos. One of the best platforms that people access to learn or view things, Youtube content is accessible for years.

Twitter is one of the best platforms for product recommendations. It is one of the best platforms to showcase your brand through influencers using tweets, as it has a lot of users.

We can safely say one of the most effective influencer marketing platforms is Instagram. Through reels, videos, and images the influencers have taken over this platform with pomp. A large number of people use this platform today and information and content are posted and spread within seconds.

Examples of successful influencer marketing campaigns

• Remember when the Dalgona coffee trend blew up? That was the courtesy of the brand Nescafe! They featured influencers and Instagrammers to carry out the trend on the platforms with proper hashtags. As a result, the feed blew up as the trend went viral within no time.  
  
  

• When KFC India decided to launch a new food product “Double Down Burger”, they decided to do something different than shooting an ad. Before the launch of the product, they collaborated with food bloggers to create curiosity by naming it a secret burger, to create curiosity. After the launch of the product, they invited food bloggers to taste the burger, record the review and promote it on their social media handles.

• As more than half of Tinder users are aged 18-25, Tinder decided to choose Gen-Z influencers to promote their brand. It collaborated with mega-influencers and TikTok content creators who made content that matched Tinder’s brand identity and had a strong organic engagement with followers. 

Conclusion: 

A rightly planned Influencer marketing campaign can be really fruitful for a business looking for exponential growth on the social media spectrum. Validated the points mentioned above you will be able to launch impactful Influencer marketing campaigns for businesses of yours and others.