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Social Media Influencer Marketing
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What is ‘Social Media Influencer Marketing’ and why is it so effective when done properly?
Social media influencer marketing involves partnering with industry-relevant and influential individuals on social media platforms to promote a product or service to their followers. Influencers have a targeted and engaged following on social media, and their endorsement can help a brand reach a wider audience and build trust with potential customers.
So why is social media influencer marketing creating such a buzz in the world of marketing?
First, influencers have built a relationship of trust with their followers, who value their opinions and recommendations. When an influencer endorses a product or service, their followers are more likely to trust that recommendation and consider trying it themselves. Influencers that will generate sales will be viewed as an oracle type figures within their industry
Second, social media influencer marketing allows brands to reach a highly targeted audience. Influencers often have a specific niche or area of expertise, and partnering with them allows brands to tap into that specific audience. For example, a fitness brand might partner with a popular fitness influencer to promote its products to a highly engaged audience of fitness enthusiasts.
Finally, social media influencer marketing is highly effective because it can generate authentic and engaging content. Some influencers (the ones you should use) are skilled at creating content that resonates with their followers, and by partnering with them, brands can leverage that creativity to create engaging and authentic content that will resonate with their target audience. User-generated content in most forms of marketing is what generates you the high spending clients. I have made fortunes for my clients by getting reviews of their products written by influential publications. It is easily the best form of traffic.
So how do you set up and launch a social media influencer marketing campaign?
First off you have to break down the exact problems your product or service solves for each target market. (If you want to see how to break down the problems you product solves please refer to my ‘Sales Funnel‘ blog post). The general strategy is to find influencers who post about the problem your product/service solves and then get them to create some user generated content round your product. This is a really brief overview as social media influencer marketing is vastly more than this but this strategy is highly effective. So first of all you need to find influencers who can connect you with your target audience.
So lets look at figure one above where I break down for key attributes that potential influencers need before you approach them.
- Relevance: How relevant is the influencer to your product? Go through the influencers posts and look at how many times they post about the problem your product solves. Golden rule here is don’t work with influencers who have built up their audience using viral content.Â
- Reach: How big are they in comparison to your market? Try to guess how big your products market is on social media in terms of users and then have a look at their reach in comparison to it. Say you have a product which helps sales people the size of the audience will be less than a product targeting the football market. So assess the reach of your influencer by market size.
- Authority: Are they actually an authority figure capable of influencing people? Have they won awards? Are they a member of industry based associations etc.
- Engagement: This is the most important attribute you need to assess when evaluating influencers. When they post on the subject that your product or service operates in how many people respond or interact with it? Go through all their posts and isolate the ones where they are talking about what you do. Have a look at the way people react to it. Do they share it? Do they like it? Now imagine your product there.
So once we have found our influencers what can we get them to do to increase our sales?
Types Of Social Media Influencer Campaigns
There are various ways you can get your influencers out generating sales for you here are some of them.
- Sponsored Posts: Probably the most common influencer campaign. This is where the influencer will create some content around your product and then you sponsor the post.
- Product Reviews and Tutorials: This is probably the most effective form of marketing of all time. People buy from product reviews. Way before social media I would get online publications to review my client’s products. This would generate thousands of buyers who trust the opinion of the publication and will then buy because of the review. Social media influencer reviews and tutorials achieve the same result.
- Brand Partnerships: This is the most expensive type of campaign and is where you take on an influencer and they only push you. It may also involve creating their own influencer product line etc.
- Social Media Takeovers: Social media platforms have a feature which will enable you to allow an influencer to ‘take over’ your channel. This means they can post (you can moderate it) and comment on the channel as though they were you. This is. great way to expose your channel to their audience.
- Influencer Events: Brands can invite influencers to exclusive events, giving them an opportunity to experience and promote the brand firsthand. It is really important that you run the events in a way to get maximum publicity from them. You need to have stuff at the event that they can live stream for instance you want to have people being interviewed on a stage or get your influencers to interview people like your product designers etc. The event needs to be created in a way that makes it easy for the influencer to generate content for their channel.
So now you have your influencers and you have set up campaigns how do you start getting them to make sales?
You really have to understand the sales process. Sending a lead straight to a sales page will probably not create a sale if your product has a long engagement period. This is the bit where most people fail. Think about this :
Why does it take longer to buy a new jacket as opposed to buying a car?
If you aren’t that fussy, you could probably pick up a new jacket in a few hours if you live near a decent shopping centre or go online. However you probably couldn’t buy a car in the same time. The purchase of a car is not a simple one. It carries long term responsibility so therefore the level of engagement between you as the buyer and the seller is a lot more protracted. The car sales person knows that when you go in you probably won\t buy on the first visit but will require 2 maybe 3 trips to secure the purchase.
So the sales strategy for both of these products is different. Typically a car salesperson will take your details the moment you walk in where as if an assistant in a clothing shop asked you for your details before serving you then you would probably walk about. You also need to be aware of the 80/20 rule of active buyers. At any given time only 20% of your market are willing to purchase. Even though the other 80% are interested and may have the money etc they just don’t want to buy there and then. So with this in mind when creating your social media influencer sales funnels make sure you grab their email and then try to sell to them over a time period as opposed to just trying to sell and hoping they will buy. You can do this by getting your influencers to push opting into a newsletter which gives 10% off coupon or even better a life show with the influencers talking about your product and people have to opt in to see it. Another amazing and probably the best method for generating sales via influencers is to run events where you get your influencers to come down and review your products live. You then make it so that the public have to opt in via their email to watch the event. The results I have had setting this up for companies have been legendary.
If you need any help setting up social media influencer marketing campaigns then I offer a free 6 day coaching course where I teach you pretty much everything about social media marketing as well as influencer marketing. This is a free online course that you can do from home. Just check out the details below.
FREE 6 DAY SOCIAL MEDIA SALES COURSE!
Would you like to do a FREE 6 Day course on how to generate leads and convert them into sales on social media?
The course consists of :
- The structure of a sale – It is really important that you understand how a sale is constructed and the components required to convert a lead into a buyer.
- Setting up a lead generation machine – Leads are the petrol in the engine of a sales system.Time to get your lead generation booming!
- Closing sales – If you can’t close you won’t get anywhere. Here I show you how to become a God at closing!
- Social Media Strategy – Most people fail on social media as they don’t have strategy that works. Lets get you capable of creating amazing social media sales strategies for your business!
I would love to have you join us doing this. I have taken thousands of people through the course and they have had amazing results. It is free so just CLICK HERE to join!
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