Influencer marketing seems straightforward. At its most basic, you hire an influencer — someone online who’s considered an expert to their audience — to talk about your products or services. But while this definition is simple, you’ve got lots of options when it comes to how you use influencer marketing to your benefit. These are four neat ways business owners can use influencer marketing to get more attention for their enterprises.
Build Business Relationships
One of the most interesting and indirect ways to use influencer marketing is to build business relationships with the influencer you approach as well as other influencers and companies in your industry. This approach can also help you in developing relationships with people and businesses outside of your perceived markets who might have a need to work with you.
When you sit down to create a marketing campaign alongside an influencer, don’t just think about the short-term increase in traffic and the potential to get new customers. Also think about secondary, long-term benefits, such as making new business connections and continuing the conversation about your products and services to generate more word-of-mouth attention.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Influencer marketing adds credibility to a brand and can go a long way in expanding brand awareness. This is true however you use it. Even if your brand isn’t the exact center of attention, when an influencer talks about your business, your enterprise will get some attention. But you don’t have to settle for having other people talk about your products and services indirectly. Influencer marketing doubles as word-of-mouth marketing that you can feature prominently on your web pages.
There are many ways to do this. For example, you can create a promotional video where you talk about what your business does and feature reviews and quotes from influencers you’ve worked with. Or, you can highlight results and recommendations from others in eBooks, on your own blogs, in social media campaigns, or in any other type of content that you create.
Blogs
Influencer marketing works for both long- and short-form content, which is perfect for blogs of essentially any length. An influencer can write blogs to review your products or mention your business and its services, or you can write your own blogs and reference the influencer’s work. This kind of mutual benefit is a fantastic way to forge long-term relationships with influencers.
Social Media Campaigns
Whether your influencers are producing blogs, videos, or some other type of content, consider incorporating their work into your own social media pages. You can simply link to the influencer’s content from your accounts, or you can outline a campaign to run in tandem with the material the influencer produces for you. It’s also a good practice to engage with users who comment on the influencer’s content. This type of engagement on social media is a fantastic way to humanize your brand and get readers to associate your company with things like responsiveness and support.
There’s no denying the effect of a successful influencer marketing campaign, and the great thing is that business owners have many ways to use this type of advertising. If influencer marketing is something you’re interested in for your business, make sure you consider all the different ways you can use it to achieve the results you’re after.
