Introduction
Influencer marketing is a strategy used by companies to advertise their goods and services by collaborating with well-known social media influencers or bloggers. Brands can use influencers’ typically sizable, engaged audiences to increase their credibility and even boost sales. Read on to know more about it.
Who is an influencer?
An influencer is a person who uses social media to wield their influence. They are people who have developed a reputation for being knowledgeable and skilled about a particular subject. They frequently post about that subject on their preferred social media platforms, building sizable followings of fervent, active followers who closely follow their opinions. Brands adore social media influencers because they can start trends and motivate their followers to purchase the products they advertise.
Influencer Marketing- its definition and campaign types
Influencer Marketing is a type of marketing that involves working with individuals who are active on social media, and other content producers who have influence over various-sized audiences. The influencer’s community may be chosen for brand promotion as part of this partnership, which typically entails some form of co-content development.
With the passage of time, Influencer Marketing is becoming a widely used strategy for online promotion. It combines traditional and modern marketing strategies and transforms the concept of celebrity endorsement into a content-driven marketing campaign for the contemporary era.
Through Influencer Marketing, a brand works with an influencer to promote one of its products or services. However, some partnerships between brands and influencers in this type of marketing are less concrete than that, and they merely aim to raise brand recognition.
To proceed with Influencer Marketing, it’s crucial to plan out a campaign beforehand so that it helps in driving sales and pulls more traffic toward a brand. Hence, to help you out with the same, we have compiled a list of eight types of Influencer Marketing that have proved themselves to be effective from time to time.
- Host Giveaways
Giveaway campaigns are hugely popular and offer a lot of growth that is assured in the form of social media actions like following, liking, sharing, retweeting, and commenting. As a result of the influencer content’s high level of originality, this also has a lot of plainly visible advantages like increased brand awareness. Running a giveaway campaign is very easy. The influencer simply asks the audience to do things like enter their email addresses, like a post, comment on a post, and answer some questions in a contest. After the contest is over, the winner is chosen, and the winning prize is announced.
- Social Media Takeover
Influencer marketing techniques like social media takeover are employed to broaden brand awareness and provide audiences with engaging content. It is like handing over the controls and letting an influencer manage your brand’s social media promotion. With the support of influencers who include interactive elements like contests, Q&A sessions, selfie sharing, etc. to further engage followers, brands use social media takeover to advertise events.
- Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a strategy that uses partners to promote products. A percentage of every sale made because of the influencer’s content and influence is paid to them as a commission. This approach helps both sides since you make a transaction, and the affiliate is compensated for bringing in the customer. Here, you can draw affiliate community influencers and ask them for help promoting your product.
- Sponsored Social Media Content
When you have top-notch material that is prepared for distribution, it may get lost amidst all the noise on social media. Therefore, it makes sense to collaborate with influencers who can create and disseminate social media content. As a part of it, the influencer must produce and publish content on their social media pages to promote their brand and receive payment or be provided with a free or heavily discounted product in exchange.
- Gifts
Another type of influencer marketing involves sending products to an influencer in the hopes of receiving free publicity. This practice is referred to as product seeding. It is a chance for your brand to get a review on social media, which if positive, can attract people toward your product. Additionally, by giving your influencers a product link or a discount code that they can use to advertise your product, you can boost sales.
- Sponsored Blog Posts
Blogs are proving to be one of the most reliable information sources available online. As a result, companies are turning to influencer bloggers to benefit from the audiences’ confidence. Here, you may pay the bloggers to write a blog post about you. A sponsored blog might be of two different types. One that is solely focused on your brand and discusses your products and services. The second option is to request that the sponsored blogger promote your business in articles that cover related goods and services. In both cases, an influencer is used to write about your business and raise awareness of your goods.
- Guest Blogging
By working with influencers who are also bloggers and accepting guest posts on sites in your niche, guest blogging can be a very efficient approach to marketing your brand. Increasing your visibility, it raises brand awareness. The guest blogger is more likely to share your piece with his network, which promotes your brand and brings traffic to the blog post, increasing your authority and credibility and exposing your brand to possible new followers and customers.
- Brand Ambassador Programs
An influencer who frequently shares material for a brand is called a brand ambassador. They typically have long-term relationships with the brand. The duration could range from a few months to a year or more. Brand ambassadors serve as the “face” of a company, and actively post and promote brands’ images, tweets, videos, and articles through their social media platforms, just like celebrity spokespeople do in conventional marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is based on the idea that by interacting with influencers on social media, they will spread the word about your brand to a wider audience by sharing it with their extremely powerful networks. It is simpler for marketers to reach their audience by providing content through influencers whose opinions and input are highly valued by the audience because they already have a sizable fan base at their disposal.