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What Are the Top 5 Tips for Implementing Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing
What Are the Top 5 Tips for Implementing Influencer Marketing?

If you run a business with an online presence, you may be wondering what is the best way to use influencer marketing. Taking a closer look at influencer marketing statistics provides some insight. According to Inmar Intelligence, raising brand awareness was the top objective of 86% of brands in 2019. The other most popular goals were reaching new or targeted audiences, improving brand advocacy, and increasing sales conversions. 

Does Influencer Marketing Work?

Leveraging an influencer marketing strategy effectively promises to boost earnings. According to Neal Schaffer, businesses make $5.20 for every $1 Spent on influencer marketing, on average. But what are the characteristics of a good influencer? 

Top 5 Tips for Implementing Influencer Marketing

Hiring influencers may be mission-critical to your business for building trust, brand awareness, engagement, and ROI. Here are some tips to help your business tackle influencer marketing.

Tip 1: Influencer Niche

Your brand’s niche should have some overlap with your chosen influencer’s niche. This ensures that your brand will be appealing to the influencer’s audience. The desired result is to broaden your audience to include some of theirs. Some of their followers will follow your brand, engage with your content, and hopefully build enough trust to spend their money with you, resulting in solid KPIs. 

What are KPIs in influencer marketing? These are the key performance indicators that your brand will focus on, such as the number of followers, website traffic, or ROI.

Some top influencer categories include fashion, luxury, beauty, fitness, food, animals, gaming, and parenting.

Here are some examples of influencer niches supporting a brand’s content.

  • Sell niche products for homeschool parents? A credible homeschool education influencer would be a perfect pairing.
  • Sell beauty products? An influencer known for their impeccable makeup could be ideal.
  • Does your brand promote iconic clothing? Choose a style icon as an influencer.
  • Do you share animal content? Use a known animal influencer such as Ben from the Urban Rescue Ranch or a trusted veterinarian that can answer your audience’s animal health questions.

Tip 2: The Influencer Should Add Value to Your Community

Influencer content needs to add value, answer questions, solve pain points, educate, and/or entertain your audience. 

For example, if you have a natural baby food brand, your audience is likely concerned with the health and development of their child. A child development expert can endorse your product while teaching the audience about best practices for feeding their babies. Parents receive new tips and an added context for why your product provides a solution to their concerns.

Here is another example. If you have a food blog, working with an influencer chef to provide recipes adds value because your audience is entertained and learns a new recipe while they learn about your product. They are encouraged to watch the content, share your link, try the recipe, and add a comment, all of which provide added engagement and social proofing. 

Tip 3: Backlinking Strategy From a Trusted Site Boosts Your SEO Rankings

If the influencer you work with has a trusted brand with solid SEO rankings, links from their content to yours will improve your site’s rankings. 

Tip 4: Check Their Followers

Because of evolving privacy laws, it is harder to track and retarget audiences than ever before in online marketing. That is why checking the kinds of followers an influencer has to ensure they are reaching your target audience is so important. Before investing in an influencer, ensure their followers make sense to your brand. For example, you may be a food blogger considering a guest chef for your content. If you check the chef’s followers and see that they are mostly older than your target demographic, you should keep looking to find an influencer more aligned with your target audience.

Tip 5: Consider the Type of Influencer to Hire

There are 4 main types of influencer by follower count: 

  • Nano-influencers reach between 1-10 thousand followers
  • Micro-influencers reach between 10 and 100 thousand followers
  • Macro-influencers reach between 100 thousand and 1 million followers
  • Mega-influencers or celebrities reach more than 1 million followers

So how do you choose which type of influencer to hire? This will depend on your budget, goals, and audience size. The vast majority of influencer marketing is done with Micro-influencers. This is because they offer a great combination of value and follower loyalty, which is attractive to small and mid sized brands alike.

Which Social Platforms Are Brands Using?

Business Insider shared that in 2021, brands intended to do their influencer marketing on various social media platforms such as: Instagram (93%) followed by Instagram stories(83%), TikTok(68%), and Facebook(68%). Despite those numbers, if you have a large following elsewhere, you may want to do your influencer marketing there, where your audience is likely to be. For example, if you are a YouTuber, your audience will be on YouTube already, so Instagram may not be your best choice.

How Lionize AI Can Help

Lionize AI’s influencer marketing software makes the social media influencer marketing process easier for both brands and influencers alike. We match brands with niche influencers to help get products and services in front of the right audiences quickly. Whether you’re an influencer looking to partner with high-quality brands or a brand looking for influencers in your niche, we can help. Contact us today. We are happy to answer any questions you may have.