Influencer marketing can be such a pivotal tool for your business and it’s a great way in 2020 to increase your sales. Brands and businesses use influencers to promote their products to their audiences via social media. The content created is sometimes fully created by the influencer or is co-created by the brand.
Have you thought about adding influencer marketing to your sales strategy?
Research your influencers
Whatever category or niche that your product comes into, you need to find influencers who are big in that sector. You’ll be able to find out about them through social media and also through Google searches. It is always handy to find any influencers who may have already mentioned your product or brand before, in a non advertorial or paid way as they already love it.
Have a look through previous ads that the influencer has done and see if it fits with your style. Look at their whole content feed and make sure everything aligns well with your overall message of your brand too.
Look into the numbers last as the content provided will always be the major point here. Yes, engagement and number of followers are important but don’t just focus on these and then harm your marketing while not focusing on the above.
Start working with influencers
When you have got your list together, you need to start reaching out and talking to them. You may want to do this by email as you can do a more detailed written introduction about your brand. Or if you are already quite big on social media, especially instagram, you might want to reach out to influencers through that as they will be able to immediately see your profile.
Share as much as you can with them about your brand and your values so that they understand the tone of the partnership that you want to have. Let them know what you want from them, is it an event or maybe a review. Give them as much information as possible.
They will want monetary compensation for this work so that must be fair for all parties. Always remember there is the possibility that you will want this relationship to work out in the long term too.
Time to review
For me as a consumer I love seeing reviews online and especially by those I follow on social media. I have seen some awful reviews though just to note that you really should watch how they’ve previously reviewed products before and make sure that they are being thorough. Bad reviews will work against you and could turn your sales the other way!
There is so much interest with unboxing videos on YouTube for example, this can be a great way for viewers and potential customers get to see your product for the first time. Encouraging giveaways is a great way for influencers to help bring social media engagement and they can also tag their friends to enter too!
Get creative
Depending on your product and your business values you will want the influencer to put in their own creativity to the content. Anything that looks different to their usual content will turn their audience off, your initial research will have made sure you are picking the right people. So they will create content different from product reviews too, maybe it’s an app for kids and they will have a video of the basic instructions of the game and how they are playing it as a family. Let them be their creative selves and you and your sales will benefit.
Testimonials
A lot of product websites have testimonials from reviews featured on their site. Well-known influencers talking about your product can be highly influential to potential customers. If they see their favourite influencer recommending your product in the testimonials they are more likely to trust them and then you.
Discount codes
I am always on the lookout for special offers and discounts and I often screenshot many that influencers share of my favourite products. Some offer custom URL’s too, which is a great way of tracking how well an influencer has done to create content that is really ‘clickable’. It’s a great resource for you to look back at for future work partnerships with them.
As ever if you display good communication skills with your influencers with a clear brief, the sales possibilities are endless here.