Influencer marketing was a big hit in 2017. Numerous brands flocked to social media influencers to get word out about their brand and to reach a targeted audience. It’s no surprise that this trend is going to stop anytime soon.
This article covers a variety of articles will give you influencer marketing tips you can’t afford to ignore.
FTC Guidelines for Influencer Marketing
In 2017, the FTC put their foot down regarding full disclosure on influencer partnerships. Influencers can no longer create a piece of content, whether that be on Youtube, Instagram or some other social media channel and proceed to promote it without disclosing the partnership they have with a brand.
As an organization seeking to get its brand out there you need to make sure that you don’t find yourself in the crosshairs of the FTC. Go over the FTC recommendations before getting into any partnerships with influencers.
Social Channels To Sell Your Brand On
Unfortunately, when it comes to influencer marketing most brands only partner with Instagram influencers and forget about every other social media channel that’s out there. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with marketing your brand on Instagram, especially because one survey found that a majority of influencers are found on the platform.
However, you need to remember that there other social media channels where you can engage with your target audience. In fact, when you think about it, it would be much cheaper to partner with an influencer on one of the other social media channels.
Imagine this, you have a social media influencer who’s value on Instagram is perceived to be very high due to the number of followers they have as well as their level of engagement with their followers. Many brands would like to work with this influencer and the demand would raise the price of a partnership exponentially.
However, the same social media personality might be on other social media channels as well where they’re aren’t in such a high demand. You can reach out to these influencers and try to negotiate a lower price for their partnership on their other social media channels.
Influencer Marketing Tools
How do you track down influencers in your niche? Do you do it the old fashioned way? Search a term on Google and throw in “influencer” at the end, proceed to scour the results for contact information.
If this is how you go about finding influencers for your brand then you need to up your game to the next level because chances are all your competition is doing it differently.
There are numerous tools out there that will help you track down influencers in your niche by providing you with useful metrics such as the number of followers they have. In fact, this is exactly what Buzzstream’s Discover tool does.
However, there are other tools that will show you the level of engagement a social media influencer has for instance TapInfluence. This is a social media influencer marketplace that provides a space for brands and influencers to collaborate.
Another marketing tool you might want to take a look at is Upfluence. Upfluence is different from TapInfluence in the sense that not only does it allow you to discover influencers in your niche, but the team at Upfluence help you craft a marketing strategy to amplify your brand.
Finally, Upfluence will help you create a content marketing strategy.
Measure Your ROI In Influencer Marketing
Just like you invest a lot of time and resources in getting the right tools so that you end up with the right strategy in place and that you reach your target audience, you need to spend an equal amount of time and resources to track your influencer marketing.
Even though it might seem hard to track how much business influencer mentions are bringing in, it is not impossible. One of the ways to get started is by using UTM parameters.
UTM is an acronym that stands for Urchin Tracking Module. I know, that sounds like one big word. All you need to know though is that it’s simply a tracking device that’s designed to let you know what social media channel your audience came from based on a number of factors including the platform (Twitter, Facebook etc), medium (the type of traffic that got them there in the first place), campaign (the specific campaign that got them to your website).
It actually involves a bit of coding. If you’d like to know how to implement UTM tracking. Check out this article here.
If you find UTM tracking to hard to implement, you could always give influencers your partnering with promo codes which they could then share with their audience.
Alternatively, if you’re trying to create awareness and not necessarily selling a product or service you might want to create a branded hashtag which you could then track to see how wide its reach is.
Content Is Still King Even In Influencer Marketing
You need to create compelling content that’s useful for the target market. Having an influencer promote your product by taking a selfie with it in the background just doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to create content that promotes your product or service while not looking like an ad.
Your content should be engineered to evoke some level of emotion while at the same time educating and entertaining the audience. This is how the big brands do it and you need to get with the program or else you’ll be left behind.
Take Advantage of The Multitude of Social Media Influencers
Not too long ago “social media influencer” was a buzzword. But how times have changed. Today, becoming a social media influencer is something that people actually aspire to become. It has turned into a career.
Over the past couple of years there has been a spike in interest and the number of people who want to become social media influencers has grown drastically. This isn’t about to change any time soon.
So, what’s my point. You should go ahead and take advantage of this flooded market and use it to your brand’s advantage. We all know how hard and expensive it can be to have a top tier influencer partner with your brand especially if it’s a smaller brand.
Well, why not go ahead and deal with smaller influencers. Even though they might not have tens of thousands of followers perhaps they’re experts in their field and usually create content that goes viral for that exact reason.
YouTube Influencers
Due to low ROI many brands have been forced to pull their ads from YouTube which in turn saw content creators on the popular video platform drop by as much as 50%.
As marketers we all can agree that promoting a product or service out of context is not good business which is why many brands pulled their ads from YouTube. However, this doesn’t mean that YouTube is no longer a good idea for promoting your brand.
According to a survey conducted by Google as many as 70% of teenagers relate more to YouTube content creators than they do mainstream celebrities. This is a testament to the wide reach of content creators on YT.
So, why not partner with them and create content that resonates with their audience. It could be a review or a tutorial that breaks down how to use your product.
Influencer marketing will no doubt continue to grow in 2018 and beyond. Now is the time to establish a solid social media marketing strategy.
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