How to Tap Into Influencer Marketing Opportunities

Influencer marketing, or influence marketing, is not a recent practice or a novel concept. Influencer marketing is about focusing your marketing message through specific individuals who have influence over a key market segment you’re looking to target. According to the Houston Chronicle, influencer marketing’s been attracting more attention of late due to the rise of social media networks and the subsequent wider spread of word-of-mouth recommendations.

In traditional marketing models, marketers would focus most of their efforts on formulating and promoting mass media campaigns. Today, those models have radically changed, as you need to go beyond a sales pitch and tap into targeted audiences, efforts which can be greatly helped by tapping into an influencers credibility within communities they belong to. Influencers are not specific to a particular profession or an industry. They can be market experts, bloggers, analysts, editors, journalists, marketers, community managers and others. But what they all have in common is that they have a strong presence and are highly attuned to their audience´s needs and preferences.

Here are six tips to put into practice when appealing to an influencer:

• Link to Influencers content
• Prove the influencer´s methods and tactics are effective
• Quote them when appropriate
• Add an additional tip to their published work
• Pitch a collaborative project

Influencers work hard to maintain their personal, so taking the time to approach them in a measured and mutually beneficial way is the most effective approach. If you can form a relationship this away, it’ll give you a firm footing from which to establish strong bonds with the influencer, and thus, better translation into their respective communities.

INFLUENTIAL MARKETING PLATFORMS AND TOOLS FOR YOUR BUSINESS ARSENAL

Influencer marketing has become a new frontier thanks to the exponential growth and explosion of social media networks. The key benefit, without a doubt, is that it enables a brand to better authenticate and humanize their communications. But in order for your influencer campaign to be truly effective, you first need to locate the right influencers to contact. Here’s a list of applications to get you started locating the right influencers for outreach.

Tracckr offers an influencer analytics suite that supports influencer marketing strategies based on three parameters – reach, relevance and resonance.

Founded in 2012, Mavrck helps brands identify and activate their most influential customers at scale. The platform includes analysis and influencer segmentation tools.

Zoomph can pinpoint contextually relevant social media trends and moments in real-time. The platform´s wide services are divided into collection, analysis and visualization, powering over 17,000 digital properties.

CASE STUDIES AND EXAMPLES OF INFLUENCER MARKETING

If you’re still uncertain about where to start with influencer marketing, there’s an abundance of case studies and examples available to give you a better grasp the process.

Mobile-first influencer platform Influential has helped implement many influencer strategies, and have several case-studies available on their website, including:

1. United Nations social awareness campaign #ForgiveForpeace for International Day of Peace, Sept. 21, 2015.
   1. The result was over 1.5 billion impressions with 500 million+ reach, trending on witter in 14 countries.
2. Movie studio seeking to boost awareness for the film ‘Hot Tub Time Machine 2’.
   1. Through the activation of Influential´s influencers, mentions of the film spiked, reaching 59, 966, 772 unique impressions and 96, 383, 550 gross impressions.
3. Badoo, the dating-focused social networking service, ran a campaign to create a “SuperVine”, with an aim to boost coverage by making it the the most looped branded Vine in history.
   1. The SuperVine received massive coverage and reached over 20 million loops.

Are there any other examples of influencer marketing? The answer is yes. Marketing-schools.org provides four examples looking at the following influencer campaigns:

• Redwook Creek Wine
• La Cense Beef
• Barilla Pasta
• General Motors

TAKEAWAYS

Influential marketing works, and studying these success stories can provide you with the framework to formulate your own influencer campaign. Take the necessary time to understand the audience, the social networks you’re looking to reach them on and to understand the framework behind what makes an influencer campaign successful.

It takes time to develop relationships with influencers, but be mindful that a partnership with an influencer is a two-way street and keep everything as transparent as possible when drafting work related projects and you’ll be on our way to maximizing your success.

[Source:- Socialmediatoday]