Every brand has the enthusiasm to stay on top of its quality, both product, and service. They also want to provide top-notch customer service as that’s the key to retain the customers. But this is old news. Because now, brands want to be on top of their social media game too. If you are a brand or a business owner, you would agree.  

Staying on top of trends, being quick with keeping up with the (no, not Kardashians) internet moments, marketing trends, knowing what is up on the digital platforms is what you must do if you want to survive the cut-throat competition on the internet and social media to be specific. While we speak of marketing trends, there’s no way we can move past without stating the stir that influencer marketing has created in the business world. It has become a mandatory marketing mantra. Let’s briefly get into what exactly is influencer marketing and why does every brand wants to implement it.

What is influencer marketing?

To put it briefly, influencer marketing is a social media marketing strategy that involves key leaders, otherwise known as influencers that promote a brand, its product, or service. In layman language, the people who are popular on social media for their work and their content, promote the brand, giving insight about it to their followers. While the popular notion states that anybody who is famous on social media can be an influencer, it is not true. 

An influencer is an expert in its field, has knowledge about it, and passes it on to followers who are also interested in the same field. The new wave of influencer marketing has also given birth to a lot of content creators who have gained popularity and followers by creating entertaining, engaging, and relatable content. 

To be an influencer what it takes is common over impacting a group of people’s purchasing power. At least this is what you as a brand must look out for. However, there are no boundaries to this as it keeps evolving each day and you never know what may work for you. 

Why do brands use influencer marketing?

Now we are at a stage where digital platforms are at the center of every activity and the transparency is more than before. Trust, connectivity, bonding hold a place not in personal lives but in digital lives too. And this is what each brand wants to build with their customer- build an online network, a social media community. 

While they can do it all by themselves but having an influencer on board for that will create a bigger impact. As mentioned before, they have the power to influence people’s purchasing behaviour and that does not mean they have to persuade their followers into or portray any lies. Their content speaks for themselves and their personality which has given them a lot of love and support from their followers. And when a brand associates with such individuals, they eventually leave a mark on the minds of the influencers’ followers. 

But there are a bunch of hurdles that a brand faces in influencer marketing and one of them is how to find the influencers. Brands have knowledge about influencer marketing, but there are other aspects that they must know but are often unaware of. If you as a brand ever thought to yourself, “How do I find influencers?” Then here’s a quick guide to get you started. 

1. Know your goals

Your goals are the fundamentals of your marketing strategy, any marketing strategy. The purpose of your marketing can vary like it could be for the launch of a new product, update on discounts, sale or anything else. Since the purpose varies the goals might vary too. Generally, your goals can be to increase traffic, followers, impressions, clicks, views, likes, shares. It could be anything as long as it leads to an increase in sales. 

Knowing your metrics helps you to get direction and plan the way forward. However, you must try to not keep your goals vague and set measurable goals. For instance, if you are just starting your social media and you want people to know where they can find you, your goal can be to achieve 500 followers in the first few weeks. Now that you have set yourself a number to achieve within a certain period of time, your upcoming strategy will follow the same format and everything will align systematically. Influencer marketing has a lot of aspects to look at. Hence, you must try to simplify it as much as you can. Another way to simplify the whole process is to work with influencer marketing agencies. They can help you with end-to-end services. 

2. Decide your campaign

There are different kinds of campaigns that you can run, on different social media platforms. You can run paid ads, do sponsor posts, affiliate marketing campaigns, giveaway contests, or anything that is feasible for you. Your campaign depends on the goals that you wish to achieve and the platforms you choose. However, it is not the sole factor as your budget too plays an important role in this. Irrespective of the fact that you are a small business or an established one, budget is crucial for every brand and for the marketing too. Once that part is clear, you can start looking for types of influencers that can fit your budget. There could be instances like you are a new brand or you have a new campaign that you want to test without spending a lot of money on it and going all out, you can look for nano influencers or micro-influencers. 

3. Do your research

When the fundamentals are clear, here comes the part where you start your influencer hunting. This involves a lot of research work. To state the obvious, you would want to collaborate with an influencer who has the same niche as you. When you find that, you must run a background check to understand their past work. Go through their platforms, pages, websites, or even have conversations with them to understand their core values and work ethics. The research does not stop there because you have to understand their audience too. This will help you understand if that influencer caters to the same audience that you are targeting or not. 

If your niche is very narrow, for instance, you are a vegan brand looking to promote your product through influencers, you must be sure that the influencers are vegan too. You cannot have them promote your product just because they have a large number of followers. This you can find out by understanding their profile, the kind of lifestyle they lead, and to understand if their followers are your target audience, you can go through their comments to know what their audience thinks. Speaking for a vegan brand, you would also want to figure out if you want to target an audience that is already vegan or an audience who is looking to make that shift. For products and services like these, where the shift in lifestyle is the essence, is where influence is required. 

4. Focus on the rate of engagement

As said before and something that we will keep prompting is that, do not get carried away by just the number of followers. There are instances where influencers have bought followers and these accounts are not even active. You definitely do not want an inactive audience and hence, the rate of engagement will tell you how effective your collaboration can be. To know that, again, you have to do heavy research. You have to go through a lot of profiles, platforms, comment sections, reposts, old content and so much more. Because without understanding the journey of the influencer and how their audience has grown with them, it could be very difficult to find an influencer suitable for your campaign. 

5. Use influencer marketing platforms

Influencer marketing can be a real hustle if you are trying to carry out the entire strategy by yourself. And as much as interesting and a learning curve it would be, you might not have the time and energy for it. That’s okay because you can always work with influencer marketing platforms. These platforms give you customized services. You can look up for influencers on it, approach them for your campaign or even just take consultancy from them. They can help you program an end-to-end influencer marketing strategy as per your requirement. 

Their expertise and a big database of influencers can really come in handy for you. It not only saves you time but the quality of work you receive is commendable and timely. At WORD, we function on this core policy. Our onboard influencers, the brands we have worked with and the campaigns that we have brought to life follow a thorough procedure and are built on the teamwork of industrial experts. After all, that’s the only way we can manage to bring the best to the table. 

If you ever planned on getting started with your journey of influencer marketing, do not waste a single minute on doubting its potential. It’s a marketing strategy that covers all your requirements that as a digital brand you may require. Your audience is here and the people they follow are here too, on social media and other digital platforms. Influencer marketing is the best way to reach them and grow your brand further.