What is an Influencer?
Influencers are individuals who have the ability to sell and promote a brand, product or service. Influencers are present within all interest types, with followers that have similar values and interests to the influencer. The power of influencers continues to grow.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer Marketing is a way to promote your business through influencers. Working with an Influencer gives a brand exposure to the influencers social following. 93% of marketers are now using influencer marketing as part of their marketing strategy. Source: Key Influencer Marketing Statistics You Need to Know for 2022 (influencermarketinghub.com)
The Importance of Choosing the Right Influencers
We have shown that when using influencers, the influencer’s followers are targeted. Therefore you need to choose influencers whose followers mirror your target market. This will ensure that your message will resonate better with their followers and as a result increase the likelihood of interaction.
Not only do their followers need to mirror your target audience, their followers need to be active, and engage with the influencer.
How to Amplify Influencer Marketing?
Before you can amplify your influencer marketing you need to ensure that you are receiving all notification of mentions of your brand. Facebook’s business suite allows you to monitor mentions of your brand from your mobile and desktop.
You should use the key available channels to ensure that you monopolise all halo activity generated to ensure the best possible results. Working with a PR specialist, Green Opal recently used influencer marketing to launch a new brand for Homefield Grange Retreat – Homefield Grange at Home.
Homefield Grange Retreat ran by owner Suzanne Peck, is a luxury boutique detox and weight loss retreat, and the team has run a very successful retreat for over 17 years. As a result of lock down, the team wanted to bring their very successful programme to clients in their homes.
The team understood their target market, and this allowed them to work with the PR team to identify appropriate influencers to work with, those influencers whose followers represented the target market.
This is how we amplified influencer marketing…
Owned Social Media
Owned social media, is social media that a company owns but has paid for. It is the most important resource to use to increase the impact of your influencer marketing. It’s simple and effective. Follow, like, comment , share and repurpose.
Follow – Make sure you are following your influencers from all social media channels. Take a look at some of their followers. Are there any that you think are relevant to your brand that you would like to follow? Following them increases the likelihood that they will follow you back. The likelihood of being followed back increases if you are relevant to their followers. If you have chosen the most relevant influencers to your proposition the better your results will be.
Like – Ensure that you like all posts around your brand
Comment – Take time to comment on posts
Share – When the influencer has mentioned your product, make sure to share it on your social media.
Repurpose – Where the influencer has mentioned your product, you can repurpose the content for your site, through marketing channels and your social media. Don’t forget to mention the influencer on your post.
By interacting with the influencers your product will achieve additional coverage on their social media, will be seen as an engaged brand by the followers, and provide additional reach for the influencers brand.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
It is important to get the foundations of your SEO in order prior to the campaign starting so that the pages are visible in time for your campaign launch. Prior to the campaign launch don’t forget to go into incognito and review your search results.
Onsite
Once a user has got to your site, you need to make sure that it is as easy as possible for a user to find what they are looking for.
Sites Internal Search
The internal search is one of the easiest and quickest ways for a user to find what they are looking for on your site, because when it is offered 30%(https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/best-practices-for-search/ ) of users will use a search box.
If you have a search box on your website, check the search results for your site, to ascertain if they could be improved, and whether the product or service is accessible via your internal search.
Homepage Presence
Up to 60% of your visitors will arrive on your homepage, so make sure that when a user hits your homepage they can see what has been promoted by the Influencer. Don’t forget your top landing pages, and what can be done there to ensure that offering is visible.
Fresh Content Ideas
Take a look at the influencers content, to discover what could be repurposed to use on site, and if they have taken a lovely photo or left a review. Add it to your site, as not only does it give you fresh content but also an element of social proof on the site. This can be included in your email campaigns too. Don’t forget to source the Influencer.
Communication
In order for this campaign to work there needs to be communication across all of the relevant internal and external team members. For this project Green Opal worked with specialists in their field for PR and Search engine marketing as well as a number of internal team members.
Another key element of communications is to ensure that you respond to mentions in a timely manner.
By engaging with your influencers and their audience you will increase the reach of your influencer campaign as well as create fresh content for you to use within your marketing campaigns.
If you have any questions about this article or want to discuss how you can amplify your influencer marketing then please get in touch.
Shout out to the all of the teams involved – Zoe, Phil, Green Opal and Homefield Grange