A Novice Guide To Influencer Marketing - Web-Feet Blog

As social media has evolved to become a near dominate frontier it’s become clearer to brands that word of mouth marketing has a lot to offer in terms of “advertising”.

When people recommend a product or service to their friends, it carries 100x more weight than any banner ad does these days. In fact, we’re all suffering from banner blindness and it’s safe to say that as an advertising model on any platform, web or mobile, it’s now the least effective. Anyway, let’s get stuck and read up on A Novice’s Guide To Influencer Marketing.

But who needs banners when you have people? Identifying influencers on social media and paying for product endorsements is a powerful way of advertising and the future, to some extent anyway. There are plenty of influencers out there to choose from too, on just about every social platform and some of these people who may have over 1m followers can command rates running into the 1000s each day.

These people develop trust with their followers, trust is the best advertisement there is, would you look into a product that your friends dislike or would you buy one they praise?

It is such a new form of marketing though that many businesses are yet to realise its worth. For those that do, it can also be difficult to know what the going rate is – do you pay $100 or more for a single tweet, or is this too much? The best way to work out how much to pay an influencer comes down to a simple equation.

Influence = Audience Reach (# of followers) x Brand Affinity (expertise and credibility) x Strength of Relationship with Followers

How to Use Influencer Marketing

Brands are mentioned daily a total of around 3.3m+ times and these mentions are highly effective. This is because an influencer or anyone on a person’s friends list is more trusted than a logo attempting to sell to yourself. Whilst a lot of everyday advertising goes over most people’s heads, word of mouth influence carries the trust and creative marketing you need, friends know what each other likes so use that to advantage, you can only assume.

So how do you get started?

1. Identity is key for influencers in your niche – you can do this using tools such as Followerwonk for Twitter or Buzzsumo. It’s essential that you look at the kinds of followers they have too.
2. Build your own social following – don’t think that an influencer will be able to do all of the work for you on social. Join all of the major platforms and work to get your followers up and engaged. Do put the work in, in order to use social you have to get social and whilst there’s nothing wrong with using scheduling software for posts, you should take the time to share others’ content as well as reply to tweets/posts/questions personally.
3. Build relationships – unless the influence states clearly that this is a service that they provide, you should build relationships with them before asking them to endorse a product. An email outlining who you are and what you do should suffice.
4. Share content with them – don’t be afraid to tag influencers in your content posts and ask what they think, the worst that they can do is ignore you.

Transparency

Some places have rules forcing influencers to be transparent about the brands that they work with to promote. This may or may not apply in your part of the world but it’s still likely that you’ll come across influencers who want to make it very clear that they are being paid for promoting your brand. You too should be transparent when it comes to your brand. An influencer who is endorsing your products is not going to be best pleased if you stretch the truth or use lies and gimmicks to market your products as it reflects on them.

Consumers are no longer trusting of brands and they are even less so of ads, so it pays to be upfront and to ensure that you market yourself as a brand that’s ethical and transparent.

The Future

It’s likely that we’ll see influencer marketing take off on an even bigger scale that it’s reached now. Whilst currently, the majority of word of mouth marketing takes place offline and in person, the use of social is on the rise and it’s moving quickly. Email is the next most effective method at 51% but it still trails behind sharing information in person which happens 80% of the time. Social media currently stands at 39% but can be expected to close the gap quickly as more and more brands catch on.

Consider also:

• 40% of young adults are “WOM Champions”
• Almost 3 in 4 young people think it’s acceptable for brands to communicate via social media (And prefer it)

So whilst a lot of brands may discount the youth market, often these are the people who are the most receptive to WOM marketing. Add to this that many young people are already making money through successful YouTube and other social channels, and it would be silly to ignore the market whatever business you’re in – although clearly if you sell stairlifts then it would be taking it way too far outside of your target market.

Brands pay a lot out for advertising and when it comes to word of mouth marketing, it shouldn’t be approached any differently. Yes, you may hit lucky and get on the radar of influencers who will tweet to their 2m followers for nothing, but they have worked hard to get to where they are and don’t expect to be taken advantage of. There are plenty of brands out there that attempt this too, I get so many requests to look at websites, apps, in fact, you name it and I have investigated it.  And quite frankly, my time isn’t free. With that in mind, approach influencer marketing just as you would any other form of advertising – with a clear strategy and budget – and you won’t go too far wrong.

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