What are your marketing plans for the next year? Do you know how to further grow your business? According to recent research, companies, who promote their products or services using influencer marketing techniques, can get an 11x higher ROI, than those, who stick to the traditional form of marketing.
Who are influencers? How can they help your business?
Influencer Marketing is the process of building relationships with a consumer by integrating information about your business into the content created by so-called influencers, or thought leaders. But, how to spot people who can make your advertising campaign more profitable? Technically, any person, who enjoys a wide audience of followers or subscribers, and a solid reputation in a certain niche, is a social media influencer.
It is no secret that customers do not trust commercial advertising nowadays. However, if they get a piece of advice from someone, whose opinion is important to them – most likely, they will accept it.
The competition between companies is very stiff, and it becomes more challenging attracting attention to the brand. As industry influencers have already garnered a great deal of trust among customers, involving them in your marketing campaign is a safe bet. Therefore, if a famous YouTube tech blogger (say, Marques Brownlee) advocates for any given smartphone, the members of his wide audience will think that this model is worth buying.
What’s interesting – at the end of 2017, 39% of business owners were planning to increase their influencer marketing budget for 2018, and only 5% of them wanted to decrease it. So, what should we expect in 2020-21?
What are the trends and expectations for influencer marketing in 2020 – 2021?
Speaking about the efficacy of influencer marketing techniques and strategies, we should note that SMM remains a highly beneficial approach to promote your brand.
Social media is a great tool for improving your link building plans. It actually looks like a two-step strategy: first, you make your brand recognizable and after succeeding in this task, you take the second step – promote your links within the chosen social media platforms.
According to the opinions of link building experts, the quality of the link depends on its relevance to the chosen website and topic. The quality of content, in which it is integrated also plays a vital role. Simply put, if all your social media posts are ‘copy-pasted’, they are likely to be considered spam. At the same time, the more interesting and engaging your content is, the more people will click the link you promote.
If all the mentioned factors are taken into account, your marketing content will be more natural and personalized. Of course, the creation of such content requires a lot of time and excellent writing skills. If you lack either of them it is better to cooperate with a reputable marketing agency like Haka.Media. Otherwise, you risk ruining your online reputation and losing a portion of your audience. Promotional links look native and authentic only if they are well-integrated into the content. In addition, remember that the more specific the niche you choose, the wiser your marketing moves would be.
For instance, if you want to promote an AI product, you will obviously get a better response rate from the audience of AI-related influencers. So, it will be reasonable to focus on advertising via their Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Tiktok accounts, than via channels of general tech experts. Interestingly, four out of five experts said that they would rather promote a link via a germane, but less authoritative medium. Therefore, we can conclude that 2021 will see the rise of highly relevant and native link marketing.
Another trend is using video content in marketing. Videos are not only engaging, but they also allow integrating authentic ads as well. The statistics show that video marketing helps businesses generate high-quality links and achieve a 54% increase in brand awareness. Therefore, it is no wonder that 82% of those, who promote their brand through video content, have a higher ROI and therefore make it a keystone of their strategy. Moreover, vloggers (aka video bloggers) are way more popular and trusted nowadays. Before buying a product, 79% of consumers would rather watch a video than read a review, Instagram story is even better. Thus, this kind of visual content is in high demand.
How to apply influencer marketing wisely?
It is obvious that along with shaping a marketing strategy, executives should decide how to put it into practice. Since influencer marketing is on a roll, the question is how to apply it wisely.
First, you will need to reach out to those influencers, whose media channels might be of a great boost to your advertising campaign. Of course, it will take a good deal of time to find exactly those people, whose area of focus is relevant to your product or service.
Luckily, there are several tools that might help you in building business relationships with influencers. For example, Traackr hosts a wide database of video bloggers. It also provides advanced features like searching and filtering by age, gender, keywords, and other aspects. This is helpful for choosing the intended blogger, and entering into a profitable partnership. Another attractive feature of Traackr is the ability to classify the chosen influencers under specific groups, thus organizing your working process. For example, if you cooperated with many people within the platform, it might be hard to remember where the partnership stands with a particular person, so using the classification feature might be a blessing.
Still, the whole outreach process will require that you spend much time and effort on creating customized email templates, pitching attractive offers, negotiating the terms of cooperation, etc. Therefore, if you decide to carry out influencer marketing on your own, it will be no easy task.
It might be more profitable to refer to a marketing company though. It will take charge of building relationship with influencers and creating high-quality content for you. Looking for such company, mind that the marketing specialists should be good at media outreach and content creation, as well as offer link building service. What’s more, if you decide on handling influencer marketing with the help of an agency, remember that a link building package should not include the same-type anchors or content, as it will bring you more harm than profit.
