Has your business tapped into the power of “influencers”? To be fair, you might have held off for understandable reasons. Perhaps the very term “influencer marketing” daunts you, or you don’t see how a young, trendy social media star could help you to sell your particular product.
However, you need to keep an eye on the future – and the future will be strongly rooted in influencer marketing, current trends suggest. Hence, no matter where your business operates at whatever stage of its journey, you should act on the emerging influencer marketing revolution.
The building blocks of a successful business
Ultimately, for your business to not only achieve success but sustain it, too, that business must offer a popular product or service that can continue to regularly sell over the long run. Therefore, you have an interest in building a customer base that stays loyal to your company.
To stoke excitement about your business, you must be where your target customers already are. While you might trust friends and family primarily to help you with purchasing decisions as per a Neilson report cited by Forbes, an authoritative online source could also help shape your choices.
Traditionally, product recommendations have been sourced largely from media outlets and review websites. However, these days, anyone rising to prominence on the highly meritocratic platform of social media can also voice recommendations to an appreciative audience.
That person can be basically described as an influencer, though the real power wielded by an influencer is in the content they produce. Furthermore, an influencer must “represent something”, Real Business notes, with followers “influenced by whatever that influencer represents”.
Matchmaking to find the right influencer
While the world’s tally of influencers has been estimated to number 1.1 million, they can hugely vary in not only their areas of specialism but also their follower counts. Influencers can ascend through the successive ranks of “nano”, “micro”, “macro” and “hero” as their follower numbers increase.
Still, even a “hero” influencer – one with over a million followers – might not prove the best match for your own business if the aims and target audiences of the two are not closely aligned. Looking for the aptest influencer for you can, for this reason, feel like speed dating.
You might not exactly have the appetite to invest too much time and money into this “speed dating”. After all, a major selling point of influencer marketing is that, once you have connected with the right influencer, you can take much of the usual “trial and error” out of marketing, implies Forbes.
This can be significant for resource-strapped small businesses with an eye on future growth. With roughly 71% of Gen Z’s digital users having established a firm relationship with at least one influencer, they evidently trust influencers and so are likelier to take account of their advice.
If you are already building a strong presence on such social media portals as Facebook and Instagram, partnering with a specialist marketing agency could assist you in forming your influencer marketing strategy.
