Influencer marketing is currently a 6.5 billion dollar industry and has projections to double that by 2024 due to it's high ROI for small businesses.
If you've ever spent more than 5 minutes on most social media pages, you've come across multiple "sponsored post" or an influencer or two giving a review about a product or service they've received. Regardless if you've ever used an influencer for your business, you've definitely been influenced by someone on Instagram to buy something.
Why Influencer marketing works
Influencer marketing allowed me to leverage others influence to sell my services
When I first began to notice the power of influencer marketing I was scrolling on Instagram and began to notice different people talking about the same product. Hours later an ad popped on my instagram about the product and then again when interacting on Google. Less than 24 hours later, I purchased the product. That was a powerful form of marketing I had to be a part of!
Working with an influencer
The key to monetizing greatly from an influencer marketing campaign is to first and foremost figure out what you want to sell, who is the item or service for and what platform on social media or YouTube has a majority of your target audience present interested in purchasing your type of item. This is a vital first step, as you must know who your offer is for in order to find an influencer that already has that type of following for maximum results. Once you find an influencer that you feel has the type of followers you want to get your product or service in front of, it's important to make sure you have specific ideas or campaign guidelines to present to the influencer. This will assist both you and the influencer with having a clear understanding of what type of content you want to maximize results.
Things to avoid
Avoid focusing on follower count exclusively and pay attention to engagement
The days of only working with influencers with a mass amount of followers on Instagram are over! Nano Influencers (Influencers with less than 10k followers) are the new wave when it comes to lead generation for service based businesses. When my service based business worked with a nano influencer that had only 6k followers we saw a return on our investment in less than 24 hours and gained new email subscribers and IG followers within 48 hours that allowed us to convert them into customers overtime using email marketing. The nano influencer worked the best for our business because her account had constant engagement, a proven track record of working with other service based brands and brand trust from those who followed her page. It's important to focus more on the influencers engagement instead of followers if you are a service based business.
How to get started with an influencer
The hardest part about influencer marketing is not creating the marketing campaign, but identifying who should be the influencer for the campaign. One of our newest programs at Pinq includes an Influencer Marketing program where we match your business with an influencer that matches your budget, style and campaign needs. We handle the contracts, price negotiations and even assisting the business with developing the marketing campaign for maximum results in a short amount of time. Visit Pinqinc.com and click on "Influencer Marketing" to see how we can help!