Today, organizations have an option of large number of channels to reach out to their customers. To boost their marketing capabilities further, organizations now need a smart way to present their offerings, which would impact or influence customers deeply, and help build loyal relationship with them.
Influencer marketing, a form of marketing that targets specific influential individuals or communities rather than direct consumers, provides a good way to deal with this situation. Influencers have the capability to influence consumer behavior, and shape the decisions taken by a large number of audience, either directly or indirectly. Such influencers may include celebrities like sports person, journalists, analysts and famous authors, or may be common individuals like bloggers, active social networkers, or may be even the office colleagues whom your consumers trust.
Any audience under direct or indirect contact with these influencers can easily get inclined towards the brand or product promoted by him or her, while a negative feedback by them may result in an adverse effect on the brand.
For any brand, the easiest way towards influencer marketing is to identify top influencers from the existing followers of your brand. This provides an advantage of leveraging existing fans and followers to target more business, which is often considered as an economical option. But when organizations are planning to invest greatly on this, they may target national or global influencers to have much wider impact.
Harnessing the power of influencer marketing involves following stages:
Influencer Identification
– The very first step is to identify right influencers or influencer communities that suit your requirements.
Influencer Activation
– Activation of influencer refers to driving the influencer’s impact in favor of your brand. For any brand, there are fair chances of having negative influencers, which may include unsatisfied customers, competitor products and firms or some social activities having conflicting thoughts to what your brand is promoting. Thus, you need to strategize in a way to reduce the impact of the negative influence, while promoting positive influences and also converting the neutral influences to have a positive outlook towards your brand.
Various individuals and communities have a varying scope of influence across various mediums including social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), publications (books, blogs, media publications), public events, social forums and so on. Thus, the right influencer for you would pretty much depend upon your marketing strategy.
For instance, if you are working on a strategy to improve your brand presence across social networks, you will probably look for influencers or communities active across those social networks (basically social media influencers), having a decent number of followers or members and where the content gets propagated at a rapid pace.
Identification of right Influencers or Influencing communities can be best performed via a detailed analysis in a statistical manner. This involves gathering information about all the potential candidates or user groups, and doing deep analysis on them based on their activities and attributes.
An optimal strategy for this would again depend on your business requirement and your branding strategy, and what exact outcome is required from the influencers or the influencer communities.
For instance, if you want your influencers to talk about your new offerings, you may want to introduce them with your new offerings first, and ask them for reviews. If you want them to simply talk about existing offerings, you might have to engage them with new content to talk about. And to cover-up the negative influencers, you can set up appropriate influencer marketing campaigns to identify and mobilize the right influencers to share and promote your content across desired channels.
For organizations who thrive on new innovative marketing strategies, integrating Influencer Marketing with their existing marketing strategy would be a good way to proceed. Influencer Marketing leverages a trust-based marketing that is based on natural human instincts. This helps organizations establish better loyalty and stronger relationship with the consumers and influence consumer behavior in more human way than any other form of marketing. To read more about influencer marketing, and how it can help your organization, visit Advaiya Influencer Marketing Offering.
