How will Influencer Marketing boost your sales?

If you want to communicate with your customers effectively, then influencer marketing is the right thing for you! This article will inform you what exactly it is, how to implement it and what benefits it brings.

Influencer Marketing – what is it?

Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing activity based on cooperation between a brand and an influencer, in which the influencer plays the role of a promoter or recommender of our brand among their audience, who are our potential consumers. By collaborating with a specific creator in this way, you can reach a large number of people in your target group with your offer. Your product is advertised by a person who is credible to their followers and whose opinion they trust. The popularity and trustworthiness of the influencer play a key role here – only by collaborating with such a person can you benefit, so that influencer marketing will be profitable for you.

When choosing a product, the buyer is not only inspired by the advertisement itself, but also by reviews of the item. For instance, when you’re choosing household appliances, you browse the internet for reviews – or when you want to buy healthy snacks, you will most probably take a look at the products advertised by celebrities, such as fitness and healthy lifestyle gurus. We pick the recommendations that seem reliable and true to us.

Who is an influencer?

An influencer is a person who has gained a lot of popularity on social media, fundamentally due to their authenticity. These people are not only celebrities, but also regular individuals who run their accounts focused on one field, which could be fitness, fashion, health, beauty, etc. They are a sort of bloggers who bring together people with similar interests around their account. The area of influencer activity is generally social media (Instagram, Facebook), but not exclusively, as it could just as well be a video channel (Youtube, Tiktok), a blog or the internet in general.

The advantages of Influencer Marketing

The advantages of this form of marketing include increasing your visibility and expanding your network of reach, so that your sales can grow. Influencer marketing may also be helpful in promoting a new product for your brand, but also, for example, when it comes to improving your image, showcasing a new version of your business or a modified product. All of these are related to sampling campaign activities, so influencer marketing will fit perfectly into a planned sampling campaign as part of its support.

It is important to choose the influencer correctly. A person who runs an account that is not related to your industry will not be suitable for collaboration, nor will be an influencer who cannot pride themselves on having a very positive reputation and whose popularity has been brought about by scandals and other questionable forms of activity.

Influencer marketing – an effective campaign in a few steps

Firstly: the objective – this is typically the first step in basically any campaign. Make an initial assumption – what do you want to achieve by collaborating with an influencer? For the purposes of the article, suppose you are launching a new product and want to increase its sales and, at the same time, the coverage of your brand.

The other issue, on which the success of the whole campaign really depends, is targeting the appropriate audience by picking the correct influencer. In this respect, you need to pay particular attention to the reach of such a person, their interests and the patterns they convey. Returning to our example, let’s further specify that this new development is a series of innovative 100% vegan organic cosmetics. When choosing an influencer who will be a kind of ambassador for you, consider the values they convey. The right person, therefore, would be someone who advocates for animals, represents a healthy and environmentally friendly lifestyle and who will have a broad audience of like-minded people. Remember that the selected individual will be, so to speak, the face of your brand, so choose them as wisely as possible, as you will be judged accordingly to the person who promotes you.

Once you have picked the right influencer, it is time to define the terms of the collaboration. It is a good idea to establish its details such as the number of posts, their form (photo, post, video, animation, etc.), their distribution channels and the way our influencer will talk about them at the very first stage. Drawing up a proper timetable will certainly improve such collaboration.

The final step involves monitoring the activities and ongoing participation throughout the campaign. By ongoing participation we mean: responding to comments, providing product information, debunking myths about your brand or responding to negative feedback and customer dissatisfaction. On the other hand, by tracking the results of the campaign you will be able to evaluate its effectiveness. Referring to the example of vegan cosmetics – you can check how interest in the product and its sales increased after each post or story from your influencer.

Summary

When choosing a product, the buyer is not only inspired by the advertisement itself, but also by reviews of the item. We pick the recommendations that seem reliable and true to us. The opinion of someone you trust and admire, who is as ordinary and real as you are – is the most convincing to you. This task is fulfilled by carefully selected influencers who can help you reach your target audience and increase the reach of your product.

Remember that you cannot rely solely on influencer promotion of your product as your only marketing campaign. On the other hand, combining it with product sampling can produce an amazing effect. You can read more about the sampling campaign here: ‘What you can achieve with a sampling campaign’