Influencer marketing means using celebrities, experts, big names, and other well-known people in your niche to promote your business to their audience. It’s a new style of online marketing that brands and companies are using to expand their audience and establish their own names. If you’re not taking advantage of influencer marketing now, you should be and here’s why.
Can I Borrow Your Audience?
One of the main advantages of influencer marketing is that it allows you to leverage someone else’s reach for your own benefit. When an influencer mentions you or publishes your work to their audience, this puts your name out to a great deal of people. If your content or offering is a good match with the influencer you’ve chosen, you’ll see great results. You’ll also acquire some of their audience who will now start following you as well.
Trust and Authority
Influencer marketing helps you build trust and authority. When an influencer promotes you, they’re giving you their seal of approval. They have a loyal audience that trusts what they say. When they say that you’re worth following too, they lend this credibility to you. In a way, it gives you overnight expert status with the influencer’s audience. This is a very powerful form of social proof.
Small Investment, Huge Returns
Unlike content marketing and other online marketing techniques, influencer marketing involves relatively little investment on your part. The way you get an influencer to promote you is through building a relationship with them. This may involve you doing some favors or work for them for free in return for the promotion you’ll get from them. This makes it one of the lowest-investment but highest-return marketing methods available.
How to Get Started with Influencer Marketing
There are many different ways to get an influencer to market you. You could have them feature one of your products or services. You could create a piece of content for them to publish for you. One extremely easy technique is to interview the influencer or have them interview you. Even the simple mentioning of your name on social media can gain you many new followers.
The first step is to decide what you want to achieve and identify influencers that can help you do that. Choose influencers that have a great deal of reach and that are relevant to your business; in other words, they have the kind of audience you want. Once you’ve identified some good prospects and narrowed them down to a manageable number, you should start connecting with your influencers and figuring out what value you can offer them.
Influencer marketing is powerful because it’s like a referral from a trusted friend. The only difference is that this trusted friend has thousands of fans and followers who are hungry for what you have to offer.
I have recently released a training course on how to Find and Interview Influencers. Learn more: www.InterviewingInfluencers.com
