Social media is a platform that allows for people to communicate freely and exchange ideas. Social media has never played a role as huge in our society as today, and never have people looked up and put so much trust in online figures – known as influencers.
As a result, the trust makes the people do as the influencer does, and buy what the influencer has.
It’s not really a secret that people want to do everything that their idols do.
And it’s not really a secret that influencer marketing help brands drive sales either.
In this article, we’ll look at how influencer marketing can help your social selling, and what approaches you can take to generate better results.
1. Be a part conversations and trends
It seems like new trends are constantly emerging, and the speed of which trends are born hasn’t exactly slowed down thanks to influencers (and social media).
Recognize this?
The whole reason to why it became popular was social media.
Many people admit that the reason they follow influencers is for inspiration and to stay up to date on new trends.
Influencers are expected to know the latest trends all the time and then share them with their audience. Maybe a bit of pressure and stess for the influencer, but for you: extremely valuable.
Influencers are considered up-to-date, relevant, industry-leading individuals. And by getting recommended by them, you present your brand as modern, relevant, and trendy.
As opposed to a brand that is still putting most of their marketing budget on handing out flyers, which do you think will be a part of conversations and trends and be more relevant?
2. Curate influencer-generated content
Influencers are individuals who have built their audience and built their brand image. We already know that people tend to trust influencers far more than brands and other individuals, and this means that the content the influencer has created also holds a level of trust and authenticity.
There are even brands who have built their whole social media content strategy on influencer-generated content!
An important reason that most influencers remain authentic and trusted is that the are known to say “no” to partnerships they do not believe in, or partnerships they feel do not align with their message or content.
When sharing influencer-generated content, you show your industry expertise. And the more you share this type of content, the more you’ll share content that people look up to, thanks to the fact that content styles often are so easily distinguishable.
3. Measure and fine-tune
The key to improving your results is to always analyze and fine-tune your campaisn and every single aspect of them.
Thankfully, today, there are more metrics and tools to use than ever to help understand the results the campaigns generated and how they performed.
Most social platforms have built-in analytics and statistics tools inside the platform, but others don’t If you want access to the data from an influencer after you have run a campaign, this means you simply have to ask them to share the data.
Therefore, after every ended influencer campaign, ask them to send screenshots of the results the campaign generated…
But that’s not all…
The real trick is incorporating the influencer in your fine-tuning to generating more sales.
Sit down and discuss with them, whether it be on skype, Email, Instagram, or phone call, let them be a part of your planning, because it will make them more engaged in your brand, and they’ll also come with valuable tips and ideas on how to operate to generate better results.
4. Improve customer experience
The best marketing is the one that seamlessly flows together and passes by discretely. – Not the marketing that activates 10 pop-ups when you visit a website and starts a video on a new page.
The marketing that meets the criteria above is the one that is presented where the target audience is. Relevance is key for a good customer experience. Nobody wants to see ads that aren’t relevant. This means you both need to craft perfect content, as well as reach the right people.
81 percent consumers in the United States are on social media regularly, and this means you should be too!
That’s where many spend a lot of their time, so obviously, you have a big chance of impacting them!
Or if you don’t, by partnering up with influencers you can still impact them, but in a more relevant way that will improve their customer experience.
This is an excellent example of a marketing post by @david_art that succeeds to remain its relevance to the audience because after all, people follow him to see his drawings, not watches.
When influencer marketing works at its very best, it is incorporated in a way that so well fits the influencer’s overall content strategy that it is hardly noticeable. The keyword here is seamless. The campaign should be effortless, seamless, and natural.
5. Boost SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lets you rank higher in search engines, and thus get more traffic of potential customers to your website, thus leading to more sales.
Influencer marketing can play an important role in that.
One of Google’s over 200 factors that decide how to rank your website is backlinks.
A backlink is when one website points to another website’s URL.
The more trusted the website that links to your site is, the higher your website will rank.
That’s not all…
There have been a lot of questions around social media and its effect on SEO, but Google has now announced that because social media plays such a vital role in many brands’ and peoples’ lives it is obvious that they should consider social signals when ranking a website.
However.
They explicitly said that factors like follower count and likes do not matter in their ranking due to the fact that they are so easy to fake because of bots.
Therefore, having a lot of followers will not indicate popularity. At least not to Google.
What really matters are the social signals that circulate social media.
And because of signals such as retweets, mentions, taggings etc. are much more accurate, that’s what they’ll mainly look at when it comes to social media as of now.
How influencers can help
First of all, if an influencer shares a photo of your products, shares a tweet about your brand, the post will see a lot of social signals such as comments, retweets, and engagements.
Secondly (and this one is most important) is blogging influencers.
Blogging influencers are individuals who have built their influence and their website. Not only have these individuals got some great traffic, but they also often got great website ranking.
When these websites link to you, you’ll rank higher!
And these backlinks remain until the influencer removes them, which means they can be valuable for your website and traffic long after the partnership has ended.
