How to Grow Your Business with Influencer Marketing and Brand Partnerships?

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As social media usage continues to grow, influencer marketing has emerged as the fastest-growing modern-day marketing segment. It allows brands to leverage social media’s popularity and work with famous social media personalities to reach their target audience and promote their products.

But if you haven’t run an influencer marketing campaign before, figuring out how to set one up and drive business growth can be challenging. Today, we’ll delve into influencer marketing’s benefits and how you can utilize brand partnerships to catalyze business growth.

What Is Influencer Marketing and How It Can Boost Brand Growth?

Influencer marketing refers to a business partnership with influential individuals to increase a brand’s outreach, awareness, and exposure. You must’ve seen celebrities endorsing a wide range of products from cosmetics to electronics on their Instagram accounts. That is, in a nutshell, influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing marketing strategies out there, as the influencer marketing industry was valued at $10 billion in 2020. But even though influencer marketing has the power to fuel business growth, efforts can sometimes go into vain, especially if you work with the wrong influencer.

However, provided that you select the right influencers, influencer marketing can help your business in the following ways:

• Build trust and demonstrate authority
• Improve brand awareness
• Reach target audience and drive buying decisions
• Reach millennials and Gen Z consumers
• Experience immense reach and visibility
• Manage brand’s reputation

Moreover, brands nowadays are looking at more than just one-time brand deals. They’re investing in long-term brand partnerships to continuously connect with new audiences and provide them with engaging experiences.

Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy to Drive Business Growth

While influencer marketing has the potential to drive immense business growth, you need to implement it strategically. Let’s look at a step-by-step process to implement an influencer marketing strategy that guarantees business growth.

Define Your Goals

As with any strategy, start by defining your goals. Determine what you want to achieve with influencer marketing. Do you want to build brand awareness, grow your audience, generate leads, or drive sales? Defining goals early on will help you create a consistent, easy-to-measure strategy.

Determine the Type of Campaign

Influencer marketing comprises three types of relationship triggers: hire, inspire, or a mix of both. You can either hire an influencer to promote your products, encourage them to share your content, or a mixture of both. Some common influencer marketing strategies you can implement are:

• Gifting free products
• Sponsored content
• Co-creating content
• Guest posting
• Influencer takeover
• Affiliates
• Social media mentions
• Brand ambassadors
• Discount codes

Remember that there are no set rules or guidelines when it comes to influencer marketing. You can determine what works best for you based on your requirements and stick to it. The key is to be agile and keep upgrading your strategy as per the requirements.

Identify Your Target Audience

Once you have determined the goals you want to achieve and the type of campaign you want to create, it’s time to identify and define your audience. The chances are that you already have a vague image of your target audience in mind. Now is the time to drill down the specifics and create accurate buyer personas.

Create buyer personas that include both demographic and psychographic segmentation of your ideal customers. Once you know who you’re speaking to, you can easily find the influencers they look up to. This will make it easy to find influencers and create a winning influencer marketing campaign.

Find the Right Influencers

Selecting the right influencers is the holy grail of influencer marketing. You may have the best product, but if you don’t pick the right influencers to speak about that product, people won’t show interest in it. People trust influencers and what they say. 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional celebrities.

When looking for influencers, consider the following options:

• Social media stars
• Bloggers
• Industry experts
• Celebrities
• Thought leaders
• Non-competing brands

Influencers, mainly social media stars, are also divided based on the number of followers.

• Mega-influencers — More than 1 million followers
• Macro-influencers — 500k to 1 million followers
• Mid-tier influencers — 50k to 500k influencers
• Micro-influencers — 10k to 50k influencers
• Nano-influencers — 1k to 10k influencers

Two important things to note when looking for influencers are:

• Influencers with more followers are generally more expensive.
• More followers may result in more reach, but it doesn’t guarantee more conversions. Research shows that nano-influencers have an engagement rate of 8.8%, the highest among all influencer types.

Hence, the key is to find influencers that share your audience. It’s essential to discover influencers that are trustworthy and can inspire action among their followers.

Qualify Your Influencers

Once you’ve listed influencers, it’s time to qualify them. When you start building a list of influencers, you’ll be surprised by the number of influencers you come across. While many brands work with multiple influencers, as a small business, it’s better to find one or two good influencers and stick with them for the long run.

When it comes to selecting the influencers, don’t qualify them solely based on their number of followers. Sometimes, working with smaller influencers with more targeted audiences can produce better results than working with mega-influencers with generic audiences. Make sure their content and messaging are relevant, high-quality, and reflect your brand’s beliefs.

Create Irresistible Content for Influencers

Influencer marketing campaigns require content, and they can work in two ways. The brand can create content and ask the influencer to share it with their audience, or you can ask the influencer to create the content. The former approach is better as you can control the message the influencer sends across.

If you create content for the influencer, ensure that you present ideas and create content that the influencer can’t refuse. Develop content that helps you achieve your goals and helps the influencer fill gaps they have in their content. Influencer marketing is a two-way street with benefits for both the brand and the influencer. Your content should be irresistible that encourages influencers to work with you.

Promote Your Campaign

Once you have your influencer marketing campaign up and running, it’s time to promote it. There are numerous ways to promote an influencer campaign. You can run paid ads on social media and search engines.

Many brands prefer taking things offline. They put up billboards and banner ads to promote their influencer campaigns. If you promote your campaign offline, don’t forget to use QR codes to bridge the online-offline gap. You can generate QR codes, link them to your product page, website, or social media profile, and put them up on your offline marketing materials. People can scan the codes and interact with your brand.

Creating QR codes is easy. You can use a bulk QR code generator to create dynamic QR codes and link them to your website, social media, email, etc. If used correctly, QR codes can be an effective marketing tool that can help you better engage your consumers and provide them with a better, on-demand experience.

Track Your Outreach and Measure Results

Finally, you can track your campaign’s outreach and the result it’s producing. When you work with a popular influencer, you’ll see your brand mentioned and talked about on social media. While it can feel like a victory, the real success will depend on your marketing goals.

Measure the initial marketing objectives you set for your campaign, including:

• Brand awareness metrics
• Audience building metrics
• Lead generation metrics
• Link building metrics
• Sales metrics
• Engagement metrics

If you have never organized an influencer marketing campaign before, it’s possible that you may not achieve the desired goals in the first attempt. If the campaign didn’t go as planned, look back and reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Did you choose the wrong influencer? Was your content not engaging enough? Every marketing campaign — whether successful or not — has takeaways. Be sure to repeat your successes and avoid mistakes when you launch your next influencer marketing campaign.

Wrapping Up

Influencer marketing can result in long-term benefits for your business. It can drive consistent lead generation, sales, and business growth. But like any other marketing strategy, influencer marketing takes time to show results. Don’t expect to see a sudden spike in sales after a single influencer Instagram post. Let your campaign some time to grow and continue tracking and measuring the results.