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eCommerce, Marketing

Impact vs Influence: Finding the Best Influencer for Your Brand

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July 26, 2023

- Category : eCommerce, Marketing

- Tags : 2022, affiliate, agency, automation

Today, to be successful in any industry, you’ve either heard of brand awareness or been impacted by an influencer marketing strategy. An estimated 85% of organizations say they have guidelines for their company’s public image, including how its brand is represented. 

Influencer marketing is often associated with the rise of social media and its impact on people’s buying habits. It can also influence how they live. Not only that, it impacts major life decisions.

While influencing has been around since marketing began, social media has changed the game. It has made it possible for people to become “influencers” with complete control over their audience.

The word “influencer” has skyrocketed in recent years. Being an influencer these days has become an aspiration for many people. It has also disrupted the traditional marketing industry.

Let’s explore impact vs influence and how to find the best person for your brand.

Impact vs Influence: What’s the Difference?

When it comes to impact vs. influence, it’s all about maximum engagement. Two examples come to mind. One is the Kardashian effect, and the other is major political elections.

The Kardashian-Jenner family set the stage for how marketing is used to raise brand awareness and influence your audience. The family has turned their collective brands into multi-billion dollar businesses. 

They’ve created television shows, fashion lines, beauty products, and more. Most important, they are the face of everything they’ve done. 

Political Influence

The impact of having an influencer marketing strategy hasn’t been missed in our recent political elections. Politicians now seek the best influencers to reach their target audiences.  

It’s no mistake that Hip Hop has been used to influence young voters in urban areas. Today, hardly anyone is surprised when a top presidential candidate has a rap artist performing at a rally.

These optics have become the norm to reach maximum engagement.

Choosing the Best Influencer For Your Brand

Two main things influence an influencer’s success. One is their reach, and the other is their niche.

Brands often use these two factors to find the perfect influencer for their campaign needs. Reach is an influencer’s total number of followers and engagement. It includes both direct followers and engagement through social media exploration and discovery.

Niche is all about targeting influencers in their specific demographic. It helps brands reach a broad audience that trusts the influencer. Niche can also be used for specific subject-matter strategies.

Brand awareness is easily hit or miss when it comes to influencers. In the world of social media, a brand can lose billions of dollars if its target audience does not relate to the influencer they chose.

Define the Goals of Your Marketing Campaign

First, describe your goals in detail at this stage and develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor your progress. 

KPIs are the key, measurable ways to measure progress toward a goal. They help you focus on your strategy and give you an analytical foundation for making decisions. They also help you stay focused on what’s important.

When managing brand awareness KPIs, it’s important to measure the response of the targeted audience. It’s best to use leading indicators to measure progress, which is used to create future marketing campaigns.

For example, choosing the best influencer for a campaign can set the standard for future campaigns.

Choosing the Best Influencer

Choosing the best influencer for your brand is crucial. There are many types of influencers, so you need to define your brand reputation. Are you conservative or willing to explore boundaries?

Figure out what kind of niche the influencer is into. Next, determine if they have a true following. It’s no secret that people can buy followers on social media. 

Get to know your target audience and choose influencers who match their age, gender, location, or buying habits. Just because someone has a million followers doesn’t mean they will be interested in your product or service.

What is the Engagement Rate?

To determine the engagement rate, try choosing different types of influencers. Next, select several of their branded posts to analyze for engagement and responses.

You want to get the total number of likes and comments. On sites like Facebook, capture the number of each emotional response to the post. 

Then you want to divide these numbers by the influencer’s total number of followers on the platform. Multiply the result by 100 to get your average engagement rate. 

Do this for multiple posts to get a good average.

Don’t Undermine Your Values for Popularity

If your brand is about family values, you don’t want to work with influencers who promote living without boundaries. Instead, choose the types of influencers that will become your partners and support your brand in more ways than one.

Good collaborations happen when you’re both genuine and open about working together. The only way to get a good return on investment is to align with their audience through authenticity. Most brands use conversions or sales to measure the success of a marketing campaign.

A successful influencer marketing strategy must have a measurable return to have value. The impact of the influencer has to be measurable in terms of money spent. Measurable items can include the following:

  • Increase in sales
  • Increase in responsive followers
  • Increase in votes
  • Increase in viewership
  • Increase in physical attendance
  • Increase in content engagement

Set measurable markers. If your stats are not increasing, you’ve chosen an influencer who isn’t resonating with your audience.

The Brand Influencer is One Marketing Tool

It’s important to remember that the brand influencer is one of many tools when you’re trying to reach maximum engagement. Have a clear designation between impact vs influence.

Add social proof to your influencer marketing campaign, including a strong call to action. When a campaign is live, add a lead magnet to your website to get more leads than just visitors.

Most important! Ensure your influencer aligns with your brand’s values before choosing them.

Are you looking for ways to enhance your digital marketing strategy? We can help! Book a call today to get started!

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Influencer Marketing

5 Influencer Marketing Mistakes Brands Are Making

By on

July 25, 2022

- Category : Influencer Marketing

- Tags : 2022, affiliate, agency, automation

In just six years the global influencer marketing industry has grown from $1.7 billion to $16.4 billion. It is one of the most popular and effective ways to grow a business. Influencer marketing also fosters long-term relationships within industries.

A well-thought-out influencer marketing strategy can help you build brand awareness, increases impressions, and skyrocket sales. But if you ignore the common marketing mistakes made in this guide, then it’s unlikely you’ll breed any results. 

Like with any marketing campaign, influencer marketing requires strategy, planning, and analysis. Keep reading below to learn what not to do in your upcoming influencer marketing campaign! 

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing involves leveraging the influential (quite fitting) power of social media content creators to build brand awareness. 

The word influencer wasn’t officially deemed a vocabulary term until 2016, about six years after the boom of influencer marketing. With the free real estate of social media being ever more saturated and challenging to grow, influencer marketing provides brands with a more controlled space to grow rapidly.

Nothing is free anymore in social media. Either you pay ads, or you spend hours studying algorithms, or you pay influencers with free products and/or a contract and watch your brand bloom.

However, maybe you’ve tried influencer marketing in the past and not seen results. This is not a result of influencer marketing as a whole, but usually the outcome of marking one of the influencer marketing mistakes below.

Influencer Marketing Is Analytical

Influencer marketing is a science and while sometimes the investment is high, the returns can be even higher. When we worked with social influencer Jake Paul, our client gained 78,000 new followers, 141,868 impressions, and 5,000 new email subscribers. 

This is because we worked with the right influencer for that brand, at the right moment, and had their backend prepared to handle the substantial influx in traffic. 

Top Five Influencer Marketing Mistakes 

Influencer marketing expenditure is expected to reach $4.6 billion annually in the United States alone. More companies are recognizing the impact of running a successful influencer marketing campaign.

Yet some companies fall flat with common influencer marketing mistakes like working with the wrong influencer, not staying in touch with an influencer after a campaign, or even sending an influencer the wrong product choice. 

There are so many mistakes that come with influencer marketing. Luckily by reading this guide you can avoid making them and spend your dollars wisely.

1. Picking the Wrong Influencer

Sometimes brands approach influencer marketing as if it’s a high school popularity contest. Influencer marketing is not about who is the most attractive, most followed person on social media. 

It is about who has an audience similar to your target customers. These are the influencers you have to go for. The most subtle trap happens when brands choose influencers that would be their potential customers. 

Just because a person fits your niche as a potential customer it doesn’t mean that is why their audience follows them. For example, a male who buys cleaning supplies has a successful food blog. Sure, other people who clean might follow him, but they are most likely following his opinions on food, not cleaning products.

In this case, a snack company would be better suited for this collaboration. Consider everything about an influencer’s audience from their demographic, to their location, income, and more.

2. Solely Focusing on Vanity Metrics

Follower counts and views are a part of the picture, but not the whole picture.

When collaborating with an influencer, make sure to not only pay attention to their following but also their engagement. Engagement rates are measured by activity within each post. How many impressions, likes, comments, shares, and saves do their posts get on average?

Ask influencers upfront before making a deal. You can also do some research and identify their engagement and study their past partnerships. The greater follower count usually means more impressions and conversions, but these mega influencers usually come with a much higher cost.

3. Poor Timing

Sometimes the timing of an influencer campaign is just off. Are you running a swim campaign in November? Or maybe a hot chocolate campaign in May.

Influencer campaigns require a lot of back-and-forths negotiating and brainstorming. This can cause major delays in actually finishing the project. It is important to set your timing and proposal deadlines in advance to make sure your campaign launches at a time that makes sense for your market and season.

4. Missing Backend Preparation

The goal of any influencer campaign is traction and growth. That can be in the form of subscribers, donations, or purchases. And sometimes influencer campaigns wildly outperform your expectations.

But if your backend is not prepared you might run out of product or your website might crash. This is the worst thing as these people will not return to try and checkout or sign up for your newsletter. 

You do only have one shot, and there’s no time to blow it. Make sure your prices are right, discounts functioning, links are in bio, and more before launching a campaign. 

5. Forgetting Contracts

Some influencers are very professional and others work more like spontaneous freelancers. Regardless it’s your responsibility to draw up a contract. 

This sets clear expectations for work and deadlines. It also protects your business in the case that an influencer breaks a contract or doesn’t complete all agreed-upon tasks. 

Unfortunately, this happens sometimes, especially with inexperienced influencers, and you need to protect yourself.

Consider Onboarding a Digital Marketing Agency 

Influencer marketing is a powerful tool, but not all influencers are created equal. Working with the wrong influencers is one of the most common marketing mistakes. It can be more costly than the small cost, and high ROI of outsourcing a digital marketing agency.

An influencer marketing agency picks the right influencers for your brand goals and budget. They help you create a cohesive marketing strategy.

This means organic social content, influencer marketing, SEO, and even your web design. For help with your digital marketing, schedule a get in touch today!

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Influencer Marketing

The Top Influencer Marketing Strategies to Drive Results

By on

June 23, 2022

- Category : Influencer Marketing

- Tags : 2022, affiliate, agency, automation

In 2020 it was reported that digital ad spending grew by roughly 12.2 percent even during the pandemic. This goes to show that marketing is still as strong as ever, but what is influencer marketing and how can it help you?

If you are looking to help your business grow then influencer marketing strategies are a great way to do it. The key to influencer marketing is to use an influencer marketing platform and get influencers to promote your brand. 

While there are a lot of different types of influencer marketing, not everybody knows what it is. Luckily, we have created a list of some of the best influencer marketing agency advice for using these strategies.

So if you would like to learn about the best influencer marketing strategies and how they can benefit you, keep reading.

What Is Influencer Marketing? 

We know that not everyone is familiar with these strategies. So before we jump into what all of the different strategies are, let’s cover what an influencer marketing strategy is.

An influencer marketing strategy is a strategy used to get influencers to promote, recommend or endorse your brand’s product or service.

There are multiple different strategies to choose from and the great thing is that you can start using them almost immediately. 

You can also try different strategies and find out which ones are more effective for your business. Sometimes all your business may need is to try an influencer marketing strategy to get more customers, clients, and interest.

Create Long-Term Partnerships With Influencers

One of the best ways to make your brand more successful is by including partnering with influencers. While there are lots of influencers out there, some brands still fail to do this.

It not only costs them potential customers but also prevents them from getting some extra revenue for their business. The best way to use this strategy is to consider what influencers would be good for your brand.

This means that you should make a list of influencers and start finding ways to reach out to them. A great way to do this is via social media. However, this can take up a lot of time as some influencers get hundreds or even thousands of messages every day.

Instead, you can use influencer marketing agencies to help you find big influencers to promote your brand. Agencies can even advise you on the best ways to get your influences to market your product or service. 

Use Photographs & Videos of Influencers Promoting Your Brand

This strategy is one of the most effective ones out there right now. Especially with recent applications like Tik Tok, more people are using photos and videos. 

One of the biggest benefits of using photos and videos is the flexibility it provides. You can take almost anything and create a picture or video that includes influencers promoting it.

The key is to find out what your audience likes most and then create content around that. You can add this content to social media or even use it on your website to promote your brand. 

If people see that a big influencer is interested in your brand from photographs or videos then they are much more likely to become curious about it. 

You can even set up video interviews or create short compilations of multiple influencers promoting your brand. 

Choose Your Influencer Marketing Platform 

Another effective way to use influencer marketing is by choosing a platform that will help you to promote your product or service. The great news is that there are lots of platforms out there so you won’t be stuck for choice.

One of the most popular platforms for influencer marketing is Instagram. You can use Instagram to get influencers to promote your product or service to their audience.

When it’s done properly you should find that you have lots of new customers that come from your influencer’s Instagram followers.  You can do so much more on the platform and you can use a mixture of photos, videos, and ads. 

Use Influencers for Testimonials 

Aside from choosing the perfect platform, you can also get influencers to use testimonials for your brand. This is a great way to help your brand stand out from the competition, and give it more credibility. 

If you have an influencer that’s talking highly of your brand then potential customers will pay more attention to it.

The great thing about this strategy is that it doesn’t take long for an influencer to create a testimonial. Plus, you can even get them to create multiple testimonials and compare them to see which one works best.

Include Influencers in Your Launches 

One other way to use influencer marketing is by including them in your launch. This means that you can get them to go on their social media and talk about your upcoming launch.  

The great thing about using influencers is that they can create a lot more excitement for your launch. Plus they can make a lot more people aware of who your brand is and how it can help them.

When this is done properly you should get a lot more engagement and interest in your launch. This can lead to more sales and more revenue for your business. 

Get Help With Your Influencer Marketing Today 

While influencer marketing can seem confusing but it doesn’t have to be. At Forge Digital Marketing, we make marketing simple and take care of your influencer marketing needs for you.

So if you would like to get started with influencer marketing, then contact us today.

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