Using Influencers To Promote Your Brand

Brands should always be looking for new approaches to take to reach specific receptive audiences. To get the attention of those who dislike being advertised to, one approach some advertisers are taking is to utilise an influencer and their network. The term influencer is common in the digital community, individuals with large followings with something in common, be it a fandom or mutual interest – a captive audience. 

Understand your audiences

Who is your audience? This is a question you should be asking yourself constantly. A failure to identify and understand your audience is a surefire way to waste money by advertising through channels with low actual engagement from your ideal audiences. Social media, forums and message boards are great ways to observe your users and identify how your products or services are being used, and by who. Influencers commonly hold the most power through Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok; is your audience likely to be using these platforms?

Choose wisely 

Does your chosen influencer do a lot of shout-outs and product pushes? What is the engagement level with their past sponsored posts? For influencers that push out a high volume of sponsored content, you may find that yours goes unnoticed or their audience has switched off. Audiences will become savvy to influencers who post frequently or insincerely, those who do will cultivate audiences that do not yield high returns from promotional content. Identifying those who can sincerely promote your brand to an audience that trusts their content is the key to effective investment in influencer marketing.

Is it right for you?

It can be expensive, each influencer has their own price, and many know their worth. Some also won’t risk their brand if they don’t believe in your product. Going down the route of engaging with an influencer can be as simple as a quick message on Instagram, or as complicated as contacting them through an agent. Some influencers might be happy to do it for free if you send them free samples. 

Micro or macro-influencers?

Yes, there are different categories of influencer. When we say macro, we are talking about the big guns, those with followers in the hundreds of thousands or millions. They have a significant reach; they’re insanely popular however they actually receive less engagement than you might expect and some can be so famous that they attract followers who might not actually be interested in what you think their core identity and branding is. For example, one might follow Justin Bieber not because of his music but out of curiosity for how a celebrity lives. 

Micro-influencers might have followers in the low thousands, but those followers tend to be more loyal and have a higher rate of engagement with the content that is pushed out. They are more likely to interact on a personal level with their followers and probably focus on a much smaller niche interest, and so your product might be a better fit. Luckily for you it’s likely they’ll be a lot cheaper, you’ll just have to do more research to hunt them down. 

Influencer marketing is not easy; however, if approached correctly, can be a valuable string to your bow. If you would like to learn more about how influencer marketing can work for your business, please get in touch, and we would love to explore this with you further.