Visit Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other social site today and you’re met with a variety of social influencers who seem to be doing just that – influencing. Brands leverage them as spokespeople and in return gain insight and popularity with their target markets. It’s a surprisingly and effective technique for brand awareness, ultimately resulting in revenue thanks to what experts call soft-selling techniques. While the Yarra Web teams believes that your success as a brand or company is rooted in transparent and authentic content marketing and Web design, partnering with social influencers can help elevate you even further. That’s why today’s post is focused on how to partner with social influencers.
Who Are Your Consumers?
It starts with knowing your consumer. What’s their demographic? Are they a 20-something-year-old female? Are they a retired couple? There are dozens of ways to determine this, and most are rooted in the data that your marketing team should be driving. Take advantage of Google Analytics and dozens of other sites and tools that can help profile your consumer. Thanks to technology today, many of them are already doing the social influencer work for you. They not only know who your consumer is, but they know what their profiles and shopping habits are.
Brand Ambassadors vs Social Influencers
If they don’t, you’re going to need to do a little research, but it’s become increasingly easy with the World Wide Web and our advances in technology. Think of social influencers as billboards for you. You simply need to do a little exploring to determine who is the right fit. Spend some time on different social sites and look into who your target consumer looks up to. It’s important to note that there’s a difference between social influencers and brand ambassadors. Both provide a lot of value to your product or brand, but we’ll focus on brand ambassadors in a future post. Social influencers are a bit more authentic, as they’ve hopefully chosen to use your product or are passionate about your brand, while brand ambassadors are frequently hired by the company to evangelize your work.
How Do You Know They Are Right for You?
Social influencers need to check a few things off the list. They should be aligned with your company’s personality, its values and its ethos. They need to be active on social media with a large following so that you can reach as many consumers as possible. They should be dedicated towards their personal brand, with yours as a secondary priority. This makes them a great cheerleader for the work that you do. Did you know that 90% of consumers will buy into recommendations from peers versus advertisements? That’s why social influencers play such a huge role in marketing these days.
Questions? Comments? Let us know. The Yarra Web team would love to hear from you.