Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is working with people who are credible and trustworthy experts to promote your products or services. This is an important marketing tactic, as most people pay more attention to recommendations from people they trust than to ads.

When an influencer recommends you, this allows you to indirectly gain the trust of that influencer’s followers, resulting in more leads and sales. Many influencers have large audiences. However, some do not; these are called micro-influencers.

Like influencers, brand ambassadors may have large audiences and be trusted and respected in their area of expertise. However, while influencers may work on a single marketing campaign, brand ambassadors have a longer term relationship with the brand.

Ideally, brand ambassadors will love the brand and will promote it heavily at all times. Both influencers and brand ambassadors receive compensation for their work. If you’re planning an influencer marketing campaign, consider hiring an expert to find the right influencers.

To qualify as an influencer, a person has to be a trusted expert within a particular niche that serves an audience you want to reach. So someone who’s an influencer in fashion may not be an influencer in cookery. Influencers usually have strong personal brands they can use on your behalf.

Ideally, an influencer will also have a large audience that you will get access to. However, even those with smaller audiences, called micro-influencers, can successfully promote your products and services.

With advertising, you create a paid promotion for a chosen audience. With influencer marketing, you market your products and services via an influencer to that influencer’s network.

Research shows that people trust influencers more than they trust advertising. So using advertising can be less effective than influencer marketing in reaching your target audience.

While both advertising and influencer marketing can increase site traffic, people are more likely to buy your products based on an influencer’s recommendation than an ad.

There are multiple ways to measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign, and they all involve analytics.

For example, you can create special links for your influencers to use (similar to affiliate marketing) and track referral from these links in Google Analytics.

You can also measure likes and shares via a social media analytics tool. And you can use goals in Google Analytics to see when people who follow an influencer’s link actually buy your products or services.