How Influencer Marketing is Changing the Dynamics of Social Media Marketing
Krystle Vermes (fullbottle.co) explains how influencer marketing can amplify your social advertising efforts. Fullbottle is the industry’s first pay-per-like crowdsourcing platform for ad creative. Their customers range in size from small businesses to global brands. Image courtesy of Jakub Jirsak via Bigstockphoto.
Social media has been the darling of the marketing world for several years now. As brands have learned to navigate the social media marketing space, there’s been a shifting focus on which tactics are most effective. Many brands needed to understand how to craft organic content and build their own following. As more and more platforms introduced advertising options, online budgets shifted toward advertising campaigns. But the market has become saturated on both of these fronts and brands are looking for new ways to stand out and connect with consumers. Enter influencer marketing: the best strategy for brands to create highly unique content that audiences are willing to embrace. Let’s take a closer look at how influencer marketing is shifting the dynamics of social media promotion.
Why Social Media Matters
More than 74% of adults that are online today take part in some social media network.[1. http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/] Originally, the major focuses were Facebook and Twitter. Today’s social media landscape has evolved dramatically and includes a much more diverse set of platforms, from visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram to video networks like Snapchat and Periscope. It naturally follows that brands want an active presence on targeted social networks. Finding concentrated pools of customers who congregate around their interests and can amplify those topics to their friends and networks is critical for growing brands. The ROI on successful social media campaigns is tremendous; when a campaign resonates with audiences, it grows followings, sells products, and can vastly improve the customer experience.
Influencer Marketing: Authentic Engagement on Social Media
As the social media landscape evolves, brands’ levels of sophistication has improved as they approach their online presences. While some brands still struggle to find ways to connect with consumers, social media channels have afforded brands a platform where they can be warmer and more engaging. Humor, opinionated takes on industry events, and inside looks at company cultures are showcased alongside more serious news. But as each network becomes more saturated with brand activity, brands have struggled to find ways to get consumers to pay attention and to achieve the authentic tone that many brands want to embrace.
Influencer marketing has quickly skyrocketed to the top of the marketing toolset for many brands. Influencer marketing leverages existing content creators – who have established audiences – for brand content partnerships. Content creators take the general guidelines and campaign objectives and use them as a framework to create effective content that helps brands connect with their target audiences.
Embracing Influencer Marketing in Your Own Social Media Marketing
Many brands are finding that as quickly as they get a handle on what’s happening in the social space, things change. It’s time consuming and expensive to create original content. Engagement is much harder to cultivate than many social media managers expect and requires a significant amount of interaction. Brands are constantly on the lookout for ways to keep evolving with the pace of new platforms, while minimizing the time that they need to spend. Influencer marketing has quickly proven that it generates a high return.
If you’re thinking about embracing influencers are part of your own strategy, keep the following in mind:
- Influencer selection is everything: Your whole campaign hinges on hiring the best influencers. It can often be challenging to find the right influencers–content creators whose brand, voice, topic focus, and audience demographics are a good fit for your company. Take time to understand what makes a good influencer and have a clear strategy for systematically evaluating each candidate you’re looking at. Evaluate their brand positioning, voice, content style, and audience demographics.
- Understand the platform: Understanding the social media platform you’re spending time on is essential to a successful influencer campaign. A video that works well on YouTube may fail on Snapchat. Take the necessary time to get to know the ecosystem of a social media platform, what types of content your audience pays attention to, and the overall tone. Don’t fall into the trap of posting a stuffy outtake from a business video on Snapchat and wondering why it didn’t resonate.
- Work with the right partner: The most important component of any influencer marketing campaign is understanding how much work it really entails. Social media influencer campaigns can yield a high ROI for businesses, but it’s critical to recognize that every step requires expertise and oversight, from choosing influencers to vetting creative content to developing distribution strategies. An established technology platform partner like fullbottle can greatly simplify the process for your team and ensure that you’re achieving a high ROI.
