An effective influencer marketing strategy is an effective way to gain credibility and promote your business. You should connect with influencers that share your goals and ideals. According to Fashion Monitor, “Influencers are individuals who have amassed a trusted and engaged following online, through the content and opinions they share across social channels.”

Most people rely on others when it comes to purchasing decisions and recommendations. Influencers help you communicate with your audience and maximize you social marketing return on investment (ROI). With influencer marketing you can promote your business.

According to Convinceandconvert, “Influencer marketing enables brands to cede at least partial control of their message while customers, advocates, online journalists, and others steer the story of the brand and its products or services.” To Digitalmarketinginstitute, “Influencer marketing is essentially a way that companies can get people who already have a social presence talking about their product.”

When you want to choose an influencer focus on criteria’s such as:

1. Traffic: How much audience does the influencer have?
2. Fit: Does the content of the influencer fit your brand goals?
3. Freshness: How often does the influencer post content?
4. Social footprint: What opportunities are there to work with the influencer?

Authenticity is an important factor in influencer marketing strategy. You have to invest your time in learning as much as you can about the influencers you want. You also have to build relationships with influencer by engaging in personalized communication with them.

Strategies to help build an effective influencer marketing strategy are:

1. Set goals: It is important that you are concise and straight-forward when communicating with an influencer. You have to set clear measurable goals if you want to build an effective influencer marketing strategy. Magento development can help you set the right goals for your business. Be sure of what your goals are and know what you want to accomplish. Examples of goals are brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, generate sales, attract new visitors, customer retention, promote products and services and increase social media followers.

Your goals help you measure your efforts and they help you with your influencer marketing strategy.

According to Paul May, “One of the first thing you should do is make sure you not only choose the right set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to build your strategy around, but thy should attract people to your platform that are actually engaged in your industry.”

Your plan, strategy and research should revolve around your goals and your key performance indicators (KPIs). SEO agency can help you with your campaign KPIs. Answer questions such as who are you, what do you want to achieve, are you pushing a product or service, are you raising brand awareness, is there a timeframe for the campaign and what is the budget for the campaign.

2. Work with the right influencers: Choose influencers that can accomplish your goals and reach your target audience. It is important that you know the demographic that influencers focus on, look at the content they create, the social platforms they use and how they interact with their audience. Magento development can help you choose an influencer that will maximize your marketing efforts. Influencers that cannot help you market your products and services should be avoided.

Understand the influencers that are in your industry and know about different segments. When mapping the influencer landscape, you need to know the channels where conversations about your topic take place and why people promote content about your topic. Know what motivates the influencer you chose to say “Yes”.

Choose influencers that have values that match your style. Micro-influencers are more successful than celebrity influencers because of their authenticity.

Select influencers that have audience reach and are relevant. Consider the return on investment (ROI) that can be achieved when you pick the right influencer. Know how large the influencers’ audience is, know how active they are on social media, know how the industry responds to the influencer, know about people or businesses the influencer has worked with, evaluate the past campaigns of the influencer and make sure the influencer you choose is authentic and speak to the demographic you are targeting.

Choose an influence that can effectively and efficiently reach your audience. Find the best influencer for your product or service and your audience. Tools that can help you search for the best influencers include BuzzSumo, Builtvisible and BuzzStream.

3. Research influencers: Thoroughly research every influencer you want to choose to advance your marketing strategy. Be detail oriented and know as much as possible about influencers. With Magento development and SEO agency you can research influencers and know the best way to reach them. Choose influencers that are trusted authorities on topics you are interested in. Choose influencers that consistently engage with their audience. Know more about the content of influencers and look through the social media profiles of the influencers you want to choose or those you have chosen already. Check out their posts, images and videos. You can use BuzzStream Discovery and Google to research influencers, know their audience size, the content they promote and their engagement level.
4. Set the stage: To get influencers to work with you; you have to familiarize influencers with your name and the name of your business. Magento Development and SEO agency can help you connect with influencers appropriately. Follow influencers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagtam and Pinterest. Consistently comment on the post of influencers and soon they will acknowledge you.
5. Audience: You need to consider the target audiences of your brand before you choose an influencer. Know who the influence is, what he or she cares about and the media channels they engage with. Make sure the influencer you choose know the audience of your brand.
6. Send an email request: The success of your outreach to influencers will determine if they open or consider your emails as influencers receive lots of mail daily and they do not read them all. Magento Development can help you start and improve email requests. Make sure your subject line is short, informative, stands out and is effective. The body of your email has to be concise. The body of your mail should by straight forward. Start your mail with a personalized greeting, complement the influencers work, clearly explain what you want from the influencer, tell the influence what he or she will benefit from working with you. Make it easy for the influencer to contact you if the influencer has enquiries.
7. Build relationships: It takes time and effort to build a relationship with an influencer and SEO agency can help you with the effort. You should quickly respond to the influencers enquiries, answer all questions the influencer might have and add value to the relationship. You can use Mention’s influence dashboard and TweetDeck to engage and nurture relationships with influencers.

Magento development can help you build a relationship with your influencer. Share the work of your influencer and add value to it. You can also mention the influencer in your posts and provide backlinks to the influencers’ pages. According to Aaron Brooks, “to create an effective influencer marketing strategy, brands need to ensure they remain relevant by consistently connecting with customers in a more meaningful and personal way and many businesses are turning to experiential stunts to satisfy this need.” A report by Satkla stated that “an overwhelming 90% of millenials say that brand authenticity is important and authenticity cannot be faked.”

8. Choose the right platform: With Magento Development you can choose the right platform that helps you achieve your goals and amplify your message. If your main audience is on Twitter, then make sure the influencer you choose has a solid presence on Twitter. SEO agency can help you choose the best platform you can use to traffic your message. It is important that you analyze your audience when you want to integrate an effective influencer social marketing strategy.
9. Growth potential: You need to analyze the growth potential of the influencer and his or her marketing strategy on all economic levels. Know the growth potential of your campaign, know the ways you will help the brand gain traction and know if the influencer will get results.

Magento Development and Smarp can help your company with employee evangelism.

10. Measure your success: Track the activities of the influencer. Track the success that arises from the influencers efforts Track how the influencer accomplishes your goals and determine if the influencer is effective. You will be able to make strategic decisions if you measure the success of the influencers you use in relation to attaining your goals.

Find tools that can help you measure the success of the influencers you use. It is important that you have custom worksheets that help you monitor influencer logs, reach and engagement, content log, keywords and equivalent market values.

Brands should measure the engagement and views of influencers. When you measure the influencers result you will be able to increase conversion. Tools to track campaign success of influencers include Traackr, Onalytica and Fashion Monitor.

11. Manage expectations: Know more about your posting frequency, content deliverables, timelines and exclusivity. The influencer you choose must be able to attract your target audience. Know if the influencer you want to choose is capable of creating valuable content, know how the influencer will distribute the content and know if the content will be visible to your target audience.
12. Optimize the content of the influencer: Brands should ensure that the content of the influence is of high quality. SEO agency can you’re your brand make sure that the influencer posts content that aligns with the brands’ goals. Brands should promote the posts of influencers if they want to optimize the reach of the influencer and the influencer should also promote the posts of the brand.
13. Have a publishing schedule: Purchasing decisions are mostly influenced by peer recommendation. Make sure your strategy leverages the network of the influencer. Magento development can help with your publishing schedule.
14. Give creative freedom to your influencers: A successful partnership between brands and influencer gives exposure and buzz to both of them. The brand and the influencer receiver social proof and validation. Give creative freedom to influences so that they can personalize your message and send it across using their own style.

Brands that use influencers include L’Oreal, Mini Cooper and ASOS.

Tips to build influencer relationships are:

1. Connect: Identify and reach out to influencers
2. Nurture: Participate and support communities. Also engage in discussions.
3. Partner: Invite influencers to take part in ambassador programs. The influencer should create branded content and get involved in social programs.
4. Relevance: The influencer should share content that is relevant to your business and target audience.
5. Resonance: This is the level of audience engagement the influencer can create. Create content that resonates with your customers and work with influencers that can repurpose your content and reach your target audience. According to Shane Barker, “Instead of a celebrity posing with a product, the audience is more likely to be motivated by seeing an influencer using the product, reviewing it, showcasing how it can be used etc.

Author Bio:

Junaid Ali Qureshi is a digital marketing specialist who has helped several businesses gain traffic, outperform competition and generate profitable leads. His current ventures include Progostech, Magentodevelopers. online, eLabelz, Smart Leads.ae, Progos Tech and eCig.