Recently I have been scouring social media sites for influencers to help promote awareness of a product. Influencer marketing is one of the newest and one of the most successful forms of content marketing. But it can be tricky finding people that have a presence in our target market especially when so many accounts resort to buying followers and likes. But it is well worth the effort if you can find the right influencers.
Why Market with Influencers?
Working with influencers opens a new way to build and connect with an audience while spreading brand awareness. Many new brands reach out to influencers to get the word out about their new product or service as a shortcut to building their audience. People have increasingly become wary of companies and advertising efforts as they have learned to ignore advertisements and have become more educated on marketing tactics through the information available on the web. They want to hear a real person’s opinion even if they “kind of know” that a company either gave them products for free or is paying them to endorse products. A good influencer can integrate your product or service seamlessly into their usual content making it not so readily obvious that they are endorsing something.
Find a Good Fit
When participating in influencer marketing, you are working to build a relationship with the influencer’s audience that will drive traffic to build your audience. For example, if you are trying to market a new line of hair products to someone that is known for posting beautiful landscape photos and never showing their face. It just wouldn’t work. But if you worked with an influencer that focuses on beauty tips or a fashion model, your hair products won’t seem out of place if they feature it in their feeds.
Weeding Out the Fakes
Not everyone you find with a high follower count will be an actual effective influencer. People can easily purchase followers from some shifty websites, but those numbers will not guarantee the same number of views or engagement. A Twitter or Instagram user could easily purchase and gain 10,000 followers in just a few hours, but their posts will not likely have a boost in likes or comments. If they do, those are just as likely to be bots or some fake accounts run by a handful of people. If you stumble upon an account with 10K followers with an average engagement of 20 likes and ten comments, you have most likely found an account with a large number of fake followers.
