Modern marketing strategies are slowly turning away from traditional marketing content, with many marketers and brand owners opting for fresh and unique ideas such as influencer marketing.
Organic content generated by influencers is quite effective at spreading the message of the brand across many consumers. Think about product reviews by influencers. A good majority of marketers found that that type of content has a positive effect on influencing the buying decision of consumers.
Below are a couple of examples of influencer marketing strategies that can help your brand reach its goals.
1. Branded Blog Posts
A lot of businesses integrate blogging as a core component of their marketing strategy. Blogging helps draw in traffic to the website as well as boost the brand’s online presence. In SEO, blogging boosts a site’s ranking especially when the content that is published is relevant and offers value to its audience.
Generating links from fresh and unique articles published on the web is one of the best sources of attention you can gain for your website. These links have to be relevant to the anchor text and it must also be connected to its most complimentary page.
Branded blog posts are usually generated specifically for bloggers. It provides an overview of the site’s product and services that are promoted in exchange for payment, either in the form of free products or monetary compensation. Typically, the blogger is tasked to write a post using their own voice and includes links. The engagement from the post, i.e. posts and comments, becomes part of the blog which can last for a long time. Another term of a branded blog post is guest posting.
Benefits of a branded blog post include:
- gaining insight into your audience’s feelings and opinions about your site or activity
- drive traffic to your website
- helps you to create buzz and interest in the site
2. Brand Mention
The latest buzz within the digital marketing world is brand mention. Not only is this important for SEO but it is changing the way with which Google measures the authority of a brand.
Brand mention happens when an organization or a brand is mentioned online in the form of blogs, articles, social media posts, or other types of content. Brand mentions are typically published in the context of complaints, reviews, positive feedbacks from satisfied customers, and posts that serve to educate the audience.
The rise of the internet has significantly changed the course of how we communicate. It has also affected how brands market themselves and their products/services. There are a ton of reasons why Google is giving more weight to brand mentions for search rankings. For one thing, brand mentions create awareness and visibility for the brand especially if it is consistent and easily recognizable. People are inclined to prefer something familiar.
Mentions also give brands a touch of personality. Through brand mentions, you are able to get more insight into how your audiences interact with the products and services that you offer. This will inevitably give you a chance to tailor your marketing campaigns and improve on aspects of it that are lagging.
3. Giveaways
Giveaways and contests are extremely popular on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. They draw attention and interest from different groups of people and they encourage audience interaction with branded content in a unique way. Giveaways also offer a lot of value for the brand and involving influencers in the endeavor makes it easier to spread the message far and wide.
Giveaways are not a simple project to undertake. It involves a lot of moving parts to make it streamlined, efficient, and most of all, fair. Knowing how to manage these can help marketers and brands avoid problems along the way.
Here are a few tips for a successful implementation of giveaways with influencers:
- Know your goal for the giveaway: Giveaways are a great way for achieving different goals. Brands wishing to boost their social media activities, drive traffic to their site, or raise awareness around their products and services and leverage giveaways with the influencers.
- Collaborate with the right influencers: The success of a giveaway or contest hinges on the brand’s ability to find the right influencer to achieve the goals of the campaign.
- Understand the rules behind social media giveaways: In planning a giveaway, it’s crucial to be organized and clear about the methods and rules that will dictate the campaign.
4. Ambassador Programs
Brand ambassadors are people who have shown great commitment to a brand in one form or another. They are not spokespeople per se but they do occasionally provide media content about the products.
The main role of a brand ambassador is to promote the brand to its audiences within a given location. It’s also important that ambassadors are considered volunteers and are not necessarily employed by the brand. They are required, however, to act with integrity and honor when representing the brand’s interests.
Building an ambassador or influencer program can be an effective way to retain and acquire new customers. This is because people trust the recommendations coming from their network more than traditional advertisements.
Brand ambassadors, to an extent, agree to maintain a strong relationship with brands and they will continue to promote them on social media, events, or trade shows. Instead of relying on a script, brand ambassadors use word-of-mouth marketing to promote the brand.
Ambassadors and influencers usually get free products or receive monetary compensation for their marketing efforts. But more often than not, ambassadors are more than happy to help the brand out for free.
5. Instagram Takeover
Brands looking to test influencer marketing or add a new dimension of engagement to their current strategy can try Instagram takeover. It can be a refreshing way to boost brand exposure and awareness while providing unique and interesting content to your audience. An Instagram takeover can also be used as a gauge the scale with which influencer marketing offers to your brand.
As the name suggests, an Instagram takeover is when a well-known influencer logs into the platform using the brand’s official account. For a period of time, they post content on behalf of the brand. In practice, influencers usually post their content using Instagram Stories. When it is done well, takeovers can be an efficient way to allow brands and influencers to collaborate together in promoting content on social media.
Instagram takeovers make it easy for your brand to:
- Tap into niche groups – Hosting a takeover and cross-promoting content with an influencer will increase your brand’s exposure to audiences you would never have access to any other way.
- Gain credibility – A takeover is one of the easiest ways to boost the credibility of your brand. Your target audience usually has very high regard for the influencer taking over your brand’s Instagram account.
- Humanize your brand – Customers respond to people and doing an Instagram takeover with a well-liked influencer allows your audiences to interact with a real person.
6. Free Products
If you want to earn permission to engage with a group of people, spread your message, buy your products, or share your ideas, giving something for free is the ticket.
Giving away an idea is an incredible way to build your network. Marketers, whether working for a marketing agency or freelancing, try to come up with the best strategy to spread a brand’s message and impact how people spend. They invest money in ads and campaigns but these strategies only add to the noise. Although not new, giving free products or services is a better approach.
Generosity is a sure-fire way to catch people’s attention. Compelling stories and valuable ideas must first reach a tipping point before they gather enough momentum and to push the effort over the edge, it pays to be generous. Giving away your work will mean future customers will hear about your brand, consider its value, and ultimately reward you for your generosity.
But this strategy only works if you have more than one product or service to offer.
Take for example authors who give out free eBooks in order to build awareness, establish a reputation, and showcase their other works available for purchase.
7. Challenging Influencers
We’ve seen all the challenges that people are getting to these days. To audiences, these are a fun and engaging content that features their favorite influencers trying to outdo each other. Marketers and brand owners can use this to their advantage.
Challenging influencers can help boost the visibility of the brand as well as increase engagement. You can create an interesting challenge that relates back to your core product or service and reach out to several influencers to join. Winners can be determined based on the number of views, likes, or shares their posts get.
An apt example of this would be the Ice Bucket Challenge that had virtually every celebrity and influencer participating to raise awareness to a cause. It managed to shed light on the plight of the patients of ALS and encouraged many people to donate to the cause, raising over $220 million worldwide.
