Social media is one of the most popular marketing channels right now. It helps brands to build long-term relationships with their consumers. Hence, the use of traditional marketing (TV and print ads) is gradually decreasing.
Influencer marketing is a very popular strategy used by marketers and brands right now. If an influencer supports your brand with great reviews, chances are people following them might buy your products or services.
Twitter is emerging to be an impactful platform for influencer marketing. A single tweet from an influencer about a product has encouraged 40% of Twitter users to buy it. Also, approximately, 75% of people research social media for recommendations and advice before making any decisions about buying.
Work with the Right Influencers
A crucial step in influencer marketing is to identify suitable and successful influencers for your brand. List your required traits in an influencer, keeping in mind your campaign’s goals. This will help you identify influencers who can help you achieve your goals.
Authenticity, activeness, engagement, expertise, and leadership are some important traits to look for in an influencer. Let’s take a closer look:
Authentic: It is important that the influencer truly believes in your brand. The genuineness will reflect in their blog posts, Tweets, or Instagram posts and their audience can relate to your brand. 75 percent of marketers look for the authenticity of the content from influencers.
Active: The key to be a successful influencer is to stay fresh in the minds of their audiences. And this depends on how frequently they post their content on social media platforms.
Engaging: How many like, comments, and shares does the influencer’s content get? A high engagement rate will benefit your brand because it means that the influencer’s followers are interested in the content posted.
Expertise: Being an expert or specialist in a specific niche is an important part of being an influencer. It is always better to collaborate with an influencer who is highly relevant to your industry.
Leadership: It’s simple and easy to follow trends and fads on social media. But one important aspect of a good influencer is that they create and get issues trending.
An increasing number of companies have started adopting an influencer marketing strategy over traditional marketing. While implementing this strategy, one common problem you will always face is finding the right influencers for your brand and products.
There are many tools and software available, which can help you to find and identify relevant influencer marketers. There are paid as well as free tools available. These tools can not only help you find your right influencer, they can also help you to design your campaign.
Grin is one such Influencer marketing platform which can help you identify and work with top social influencers. The software includes search, management, and tracking tools.
How influencer marketing can help you build trust with your customers
1. Promote the Experience
Help the influencers you work with to get involved with the product. This helps to create a sense of truthfulness and dependability between your influencer and consumers.
Invite the influencer to use and experience your product, help them understand why your service or product is worth talking about/mentioning on social media. The influencer’s posts will reflect the genuineness of their relationship with your product or service.
Example: Sephora is a French chain of cosmetic stores. They offer beauty products including skincare, bath & body, nail color, tools & brushes, hair, and makeup.
Sephora sends beauty products for free to popular beauty blogger, and vloggers, asking them to write a genuine review of the products. This community is known as, “Beauty Insiders.”
As the experiences of bloggers and vloggers are original and unbiased, their followers appreciate the genuineness of the promotions. Thus, increasing trust in the brand.
2. Offer Discounts
Some people might buy your product or service right after reading the feedback and reviews given by the influencer. But some customers might not because of the high price of the product or just the lack of confidence to try out a new product.
The influencer can use discount coupons on their links to attract more customers to try your product. They can also use unique hashtags to promote the product or brand. The word “Discount” undoubtedly attracts a sizable number of consumers. And there is a good possibility that at least some customers will decide to check out the link.
Example: Daniel Wellington is a Swedish watchmaker. They worked in partnership with many influencers on Instagram. These influencers were asked to post a picture and highlight a discount code for 15% off on Daniel Wellington watches.
In less than five years, Daniel Wellington evolved from being a startup company to a company worth $220 million. Below is the picture of a Daniel Wellington watch posted by David Ambarzumjan, one of the influencers the brand partnered with.
3. Customer Endorsements
Turning your satisfied consumers into influencers is a great way of strengthening your brand. They have had a good experience and are optimistic about your brand. Use the feedback and testimonials from your customers and highlight it on the front page of your product website.
They will be more than happy to share their experiences. Those testimonials will be the first thing that gets noticed by your potential customers. It is a clever and effortless tactic to develop and maintain trust.
Example: Glossier is a Manhattan-based beauty startup. Rather than hiring a big celebrity, the company relied on the feedback of regular women. The endorsements from their regular customers helped them to promote their beauty products.
4. Have Influencers Share Your Product or Brand in a Post
A simple way of sharing content related to your brand is having an influencer mention your product in a post or video.
An influencer can also use Instagram or Pinterest to share pictures and share their experiences with your products in the comments.
Around 90 percent of influencers use Instagram to promote products or brands. Next comes Facebook and Twitter with 80 and 75 percent respectively.
5. Build a Relationship
The idea of using an influencer for marketing will only work out if you put in your time and energy. It is very important to develop a genuine relationship between an influencer and your brand. While contacting an influencer, remember to explain clearly why you would like them to work with you.
Influencers deserve fair compensation. Even before meeting influencers, think about your budget and propose a fair payment to influencer. In your initial email interactions, you can mention the payment which you wish to pay. And you can always invite them to discuss the compensation in detail.
Example: Under Armour is an American company that produces sports, casual, and sports apparel. They built a relationship with Stephen Curry, who is a professional American basketball player. According to the estimation of Morgan Stanley, Under Armour made a turn over of $14 billion. The company was able to achieve such a huge turn over only after they teamed up with Stephen Curry.
6. Give Influencers Creative Freedom
One of the biggest mistakes brands make is controlling the content developed by an influencer. Restricting the creative freedom of your influencer can actually impact the quality of your brand content.
Firstly, the content developed by the influencer will have an absence of originality as it will no longer be their story. This, in turn, will spoil the genuineness of the campaign.
Secondly, since the influencer is not given full creative freedom to work on brand content, they might not show interest in collaborating with your brand again. This is a major reason why over 63 percent of influencers are not interested in working for a brand again. Almost 83 percent of the influencers are willing to work again with a brand if they are given the creative freedom to play around with the content.
Example: Clothing brand, Zara, teamed up with top fashion Instagrammers on the #iamdenim campaign. The purpose of the campaign was to showcase their latest products.
The brand worked with influencers, who posted their pictures, which showcased some new trends in fashion industry. In less than a year, there was an increase of 4.6 million followers on Zara’s Instagram account.
The reason for this huge jump was the creative freedom given to the influencers.
Final Thoughts
Brands are using influencer marketing to enhance their brand visibility and increase their sales. The crucial part of the process is to find a suitable influencer who will help you connect with your target audience on a large scale.
Make sure you are establishing a strong relationship with your influencers. This will help to carry and reflect the originality of the content to your customers. Such authenticity is the key to winning your customers’ trust.
Do you know any other ways or approaches to using Influencer marketing to win consumers’ trust? Let me know in the comments section below.
