If you step back and consider what marketing really means, you’ll understand that the single most important thing is the outcome. In most of the cases, the outcome is to improve brand awareness, sell more products/services, acquire new leads, and so on. The end result is to let your specific target audience know that you’re available and ready to offer them value.

You can use hundreds of digital marketing methods to promote your business. The success you’ll have with each of them depends on various factors, including your niche of activity and your branding strategy.

Influencer marketing is not really a new marketing strategy. Yet, it is extremely underrated by today’s marketer. Influencers have started to acquire more and more power. Their influence is getting bigger because the digital channels that rule today (social media) are giving them all the possibilities to exponentially broaden their reach.

 

(source: http://neilpatel.com/blog/make-influencer-marketing-work/)

As you can notice from the above graphic, today’s consumers are heavily influenced by other consumer’s opinions. More than just that, when the information comes from a real influencer (optimized authority and reach), the conversion rates of your marketing can drastically improve.

More Types of Influencers

An influencer is a person who has an above-average influence over more individuals. People respect influencer’s opinions because they take them as experts in the field or they perceive them as “cool”.

Nevertheless, there are more types of influencers, and here are just a few of them:

  • Social media influencers – They have big/huge databases of followers and they talk about a specific topic. YouTubers, Facebook pages, Instagrammers, Vine-video makers, etc.
  • TV Influencers – Famous journalists, actors, famous people, singers, etc. These are the people you usually see on TV, newspapers, and on media in general.
  • Small Influencers – Teachers, respected persons within a community, and individuals that have high status. They must also be recognized by more than just a few people.

Depending on your business size, niche, and objectives, you need to figure out which type of an influencer you need.To give you a hand, we’ve prepared several simple strategies to choose the right influencer for your marketing campaign:

A “Specific” Influencer with a “Specific Audience”

The single most important factor that will differentiate a successful influencer campaign from a mediocre one is the specificity of the influencer’s audience. The influencer’s followers should have specific interests that can match your offers proposal.

Moreover, that influencer should also belong to your “niche market” while not representing direct competition. For example, if you’re selling baby products, you can approach a popular mother that writes on her blog for passion. Her audience should be perfect for your marketing campaign and offers.

Seek Influencers that Don’t Promote Sponsored Content Frequently

Don’t do business with influencers that are already promoting their influence for money. More often than not, their audiences will be bored of so many advertisements. Therefore, an influencer that consistently “influences” other people by offering affiliate offers or sponsored ads/content is likely to have a disengaged audience.

You never want to deal with a disengaged audience, as your conversion rates will significantly decrease. That leads us to the next point…

Look for Influencers that Have Engaged Audiences

It’s almost obvious. If a blog post is being read, commented, and shared 1000 times, then it means that the visitors of the blog are definitely interested in the topic. Otherwise, if the average blog post gets 1000 views, 10 shares, and maybe 5 comments, the audience of that influencer is surely not so engaged.

Your best chance of getting more targeted leads is to make sure that you’re only approaching influencers that present engaged followers.

Don’t Always Look for the “Biggest”

The influencer with the biggest audience will always cost more. Yet, a big audience doesn’t necessarily mean a profitable audience. As I’ve mentioned countless times before, in order for an influencer marketing campaign to work great, it needs to focus on specificity.

Therefore, even if you find smaller influencers of which audiences are extremely suited for your products and services, you should go for it. Analyze the ROI (return of investment) after negotiating with each influencer and observe which party offers you the most benefits.

Find Influencers that Value Your Work

You’ll find it much easier to negotiate and collaborate with an influencer that values and respects your work. Considering that your business niche is the same or very similar with his and considering that your offer is extremely valuable for his own audience, you’ll have a winner.

Mike Hudson, Marketing Manager at AussieWritings.com, gives us his definition of a “winning influencer”:

“A winner influencer is an entity that will always serve your business well.You’ll be able to collaborate on a long term basis and maybe he’ll even feature your products among his website/platforms and platforms for free. Who knows? You might also win a like-minded friend too!”

Takeaways

As a last important insight, you should never expect perfect results right from the start. Like every marketing campaign and every possible marketing strategy, you need to be consistent. You need to test, fail, assess, re-organize, optimize, and finally scale.
About the Author: Olivia is a young journalist who is passionate about digital marketing, career and self-development. She constantly tries to learn something new and share this experience on different websites. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.