Using influencers to boost your marketing isn’t necessarily anything new or revolutionary. Everyone’s favourite celebrities who tell stories about the brand have been the cornerstone for companies’ for years and years in reference marketing, sponsoring and event marketing as well.
The rise of social media has made it possible to be more convincing, to reach completely new audiences and to create much larger network of influencers than ever before. To be able to create successful influencer marketing, however, requires a new mind-set. You have to focus on including it into company’s long-time strategies instead of just creating brief, individual campaigns. PING Helsinki provides five tips on how to succeed in cooperating with influencers.
It’s time to move to the next level in influencer marketing – and this means gaining profit with strategic, longterm cooperation. Planning the actions of influencer marketing have to be included into yearly planning of the whole company’s marketing. It can even get a central position in the whole marketing mix.
Using the company’s own channels and planning all the actions of influencer cooperation in paid, owned as well as earned channels already early in the planning phase will get you so much further than only renting social media influencers’ channels.
It’s not enough anymore to just be and interesting influencer with nice content. You have to know how to collect data and use it in all parts of the process: from creating strategy to planning, selecting the right influencers, distributing the content as well as measuring the effects.
The only way to get as much out of the influencer cooperation as possible is to consider all possible options already in the planning phase.
Remember to consider what kind of content you need, if you can use influencers as experts of their target group or invite them to participate in service design?
You also have to think what kind of influencers are the most important to your company’s business. Is it important to talk to mega, macro or micro influencers, experts or even nano influencers? Successful influencer marketing is about finding the right combination of win-win-win: on the terms of influencers, with the goals of the company and always serving the audience.
The importance of live content has grown in all channels and it is important that its possibilities are taken into consideration also in the commercial cooperations. It is also crucial to remember to reserve enough resources into monitoring the live content.
Podcasts and other vocal content have also finally found their audience in Finland, too, and in 2019 it’s time to see who’s who. Besides creating a good storyline, you have to focus on having an interesting narrator as well as quality production.
The first steps of B2B influencer marketing have been taken and an increasing number of good examples will be seen.
The field of social media influencers will grow and new fields such as sponsoring, e-sports and using social media influencers in traditional channels (e.g. as authors) will provide possibilities of cooperation in many new channels.
Succesful cooperation requires trust and being real. Trust comes from the transparency, openness and honesty of the cooperation.
Being real, on the other hand, requires finding influencers who match with the values of the company. They should be ready to recommend the company’s products even without the cooperation.
It also requires willingness to give free hands to the chosen influencer to use his/her own style and tone of voice. They need to talk about things that matter to them and to use their own personality as freely as possible.
Influencer cooperation is succesful when it is a part or the entire plan of marketing and sales. That’s why you have to think carefully which channels to choose, how and with who the cooperation is planned and executed, what kind of content will be produces, how the actions are being monitored and measured.
We will gladly participate in creating succesful models of influencer cooperation with You!
Inna-Pirjetta
Are you wondering how to create even more succesful influencer marketing, how to find the right influencers and what kind of agreements to make with them? You can now sign up for practical influencer marketing training on February 9, 2019. Together with Maria Sillanpää from Bonfire Agency we will give you the best cases and tools in both B2B and B2C influencer marketing!