2018 is almost coming to an end. It is very evident that the world of advertising and promotion is now driven by the influencer culture. While brands are attracting new customers with their smart approach to inbound marketing, smarter businesses are targeting content marketing to make things happen. So, if those are the two hot-selling cakes that every online business should probably swear by, how about we talk about the remix here. Advertising works on account of the integrity of the seller or their representatives. As per a report, a majority of B2B service and product buyers – 95% – consider content as trustworthy when evaluating a company and its offerings. Hence, it is crucial that brands and businesses inculcate the essence of trust and familiarity in their content as well as their promotional strategy.
Influencer marketing is the most effective channel for customer acquisitions. Since influencer marketing has become as popular as blogging for business, brands are roping in other people who happen to be highly followed and trusted by their followers (also, target audience) so that they can successfully pitch their offerings to a definitive set of audience. Correspondingly, marketers are making an average of $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing with 70 percent earning $2 or more and 13 percent earning $20 or more.
With such a strong potential for bringing new clients onboard and also generating a strong return on investment, it is highly recommended that you, as a business, must effectively implement the mixed value of Content Marketing and Influencer Marketing. You may ask, ‘how’, here’s a brief guide.
Weaving Content Marketing & Influencer Marketing together
Using this mixed strategy can help new businesses get a grip on customers who can assure sale, for more than half of the time. On an average, content marketing churns a conversion rate for businesses and brands that is six times higher than those that don’t use Content Marketing. On the other hand, influencers build their reputations on a foundation of trust. Mingling these two can bring about impeccable brand conversion results. Here’s how you can power your Content Marketing efforts by supercharging them with Influencer marketing.
Choosing the right set of influencers
Once you have finally made the decision to go with Influencer Marketing as an effort, you need to identify your target audience and figure out the respective influencers, in terms of their industry. While choosing the right influencers, you need to understand that the image of this chosen influencer(s) has to align with your brand image. Secondly, this influencer should have quite a reach amongst their followers and must have a trust base with them.
Talking business on terms
Once you have compiled a list of probable influencers, you will have to clear your business terms with them and finalize the working terms such as the investment per influencer post, the kind of content chosen for a particular influencer, and obviously the terms and conditions laid by the influencer. Just remember that this is going to be a long-term engagement and any relationship mishap can deeply affect the reputation of your brand in the eyes of the followers.
Influencer-specific Content marketing campaigns
Running multiple Content marketing campaigns is a common instance for brands. This holds true for influencer marketing as well. You can obviously hire many influencers to endorse your offering. This way, you would be able to promote more and more offerings, using a particular campaign; ensuring that a particular influencer sticks to a particular campaign, gaining more trust in the particular product/service. Hence, aim to hire different influencers for different campaigns and run them in a parallel manner.
Creating content for Influencers
Well, when you hire your influencers, you must decide beforehand if you will be creating the promotional content for them or if their payment package includes the clause where they create worthy content for your brand/business. Regardless of the content creator here, your concern must be the quality of the final content that goes out to the followers, so that more conversions happen.
For each influencer you hire, you must have a content policy in place which is mutually agreed upon by both the parties. Your influencers can approach your inbound marketing strategies by promoting content either in the blogs, Images, or Videos format.
Set target
Collaboration with reputed and well-followed influencers can be of huge help for the promotion of your offerings. However, it is very important that you set targets for experienced and rising influencers, alike. These targets will put your hired influencers in a spot that they really need to put in work in order to promote your product and churn out the right value of your investment.
Equip influencers with tools to help programs succeed
Some marketing campaigns require the use of certain tools by the influencers in order to drive in a higher percentage of conversions. It is the responsibility of the business to make this a point that if their influencers are not equipped with the right tool, they must provide them at the earliest. However, a lot of brands put this out in their agreement as a clause/pre-requisite.
Focus on ROI of your Influencer Marketing pursuits
Influencer marketing content delivers 11X greater ROI than traditional forms of digital marketing. But, to make sure that you are actually driving a great ROI on your efforts, you must employ tools to manage influencer relationships. These tools such as Dealspotr, Klear, GroupHigh, and Traackr offer standardized metrics across teams, brands, and geographic locations to help you scale your influencer strategy.
Conclusion:
Putting all that time and effort into building great content requires a lot of brainstorming and entrepreneurial pressure. This holds true for established businesses as well as startups. So, you must leave no stone unturned in order to promote it. Putting together your content marketing campaign with a smart influencer marketing move can help you serve a deeper part of the funnel.
Hence, to build a B2B influencer marketing program or just a capable Content Marketing plus Influencer Marketing mix, you must play all your cards right so that you can effectively use Content Marketing and Influencer marketing together.
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Pawan Sahu is the founder of MarkupTrend. He is a Digital Marketer and a blogger geek passionate about writing articles related to WordPress, SEO, Marketing, Web Design, and CMS etc.
