Reaching the Right Customers: How You Can Make Influencer Marketing Work for You

Are you trying to generate sales for a new product? Elevate brand awareness? Stimulate trial? Boost foot traffic? Once you have a goal in mind and a plan in place for measuring its success, you can start identifying the brand advocates you will partner with to accomplish that goal. The key here, however, isn’t to just go out and select the top ten Instagram or Tik Tok users with the most followers and convince them to promote your product. Chances are these celebrities and influencers don’t quite align with your brand anyway. It’s all about finding the right influencers with the right amount of reach within your target audience segment. Understanding your true audience is key.

Begin forming organic relationships with your influencers that don’t strictly revolve around endorsements and promotions. Form real relationships. Show them how your brand fits within their lifestyles and why the partnership is a good fit for both parties. Make them feel like they matter–because they do!

Once influencers have been identified and partnerships established, create a secondary marketing campaign for the influencers to use when promoting your product. What do you want them to do with or say about your brand? Create branded content for them to distribute or set up guidelines for them to create their own. Either way, ensure the message is aligned with your overall campaign goals.

This is perhaps the scariest part for some brands–letting go of the reigns–but the payoff can be monumental. A study conducted by TapInfluence and Nielsen shows that the ROI for influencer marketing can be up to 11x that of a traditional advertising campaign.   And unlike ordinary digital advertising campaigns that usually disappear once completed, influencer content lives on forever, continuing to reach late adopters long after the “campaign” has ended.