It’s a well-known fact in today’s competitive landscape that influencers are significantly impacting the way businesses are being conducted. When it comes to helping marketers reach target audiences effectively, authentically and affordably, influencers are playing their bit outstandingly. Despite being criticised for its plausibility by some quarters, influencer marketing is being touted as an effective strategy to position any company’s brand image and identity. This makes it one of the safest ways to market products or services through a channel of trusted people in the industry.
To begin with, let us first understand who influencers actually are. Let us suppose a person X wants to sell a commodity through the internet. What he needs now is a potent channel with which he could get the commodity to the masses. This whole system of selling encompasses a dedicated website, advertising, social media marketing and of course a well-calculated budget.
Now here comes the crucial role of influencers who can nudge customers toward buying the commodity by showing or mentioning its positive aspects. So, influencers are basically the professionals who are well-known in a particular field and who are quite capable to sway people’s opinion and beliefs. In a nutshell – based on the feedback of influencers – people find it easier to make decisions regarding the purchase of any given product or service.
Influencers Are Important For An E-Commerce Business
Marketing needs no rules and covenants – it is just an art of making situations conducive to selling a product. When it comes to an e-commerce business, and since there is usually no physical location of stores, business owners need a positive brand image in order to reach to the masses. As a matter of fact, an influencer who mentions a particular brand is essentially carrying a marketing campaign for the seller.
The power of influencers can easily be understood by a survey conducted by Neilson, which suggests as many as 92% consumers around the world trust word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family above other types of advertising. Also, 81% people get influenced by their friend’s social media sharing and 71% people accepted that their perception regarding a brand has changed after reading positive reviews.
With the rise of big players like Amazon, there has been a palpable surge in online shopping, which is very soon going to take over the traditional market. Therefore, engaging influencers has become an effective marketing strategy on the part of business owners. Today, consumers become greatly influenced by the purchasing decision of fellow consumers and not just that they are blindly following influencers on social media.
When an organisation collaborates with an influencer, it not just promotes its brand among the audience, but the networks of its audience as well. Since the kind of influence being exerted by certain professionals on the psyche of the general public, it is also pertinent for businesses to identify the most influential people who can incredibly beneficial for them o strengthen their presence as well as reputation. Furthermore, there is always a mutually beneficial relationship formed between companies and influencers, in which companies receive credible advertising and influencers are able to strengthen their position among masses.
How To Use Influencer Marketing
If you are contemplating to run an e-commerce business or are already running one, influencer marketing could be a powerful tool for you in terms of increasing sales, creating brand awareness and acquiring new customers. It primarily conjoins both social media as well as content marketing strategies in a manner that shapes public opinion quite effectively. Here is how you can use influencer marketing to your advantage:
Allow influencers To Help Create Rich Content: Startup e-commerce businesses generally struggle due to the lack of marketing budget in order to launch their business and compete with established players. So, if you are finding yourself in such as tight spot, you can save both time and money by encouraging key influencers to create relevant content for your brand. You can also collaborate with influencers on powerful content ideas such as infographics, white papers and interview features.
Get them to do a product/service review:As we already discussed how people’s opinion get swayed by influencers’ recommendations, so it makes a lot of sense to get influencers on board and convince them to exclusively write reviews regarding your products or services. Afterwards, you can feature their reviews on various social media channels as well.
Use influencer marketing tools: Since incorporating influencer marketing is a tricky business as you have to choose the most appropriate influencer, so certain influencer marketing tools could be of great help for you on that. These can help you identify the most relevant and engaging bloggers, journalists and media outlets in their niche industry segments. Some of the effective tools are BuzzSumo etc.
Replicate influencer campaigns from the experts: By replicating influencer campaign from experts, we mean incorporating user-generated content and building a brand ambassador program.