Growing a business in the year 2021 is not an easy task. With covid-19 essentially shutting down a lot of business and making them go bankrupt, corporations have to think of new and innovative ideas to keep their business going.
There are a lot of innovative techniques that were used in the year 2020 and are still going forward in 2021 stronger and better. This technique included a lot of content marketing, live streaming videos, Search Engine Optimization techniques, Paid advertising, etc. Out of these techniques, one technique that appealed to all sectors of industry is influencer marketing.
What is Influencer Marketing? And the Rise of Influencer Marketing During the COVID-19 Pandemic:
Influencer Marketing refers to a technique in which a brand collaborates with a particular influencer that has a huge fan following on social media and otherwise to market your product and brand.
During the covid-19 pandemic, influencer marketing was on a huge rise, and it still is. A lot of brands collaborated with celebrities and bloggers to give a shout-out to their brands from the comfort of their own homes. And since a lot of influencers were sitting at homes in lockdown, this was the best way they could earn money and promote brands. You can ask a popular interior designer influencer to market it for you Influencer Marketing turned out to be a great profitable way to increase the audience reach for brands and boost marketing and advertisement with the highest return on investment.
In this article, we will further list down Methods and ways of influencing marketing you can use to grow your business.
How to Use Influencer Marketing to Grow your Business:
Influencer marketing can be done in multiple ways. The main point is to get an influencer to target his audience and market your product to them. Following are a few ways influencer marketing is done.
- Sponsored and Paid Content
This is the most used form of influencer marketing that is used by businesses. In this, they pay a certain amount to the influencer to sponsor your product or your brand, etc. This is kind of referred to as celebrity endorsement of the digital age.
Sponsored content usually refers to a social media ad that contains your product or brand’s content. So either a celebrity would feature him or herself advertising your product or the influencer can share your advertised product on their social media pages.
Since Facebook is not much used by Gen Z and millennials today, Instagram is a platform that is more on the upraise as well. And a lot of brands are using Instagram shout outs to get traffic to their pages and advertise their products as well.
- Discounts and Affiliate Links
Discount is an age-old strategy that is used by the marketer to advertise their products and drive sales. Everyone just plain loves discounts and influencer specific discounts have a special kind of appeal to it.
These discounted ads mostly have affiliated links to them, which again in terms help the brand to grow their business.
- Contests and Giveaways
This is another strategy influencers use to market products. They hold contests for their audience and give your product as a giveaway prize. And while everyone loves free stuff, but if it is coming from an influencer, it holds another kind of esteemed value for customers.
- Influencer Content on your Social Media pages
While most of the influencer advertise products on their social media pages, but you can also ask the influencer to advertise the product on your own business social media pages.
This is a practice that encourages brand reputation in the existing customer’s mind and encourages loyalty. You can give the influencer access to your social media channel for the day to make this happen.
- Brand Ambassadors
If the influencer is a perfect fit for your brand you can permanently sign them on as brand ambassadors. This would mean that they would work for your brand for a certain period and market your products to the audience.
This is kind of a long term influencer marketing strategy, which is usually adopted by big brands who can afford big pay rates of influencers etc.
- Live Streaming Videos of Influencer
If an influencer uses your product in a live streaming video on Facebook, Instagram, or youtube, this could do wonders for your brand. Because live streaming videos give the customer a sense of trust that the influencer is using the product. So if you want to market your titan 440 repacking kit, maybe you can ask your influencer to show how they are using the repacking kit in their sprayer.
The above-mentioned strategies are the most common ones that are used in the year 2020 and are continuing in 2021. The assumption is that influencer marketing will stay active for a while, people will probably just figure out a new innovative way to give your particular content an edge.
- Benefits of Influencer Marketing
Now that you know about different ways you can use influencer marketing to target your audience and increase your audience read, it?s a good idea to find out a few more benefits of investing in influencer marketing:
- It increases your audience reach
- Build trust for your brand
- Increases loyalty among your existing customers
- Increase traffic to your website and social media pages
- Get more lead in terms of clients, sponsorship, PR packages, etc.
- Drive more sales
- It also increases the number of your social followers.
Conclusion
Influencer Marketing is here to stay and benefit your business in ways that can only bring you profits and build a reputation for your brand. So it?s a wise decision for you to invest in influencer marketing, however, the key is to invest in the right influencer. If you are dealing with tech products but getting an influencer from the fashion industry, it won’t work out for you as much. So invest wisely in influencer marketing.
