While an influencer is a trusted figure within a niche or community with a loyal fan base or following who has the authority to influence his/her follower's decisions and opinions. Influencer marketing, on the other hand, is a marketing strategy in which influencers promote a company's product or services through various media outlets in which they already have a large following.
Influencer marketing is a fast growing marketing field and strategy, with 90% of purchasers trusting recommendations from their peers and the increasing importance of social media to people's daily lives and businesses, there is a great need for your company to use influencer marketing effectively to reach more people and potential customers via recommendations from people they trust in certain niches.
However, despite the importance of influencer marketing, a brand that cannot leverage technology to engage their influencers, track their influencer activity, track conversions, analyze trends, and measure the returns on investment can only see minimal success as compared to those brands who can make effective use of technology to do all these things and more.
Influencer marketing platforms are software and technology solutions that can be very instrumental to managing leads and revenue as well as driving your brand awareness through their hand-picked influencers. Instead of coordinating your influencer programs and campaigns yourself, you can pay fees to your influencer marketing platform partners who will bring in more ROI and revenue with data driven influencer relationship management that can guarantee your company's brand success. Some great influencer marketing platforms include: Upfluence, Fohr card, Neoreach and Popular Pays among others.
Influencer marketing is not as white and black as just paying people to advertise or speak of your products and services, it is all about creating relationships with influencers who can become your partners. A good influencer marketing platform should give you the opportunity to not just find influencers but to also move beyond your transactions with them and create relationships with them. Your influencer marketing platform should, therefore, understand and provide for influencer relationship management.
A good influencer marketing campaign should provide you with key performance indicators of each individual influencer as well as an overview of performance and metrics of influencer marketing programs and campaigns.
A good influencer marketing platform should have powerful algorithms that allow you to fish out influencers that can have a large impact on your company’s revenues and sales, and analyze the impact, presence and influence of your influencer whether based on niche or demographic-specific influence.
A good influencer marketing platform should hand-pick their influencers, just like a writing service company hand-picks their writers. Although, an influencer marketer can bring great revenue to your brand, they can also make poor decisions that can negatively influence your brand. For example, after Gilbert Gottfried made some insensitive comments about a tsunami in Japan, Alfac had to make a statement about his behavior and fire him.
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Make sure the influencer marketing platform of your choice can provide you with enough data to analyze and understand the presence and influence of every influencer when you're searching for them so you can get an influencer that is suitable for your products, services and brand needs.
Will you be able to build, nurture relationships and create partnerships with influencers on the platform? This is an important factor you should consider before making your choice when it comes to influencer marketing platform.
Can you access the 360-degree view of every social media aspect of your influencer's life, that is, even if you want to leverage their influence on Instagram, do you know about what they do on other social media platforms or handles?
Before making your choice, you should make sure the platform can provide you with expertise on how to manage your influencer, as well as advice or best practices that can help you maximize your influencer marketing ROI.
You also have to consider the cost and the return on investment. Can you gain enough revenue to cover the cost of the influencer marketing platform?
You should ensure your chosen influencer marketing platform deploys effective tools in discovering influencers, managing relationships with influencers and tracking the metrics and KPIs of programs, campaigns and influencers?
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There are many influencer marketing platforms out there and many of them offer wonderful services and opportunities. But you need to choose the best platform, not just because of their impressive track records, but because you know that they would be the best fit for your company and brand and will bring in the best leads, revenue and brand-awareness for your company.
