Influencer Marketing: 5 Tips on How to Improve Your Marketing Strategy and Grow Your Business

For many small businesses, the use of social media influencers is a new area of marketing. Most small brands don’t use influencer marketing because they believe that it’s too expensive or ineffective.

But Influencer marketing is achieving tremendous growth and current trends show that will keep growing.

Here are some tips you need to know about how to improve your influencer marketing strategy.

1. Relationships Are Important

Some influencers are using their status as an influencer primarily as a way to make money online. Every business that engages them to market their stuff is just another paycheck. But these types of marketing are not ideal. Especially with small businesses, relationships are much more important than just pay to advertise your products.

If you treat an influencer well then they’ll treat you accordingly. Give them something they love or like, and they’re likely to keep using it and talking about it.

If you build long-term relationships with influencers, you build long-term benefits for your business.

2. Influencers Can Increase Your Online Exposure

The technique of marketing is to increase your online exposure to potential customers. That’s because the greater your exposure, the easier it is to sell your products or services.

Who’s going to buy something if they don’t know it? These days social media exposure is a critical part of marketing. Even small businesses can benefit from being well-known on the local social media networks.

Social media hasn’t completely replaced word-of-mouth yet but has taken a similar role.

These days social media exposure is more difficult if you use paid advertising. Ad blockers have reduced the importance of paid ads.

So the best way to increase your online exposure is influencer marketing.

3. Niche Influencers or Micro-influencers

Who are niche influencers? They’re influencers who appeal to smaller, but specific, audiences. Niche influencers these days are commonly referred to as micro-influencers or even nano-influencers and represent some of the most popular influencer marketing trends.

A niche influencer might be the owner of a local coffee shop. He has a nice Instagram following and writes a blog on the coffee shop website. People read that blog and follow the Instagram account because they’re looking for new ideas or products.

If you’re selling the same types of coffee products or similar, you could reach him for a post on your products. He influences people who would be interested in your products or even services.

4. Your Audience and Influencers’ Audience

Important Tip. No matter how well you collaborate with influencers, you should never forget that social media marketing is all about the audience. With so much content out there, everyone is searching for engagement and individual attention.

They’re trying to sell their brand, promote their ideas, and tell their story. Sometimes it’s done with blog posts and other times with an Instagram story. No matter how well each advertisement is put together, without the personal touch it’s just another ad.

Influencer marketing is all about the people who will read the influencer content. They like to feel informed or helped, not sold. When working with influencers, remember that they know their audience much better than you do, and they’re making that audience yours for the campaign.

It’s important to collaborate and take what the influencer has to say seriously.

5. Don’t Use Only Agencies — Humanize Your Business

Agencies can help you to identify influencers and shaping your marketing strategy, but they cannot help you to humanize your business.

Customers who will purchase from you are not another number or a new sale, but a real person. Capitalize on that by becoming a real person to them, instead of a faceless name hidden behind an agency. You need to humanize your business.

Influencers are great at helping you do this, and they will become a part of your marketing team themselves. One of the most powerful benefits of influencer marketing is that it allows you to attract a direct group of consumers.

Influencer marketing is most effective when the influencer knows more about you and your business.