While surfing on social media every day, you see lives of various people both famous and not famous. Out of all the people you know, especially on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, let’s say 50% are friends, 10% family, 20% celebrities and remaining 20% with high amount of followers who engaged you in interesting content. They aren’t really actors or anything of that sort. They are what we call as “Social Media Influencers”. Influencers are individual social media profiles like of celebrities.
Influencer Marketing
Influence Outreach Program or Influencer Marketing is a process by which a company or brand contacts popular individuals to promote its services or products to the brand’s targeted customer base. It is a very indirect form of promotion.
Okay, so let’s see how this works. Let’s take example of Yasmin Karachiwala. She is a celebrity gym trainer. Whenever she posts a picture of Reebok sports shoes and tags Reebok, they benefit out of it. How? Let’s see. You get to know that she being a celebrity trainer trusts the brand Reebok. Automatically, you start trusting it too.
You get to know that the tagged brand in her photo, Reebok has come up with new shoes which you must check out as they are pretty much in and trending. In short, Reebok gets to reach its potential customers via Social media influencer.
Now you might be thinking on what basis are these influencers chosen? It’s very simple. Brands will choose influencers who account matches with their interest. A company which produces gym equipment would contact Yasmin Karachiwala.
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Influencer marketing is of 2 types – Earned Influencer Marketing and Paid Influencer Marketing.
Earned Influencer Marketing is an unpaid form of marketing which is mutually beneficial for both the brand and the influencer. This generally happens if they have a pre-existing relationship or if they are both part of some 3rd party content.
Paid Influencer Marketing is a paid form of marketing wherein either the brand pays the influencer to advertise its products via photos, images or videos or it pays the influencer for publishing testimonials or product reviews on their page.
But why have companies turned to individuals for promotion? They have their own advantages!
Increased Social Reach – Influencers have a large social reach as they have massive amount of followers on almost all the social media platforms.
Unique and Fresh Content – The content that these people use to promote the brand is generally very catchy and original. Because initially they want to engage their followers on social media.
Strong Credibility and Consumer Trust – Influencers maintain a strong relationship with their customers and their followers trust their opinions. This works in the favour of the plan.
Along with these advantages, these types of marketing is comparatively easy to carry out. There are 4 steps to it.
1) Finding a popular influencer.
2) Introducing products to different Influencers.
3) Product marketing with help of certain influencers.
4) Taking influencers on board as brand ambassadors.
Influencers are chosen by keeping in the mind the popularity and field of interest. They are generally educators, trainers, entertainers, etc. Usually seeing the same ads or the same celebrity promoting a product we get bored and start ignoring it. So this is where influencers play a role so the marketing of the company is carried out by hook or crook.
Author: Ankita Mundhra