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How to Execute an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy in 2017

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Influencer marketing may seem new, especially because it now heavily entails social media usage. The truth is, it has been around for decades. We don’t know exactly when it began. But what we know is that as early as mid-1900s the influence of opinion leaders in shaping how people think has been recognized. And getting key people to influence a target population has been integral in influencer marketing.

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In 2017, social media still takes a huge chunk in marketing strategies. The importance of social media is predicted to remain for a while. The new wave of marketing, however, focuses on everyday, average consumers. Are we abandoning the focus on popular bloggers, key professionals, and celebrities? Not really. The new strategies simply need to add more prominence on regular consumers.

 

What are these strategies?

 

Conducting Research

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Doing your homework puts you ahead in the game. Your homework includes finding your influencers, knowing how they are connected to you (if you’re connected at all), how they are connected to your audience, and who among them has the biggest potential for engagement.

 

Defining Strategies

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This could well be an article on its own. A concise picture of how you should define your strategies includes understanding your goals, familiarizing what your audience seeks, planning your content and adjusting it to your consumer needs, and engineering your content so that it reaches your targets.

 

Drafting a Content Plan

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This may be part of the previous step. But we can talk a bit more about this. The question you need to answer is this: What does your audience want you to talk about? This involves understanding frequent consumer issues. This is where you have to look at your audience and know what their problems are. What are they looking for?

 

A crucial part of content planning is keyword research. When doing keyword research, you’ll eventually realize what people tend to look for by looking for the keywords or key phrases with the biggest search volume recently. However, you also have to identify which ones have the most and least competition. In many ways, tailoring favorable keywords is more about finding that sweet spot between high and low competition and between high and low search volume.

 

Writing Strong Content

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You can meet your influencers and have them share your content through building rapport. But at the end of the day, the strength and persuasiveness of your content are the factors that will either make or break your goals. Your influencers can do as far share your content with a wider network. Whether this works in your favor, whether this leads to positive popularity or whether it leads to your notoriety in your niche, depends much on your content. Content with high value and uniqueness earns respect. Content that is empty clickbait earns the audience’s ire.

 

If you look at the most viral posts, the posts with most social media engagement, they’re popular not only because they were shared around by influencers but also because they have content of high value.