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What Is Influencer Marketing?

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As expaus connects brands and influencers, the glaring question is what influencer marketing is. It seems another jargon in town, but the truth is it’s an old strategy, one that keeps putting a new hat as things in the marketing world change. And things are changing swiftly.

Let’s understand the basics.

Influencer marketing can be easily grasped as marketing that focuses on key people to bring your brand’s message to a bigger audience. Basically, it’s tapping people with considerable influence and reputation to do the heavy lifting on your behalf. We call these people influencers. That’s what this is all about. So instead of you doing direct marketing to your target audience, you make influencers do it for you.

How do you make influencers work for you?

  1. Hire them.

This is the easiest way. Key leaders and advertisers can tap their audience and bring your brand’s message to them, and you can make them do that by paying them. It’s simple. Large corporations do that. The thing is, not every entity that wants to get their message across is a huge corporation that can shell out huge funds for marketing.

  1. Inspire them.

This is the hard way, but this organic way works better than traditional paid advertising. Inspiring people is harder than paying them to do work for you. When you’re able to inspire someone to deliver your brand’s message or your vision to their own audience, it means you did something to earn their trust, usually through making your brand’s message or your vision compelling enough.

  1. Build connections.

Sometimes you influence influencers not necessarily through the strength of your campaign but through the strength of the rapport you’ve built with them.

These three factors can be discussed independently in greater detail.

Influencer marketing uses virtually similar platforms and strategies as other types of marketing. It uses the social media and utilizes popular sites, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Organic influencer marketing happens on these social media platforms, which your influencers also use to move your campaign to micro-networks. Eventually, you’re growing influence in small networks, as opposed to advertising in a larger network with a vast heterogeneous audience.

The success of influencer marketing depends on five things.

  1. The strength of your brand’s message
  2. The connection you build with your influencers
  3. The reputation of your influencers
  4. Your marketing plan
  5. Evaluation

Successful influencer marketing brings results. A marker of results is ROI or sales. Increase in revenue is a strong indication that a strategy is working. Stagnant or negative revenue means you need to examine the components of your efforts and modify them or plan a different strategy.

expaus, however, has tested different strategies and identified key techniques in ensuring higher success rate. After all, our mission is to help your brand achieve its maximum potential through well placed influence.