Influencer marketing has exploded in the last few years and your first thoughts when you hear the word influencer might be Love Island or the Kardashians. Now, we’re not suggesting that your business needs to reach out to influencers with millions of Instagram followers, but it can be a key part of your marketing strategy to work with small scale niche influencers that make sense and are relevant to your brand.
Micro and niche influencers are smaller scale and able to tap into the interests and specific audiences that you’re trying to target. Instead of follower counts, it’s much better to look at the type and quality of content an influencer is creating. A follower’s expertise will be the factor that drives engagement and sets you apart from your competitors.
Who to Choose?
One of the best ways to start looking for a good micro/niche influencer is to see who already follows or engages with your brand. This means that they’ll already be someone that is familiar with your products, endorses them and enjoys them – this gives a level of authenticity that’s priceless. They’ll also be someone that lives the values of your brand if they’re already a fan.
Look around at your employees or loyal customers who could be perfect ready-made influencers. They might not be ‘influencers’ per se, but could still be great ambassadors for your brand and can create content that’s relevant, authentic and resonates with your audience.
Think outside the box and work with a range of influencers that can bring different things to the table, or that produce varied content that can appeal to different demographics and audiences on other platforms. The key things to always look out for are consistency, originality and quality content.
Content
The type of content aesthetic and style that an influencer creates should align with your brand. An influencer is like an extension of your brand, so think about your brand TOV and identity and try to find influencers that produce content that’d fit in with your whole image. On the other hand, you could try out some different ideas and encourage influencers to try out new things and new creative ventures, which could be a great direction for your brand to go in.
Use data and research to inform your influencers about the demographics your brand attracts, so that they can create content using language and references that resonate with them. Give them as much information as possible to drive quality content.
Ask your potential influencers to share their own data too with previous campaigns they’ve worked on – conversion metrics, engagement rates and their endorsement history will all be useful data to tap into, so you can make good decisions about the influencers that you’d like to work to work with.
If you’d like to talk through any aspect of your business’ marketing strategy and find out new ways to improve how you get in front of your customers then get in touch with our team at DOWO today.