With influencer marketing, you let a famous person talks about your brand/business in front of her loyal followers/fans. This is an internet marketing method to expand the reach of your brand to new users who may or may not later become the followers or customers of your business. An influencer may be one of the following persons (or roles).
Mainstream celebrities like one of the Hollywood movie stars.
Niche celebrities such as a young champion in Chess.
Experts in a specific industry or field of work such as digital marketing.
Sub-niche experts, such as a person who has much experience playing a network game, but he would not gain a huge amount of fans because of the limited size of the possible audience.
Influencer is similar to KOL (key opinion leader), but they are actually two different roles. Both roles have relatively large follower base. KOL is more related to an actual professional person. But an influencer is highly native to one or two social media channels. Usually most influencers do better as brand marketers. In your entire internet marketing plan, influencers should be the role you should be working with, if you are to achieve great viral effect.
Expanding viral effect is within the very first step when marketing a brand. When you are marketing a brand but results (or sales/conversions) are not the upmost important aspect, then your marketing is in the initial stage of the digital marketing funnel. As influencers are highly related to social media, and after all Facebook is still the king of social media platform. Let’s put up this thinking process when setting up your influencer marketing plan.
Stage 1: Publish organic posts on Facebook. The reach (to suitable audience) is very limited, because the algorithms of Facebook have been set up in a way to restrict reach.
Stage 2: Buy and run Facebook ads. This stage still uses no influencer. The ad spend is not most effective, simply because you are pushing a brand (which people do not know) to people the Facebook algorithms believe they are interested.
Stage 3: Organic posts on Facebook, but they get a boost from an influencer. If done right, this stage would get better results than the two previous stages.
Stage 4: Buy and run Facebook ads, and the ads also get a boost from the influencer. This is the stage that is expected to provide the best results in influencer marketing.
Ryan Myers is a business blog author and writer. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 with a degree in Political Science. His favorite topics to write about are blogging for small businesses and becoming an entrepreneur.
