Have You Considered a Social Influencer?

In a world saturated with social media and digital advertisements, it can be a tedious task to get a message across to your target market, especially around the busy holiday season. As a business, you must learn to maneuver through all these elements or risk your marketing efforts altogether. Another obstacle you may currently face is that consumers have become more skeptical and much smarter about their purchases. The bottom line is that consumers are informed—some might even say high-maintenance—and often rely on research and third-party recommendations before even considering a business or product.

Whether Black Friday is on your radar or you're easing into summer, your consumers are being bombarded with piles of information, salespeople and advertisements.

So how does a business work around all the noise? We target the market indirectly by implementing influencer marketing on social media! Yes, using those “crazy” social media personalities like YouTube stars and internet bloggers that can cater to thousands and sometimes millions of people—including your potential target market. 

Influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere and will continue to grow as consumers' obsession with internet celebrities grows. People trust people more than businesses, plain and simple. If you haven’t adopted a social influencer into your holiday marketing campaign, it’s never too late. You'll need to choose the right influencers (or become an influencer yourself) and how leverage their industry knowledge and audience base to help your products reach the masses!

Target the Influencers

First, you should become familiar with the social influencers and internet personalities interested in your industry. They may be discussing your brand, products or services already. You should be aware of these conversations as they can positively benefit your marketing campaigns. Or, sadly, they could be negatively impacting your marketing campaigns by spreading gossip or poor feedback that needs to be intercepted and fixed. If you aren’t part of any conversation, you can always target social influencers popular within your context to help expose your business and products to thousands of people already interested in your industry. Developing a relationship with influencers can be beneficial for both parties as it gives you opportunities to develop trust from an audience.

Endorse Products

As a company, you should be confident in your product. Sampling your products to social influencers is a great way to gain exposure. This allows social influencers to review your products or services without bias and share their authentic opinions with their trusting and appreciative audience. You should also encourage influencers to create other content with your products, even if it's in the background of unrelated content, as this allows potential patrons to view your product IRL. This in turn gives you free content that you can repurpose on your own social channels, and testimonials that resonate better with modern consumers—just make sure it's license- and royalty-free. (Ask us how!)

Seize Opportunities

With the holidays and Black Friday always around the corner, it’s a great time to be strategic in your approach to social influencer marketing. Not only are consumers especially busy this time of year, but so are influencers, meaning you need to secure your relationships as early as possible. Often, consumers lack the resources and time to test and review a product themselves and heavily rely on reviews and recommendations from sources they trust. Use this chance to team up with real-life experts to cross promote and make indirect sales. If you can help the modern “high-maintenance” consumers save time and money, you’re in a win-win situation. 

In marketing, the most important thing you can do is develop deep relationships with the right customer or client. Influencers already have those relationships! If you can leverage their influence with a solid social media content partnership, then your business can become even more visible in a vast sea of digital noise.

If you haven’t implemented influencer into your holiday marketing strategy, 'tis the season!