If you’re considering influencer marketing for your business, you’ve already taken a step in the right direction. This form of marketing has immense and ever-increasing power to sway customer opinion. That’s why we have put together these influencer marketing examples and strategies for novices.
According to a recent study, customers are increasingly turning to social media influencers and online communities to make purchasing decisions. As many as 37 percent of customers trust social media influencers over brands, which proves bringing influencers onboard is a smart business decision.
There are many routes you can take with influencer marketing; here are just a few strategies that worked great for businesses in terms of getting their product or service noticed, and driving this engagement towards sales.
1. Collaborations
Collaborating with influencers can work in various ways. For example, you can send gifts or PR (Public Relations) packages to influencers; you can do sponsored posts or ads with them; or you can have influencers host giveaways for your brand, and so on.
When collaborating with influencers, keep these things in mind.
- Look for influencers who have good reach and engagement stats.
- Choose influencers who fit your product’s niche, so it doesn’t look out of place for them to promote it.
- Pay attention to the influencers’ audience. Are these people likely to buy your product?
When done right, collaborations can work wonders for your brand, in terms of attracting a wide range of customers whom you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to pull.
Here’s an influencer collaboration which ticks all the right boxes.
In this short Instagram reel, makeup artist and influencer Danielle Marcan, who has upwards of 1.7 million Instagram followers, promotes Charlotte Tilbury skincare products as part of a collaborative ad. Notice also how Marcan provides a special promo code to her followers as part of the collaboration, and directs them to her stories for more content.
This is an effective and holistic form of influencer collaboration, containing not only an enticing ad to a relevant product, but also providing a call to action via the promo code and link.
2. Product placements
Most customers don’t like to be told what to buy. They prefer making an ‘informed’ choice on their own. Which is where product placement comes in.
A subtler form of influencer marketing, this is a method of hiding your product within an influencer’s posts, instead of the product being advertised as the main focus of the post.
Product placement has an advantage over more overt influencer marketing examples, in that it is advertising that doesn’t look like advertising. This leads customers to believe that they are acting of their own accord, rather than being pressured to buy something. Win-win.
Here’s a great example of product placement. The lifestyle blogger Genevieve Padalecki introduces a debit card by an environmentally conscious banking company, as part of her “sustainability journey”.
This signals to her followers that the company is helping her (and, potentially, them) follow her usual sustainable lifestyle, rather than being a product she is advertising.
Padalecki has made effective use of Instagram to aid her product placement. You can also take advantage of the platform by customizing your own Instagram story templates for your business and influencer marketing needs.
3. Affiliate marketing
Since influencers tend to have a larger and more engaged audience than brands and businesses, it’s worth your time to work closely with them to create ads and awareness for your product, with the goal to increase leads, clicks, and ultimately, sales.
Affiliate marketing consists of hiring an influencer to work with your business long-term. They become a partner and promote your brand in return for either discounts from you, or a commission on each lead/click/sale their content generates for you.
This is a suitable option if you find an influencer whose content and audience fits your market niche perfectly, and you want to collaborate with them over a longer period.
The YouTube channel Satori Graphics does affiliate marketing for Adobe.
This video shows how expansive affiliate marketing can become, as the influencer provides tips on how to use the product. This is a step further than simply ‘selling’ the product. This increases the chances of a potential customer using it.
The freelance services website Fiverr has also recently started their affiliate marketing program, in which they pay partners to drive traffic to the website. Micro influencers advertise this program across various social media platforms, including the social question-and-answer website, Quora.
4. Guest account takeovers
One of the newer influencer marketing examples, guest account takeovers essentially let an influencer take control of your social(s) for a set period of time. This is usually a short period, typically a week.
The History Channel’s TikTok piggy-backed off influencer takeovers to gain traction during its early days on the platform. This is one of the examples of the various takeovers they did: a video on the history of food by a hugely popular influencer in the food niche.
The success of guest takeovers can be gauged by how popular these videos got, and the History Channel account grew by leaps and bounds.
As with other influencer marketing examples, though, it is important to know which influencer takeovers your business would actually benefit from, and which influencers to hire to maximize an interested audience.
Wrapping up
In an age of terminally online Internet users, influencer marketing is a burgeoning strategy–one that you should hop on board for as soon as you can to reap the benefits.
The influencer marketing examples, and success stories discussed above are just some of the endless ways you can get creative with getting influencers to promote your product or service.
If you are an influencer yourself who is looking to promote a product or event of your own, check out our article on how influencers promote their events using PosterMyWall.
Content Writer at PosterMyWall.
