How Influencers Impact Brands
Social media has taken a rise over the years and like everything else in marketing, consumers get smarter. However, many businesses have a misconception that influencer programs automatically guarantee them an increase in sales and expect many social media agencies to provide them with these results. Whether it be building a partnership with an influencer to building your own brand through these influencer campaigns, here are some of my tips and approaches to influencer marketing.
A way to go into any influencer program is with the only anticipation about it being about driving brand awareness.
YouTube campaigns have always shown the best success for conversions, making visitors to the site a potential customer. However, Instagram has made quite a few changes to their platform over the months allowing businesses to incorporate product launches, seeding campaigns, and now recently “swipe up” campaigns. Influencers know their viewers the best and they have their own direction of how they want to build their own platform. Rather than just being given products and a set of rigid guidelines, influencers love to have creative freedom and the challenge to create something unique and different. By allowing them to create content under their own direction allows them to produce content that their own viewers can see as more authentic rather than something that is clearly branded.
The question I encourage people to think about and discuss is if there a possibility for a brand to launch today and thrive within the market place without influence? From left to right we see social media stars who are ambassadors for brands from partnerships to giveaways to sponsored content. Aside from influencer marketing, CEOs, thought-leaders, and publicizing leaders within companies have become so vital to creating a brand’s identity. Would Fenty Beauty be Fenty Beauty without Rihanna? Would Glossier be Glossier without Emily Weiss? Brands today must consider not only what message their product gives to the public but the people behind it as well.
