Influencer Marketing is a modern marketing technique in which concentration is mainly placed on particular individuals rather than the entire target market. These individuals, termed influencers, are identified as people having a profound influence on the marketing activities of many other potential buyers of a brand. The explosion of social media over the last ten years has remarkably revolutionized communication and is making a similar impact in the business world. This has brought about the emergence of many potential influencers, often people very active on social media (having many followers) with respected opinions due to industry expertise.
The concept of influencer marketing is more about positively impacting sales and not just increasing awareness. Therefore, the selection of a productive influencer is very brand and/or brand campaign sensitive. Most present-day consumers do not respond well to billboards, newsletters, digital adverts, commercials and other conventional marketing schemes. They often prefer independent brand research or hearing about it from a trusted person. As a result, the use of influencers in marketing is turning into one of the most successful ways to pull clients and customers for all businesses including social business (Social enterprises, social benefit companies, social initiatives, non-profits etc.).
Marketing for non-profits and other social businesses demands meeting the needs of both their donors and the clients they serve. Every social organization, regardless of their source of funding, requires effective marketing to enable them to continuously meet the needs of donors and clients while earning positive value in return.
In this modern business era, fundraising consulting, non-profit consulting, and the hiring of profit consulting services uncover and reveal some evolving key marketing techniques including influencer marketing strategies. The strategies of influencer marketing are constantly evolving. However, aligning with the right influencer opens the sales door to their loyal audiences and those of their networks, providing the chance to relate with these audiences non-stop.
An essential factor in the establishment of an efficient influencer marketing system is identifying and engaging the most capable and best contextual fitting influencers for the brand. Social entrepreneurs can successfully improve their value in the eyes of donors and at the same time satisfy the clients they serve by effectively making use of these traits for ideal influencer targeting;
1. Audience and Reach:
Targeting potential influencers with huge followings on various social media platforms is advantageous.
2. Relevant Connection:
This highlights the importance of targeting people with posts, comments, and messages that possess some degree of cohesion with the brand’s fundamental interests and keywords.
3. Quality and Trust:
Quality and trusted followers for Influencers provide greater capacities for potential clients. This is measured by taking special notice of audience members who actively interact with influencers in promoting the brand.
4. Activity:
How frequent an individual posts or comments and their general activity as a whole plays a major role in influencer targeting as it serves to predict potential reach before a campaign is started.
Although influencer marketing is typically employed as a tool for consumer brands and their partnerships, these strategies and features best apply to the marketing of social businesses;
Authenticity
Influencer campaigns won’t achieve their marketing goals if the audience is aware that the influencer is getting paid. Therefore, it’s very important to work with individuals with a true passion for your project. This only emphasizes that the key to a successful influencer campaign is being extremely authentic. Influencer marketing and Social Businesses are a perfect fit with respect to authenticity because potentially targeted influencers are often already outspoken about causes they support. This simplifies their identification, facilitates the establishment of a smoother relationship, and creates a more natural fit for your message.
Strategic Planning
It’s always very important to have a clear vision of what you plan to achieve before engaging with any influencer project- especially for social businesses. Also, the process of achieving these set goals and the scale on which success will be measured is of similar importance. Conducting a strategic analysis results in productive decisions on influencer action issues like; mediums with most relevance to brand audience and whether sharing brand content to as many people as possible is the primary objective or cooperating to generate new content to deeply connect with people. Early engagement with influencers is advisable to seek their opinions on how best the partnership will work.
Targeting Relevant Audiences
Statistics and experience have proven that engaging with individuals and personalities with the largest social media following and fan bases as influencers to provide an endorsement for your mission doesn’t necessarily guarantee the best results. Statistics instead suggest that more audience engagement and the highest conversion rates are provided by niche social influencers with generally smaller followings. These individuals often referred to as micro-influencers possess highly targeted and more online interactive audiences. Micro-influencer inspired marketing for non-profits and other social businesses produce impeccable results. These Micro-influencers serve as passionate advocates for their brands, playing major roles in awareness and the driving of valuable action.
Measuring Productivity
The ability to quantify the success of influencer marketing campaigns has always been and remains a great challenge today. It’s anything but difficult for anyone to perceive the reasons why surveys have marketers attesting to the fact that measuring Return on Investment (ROI) for influencer marketing was the greatest challenge they came across in 2017. Tackling this challenge could begin from the initiation of a wide range of metrics like audience engagement, sentiments, and conversions to ensure more is being measured than just fan numbers. Also, the incorporation of hashtags such as #socialgood, #socialenterprise, #socialimpact, #socialchange, #innovation, #entrepreneur, #startup, #impact #nonprofit, #funding, #grantwriting, #charity, etc. into your campaign is easy and encourages people to join the conversation enabling tracking.
To aid in this important quest for success measurement in influencer marketing campaigns, fundraising consulting, non-profit consulting, and profit consulting services would more explicitly advise social businesses to create dedicated fundraising pages for each of their influencers. This provides a unique platform through which connections can be established with their networks, depicts the clear dollar value of donations driven by each influencer and conclusively offers a means to assess the productivity of the partnership.
Legal Boundaries
Understanding the laws surrounding the agreements between influencers and companies during partnership is critically important. Although some influencers promote many social business causes without charge, most influencer endorsements involving highly followed individuals often require payments to safeguard official partnerships.
Influencer marketing is revolutionizing the business world in general and has the potential of optimizing marketing for social businesses.
