Influence Marketing Strategies

Do you know what influence marketing is? Influencer marketing at the top level is marketing toward influential people as opposed to the market as a whole in order to convert these influential people toward marketing your products or services.

It identifies people with influence over potential buyers and markets directly toward the influencers.

Influencer marketing relies on influencers to market the products or services directly to their contacts instead of the company doing it. A market influencer does not have to be a famous person, or at least not famous in the sense that they are an actor or major public figure. There are a number of highly effective influencers that have grown their potential marketing base through social media or Youtube.

When we are talking about influencer marketers we are not necessarily talking about people who are paid spokesmen for a product they are promoting. It can also be a person who uses the product themselves or who speaks about products or services as part of their strategy to build their own brand either on a social media platform or another platform like Youtube.

Either way, the idea for the company with the product or service is to get the influential person to talk about their products or services to their following. This could be in the form of mentions, reviews, testimonials or even advertisements.

There are a couple of ways that influencers are compensated as an influencer marketer. Some influence marketers are effectively unpaid, at least from the sponsor. These influencer marketers promote products or services as a way to grow their own social network. These marketers are attempting to in many ways promote themselves through their websites or social media and are using the sponsors products and services as a way to do that.

The second is a paid influencer. These influencers receive payment for advertising or testimonials on their websites or social media. It would not be uncommon for a influencer marketer to start out as an unpaid influence marketer and become a paid influencer marketer as their website visitors or social media accounts grow.

Why do companies want to use influence marketers as opposed to standard advertising. There has been a steep decline in television viewing and many internet users are finding ways to block advertisements through more standard means. In addition traditional marketing is very expensive and not getting any cheaper. When you can find influencer marketers that will effectively market to you for free the how can you go wrong.

Think about affiliate marketing as an example of influencer marketing. There are probably millions of affiliate marketers out there that will market the products of others for either a flat fee or a share of the revenue gained. The producers of the product effectively have no advertising cost unless there is a sale. If there is a sale they know up front how much they are going to have to pay for this advertisement and can budget accordingly.

If you run a major television commercial segment then you may pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and not know for sure what your return will be. Television advertisement sellers will give you some estimates and tell you that ‘you should’ receive this type of return. If you press them they will say that you really cannot measure how much your adverting will increase your sales because you never know exactly what sales channel your customers are responding to.

Staying with our affiliate marketing example of an influencer marketer you know that you will have no advertising expense unless you actually has product sales. If you do have product sales then you will know exactly what your advertising expense will be on a per sale basis before your marketing champagne ever begins.

Why is influencer marketing such a good option?

Well we have already touched on the price. It is a much cheaper option for producers. Another reason is because the influencer marketer is marketing directly to their audience. This is an audience that they have developed over time and you should be able to easily determine their demographics and thus how effectively they will respond to your products.

In addition there is usually a certain amount of trust between the influence marketer and their audience which can be beneficial to a producer. Trust is an important component of getting sales.

There are many different types of influence marketers you can reach out to (or become) if you are interested in influence marketing.

Below are just a few:

• Activist. These could be any type dedicated to a cause or movement.
• Connected People. These are people with a large social media following.
• Authoritative. These are influencers trusted by others. Many affiliate marketers fall into this group.
• Trendsetters.
• Educators
• Coaches.
• Entertainers

There are many more and variations and combinations of those above.

Do you want to learn how to become an influence marketer? We can help. Sign up for our free internet marketing boot camp. You also get two free websites and free hosting. There is no time limit; you can keep your free sites as long as you want. We also offer free training in our boot camp that will get you on your way to becoming an influencer marketer yourself. Take advantage of the power of affiliate marketing to make money online.

CLICK HERE to Sign Up for our FREE Boot Camp.