What is Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is the new age of marketing. Instead of spamming the Internet with your links, you reach out to influencers in your niche to show them your content and the products that you have to offer. But it is more than just convincing them to link to you. It is about having enough value that influencers take notice. You should not even have to convince them to promote you.

Today, I will take you into a journey into influencer marketing. You’ll learn what it is, how it can benefit your business and how you can use it to improve your brand traffic and sales. 

Old Way of Online Marketing

Before we can define what influencer marketing is, we should first go back in time to see how website owners use to promote their sites. Back then, the search engine algorithms are not yet as specialized and you can easily rank a site in as little as a day as long as you know how to create one. In those days, the quantity of backlinks matter more than the quality. This means that if you have many backlinks to your site, your chances of ranking is higher. There is no such thing as pagerank and domain authority in the old days. Back then, a link is a link. It doesn’t matter if you did it yourself or you acquired it from a low quality website, it still counts.

New Way of Online Marketing

Because of the old rules when it comes to search engine optimization and ranking, it was not long until a new breed of marketers entered the scene. These are marketers that advocates auto submissions and spamming. For them, they can easily dominate the system as long as they know the rules of the game. Because of this, websites like Google took notice. So they created some measures on how they can prevent these websites from ranking, These are search algorithms that you know today.

In today’s search algorithm, the quality of the backlink matters more than the quantity. It doesn’t matter if you have 1,000 directory submission backlinks. If these are self-created and came from low quality directories, it no longer counts. This is when the Google Slap happened. This is when spam marketers felt Google’s Wrath when they suddenly saw their websites losing rank because of the newly implemented algorithms. It was not until later that quality of the backlink is not the only characteristic at play. Google now looks at a new metric – user experience. So on top of having quality backlinks, a website is now required to have faster loading time, a low bounce rate and high search engine result click-throughs in order to rank. Talk about making website owners’ lives harder.

From here, the website owners don’t know what to do. What used to worked for them is not working anymore. Many have left their online businesses thinking that the age of online marketing is done. Others have looked for alternative methods. After a series of trial and error, a new form of marketing is born. This is born out of the focus on quality and it is influencer marketing.

What is Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the forms of marketing with the highest quality. Why? It is because instead of getting your backlinks from websites that doesn’t have any engagement, you get your backlink from a website with loyal readers, commenters and followers. You see, all is not in vain in the age of quality. While most spammy websites lost their rank, a new set of websites rose to the front page. These are influencer websites.

What is an Influencer Website

An influencer website is different from other websites in the sense that it has a loyal audience. Unlike normal blogs who aim to rank for certain keywords in order to get readers, influencer websites aim to nurture their existing readers in order to win more readers through word-of-mouth. Instead of focusing on getting a higher rank on the search engine, the focus is on people. The result is a group of loyal followers who are willing to click almost any link that the influencer provides.

Why Influencers are Powerful

Influencers are powerful because of their power to influence behavior. Unlike an encyclopedia that simply provides information in a matter-of-fact tone, an influencer relays information in a personal and caring tone. The focus of an influencer is to share his or her experience and to inspire his or her audience. It is far from just informing. It is also about changing their hearts and minds. Because of this, influencers have a great impact on their readers or followers. Because they seek to do more than inform, they manage to touch their readers or followers hearts that they become a role model to them. Taking on this role, they are now able to make recommendations that their readers or followers would most likely act upon.

How Influencer Marketing Can Help Your Business

Because of the impact of influencer on consumer behavior, they can definitely help your business. In fact, you’ll be surprised. You may not even need multiple influencer recommendations in order to reap the benefits. One influencer may be enough.

They Can Grow Your Traffic

Did you know that an exposure in an influencer’s content can grant your business an instant surge of traffic? This is what happened when Kim Kardashian talked about Bio Oil when asked about what product she used for her skin when she’s pregnant. The result is a surge in searches for Bio Oil just from the simple mention of the product. This is how influencers can grow your business. Once they mention your product to their followers, like wolves, these followers will come looking for you because they are inspired by the influencer.

They Can Grow Your Revenue

Similarly, influencers can also grow your revenue. As mentioned in the example, Kim Kardashian is able to drive the searches for Bio Oil with the simple mention of it. But the audience are searching for it not only to learn about it. It is also because they want to use it. Here’s the magic of influencers. When they recommend a particular product, their audience tend to think that it is something that must be acquired at all costs in order to reap the same benefits as the influencer. The line of thinking goes like this “If she have used it, I should use it too so I can be like her”. This is powerful for it can instantly grow your revenue in a short period of time.

They Can Improve Your Brand

It is quite common in ecommerce marketing to sell different products. But if your brand is only selling a couple of products and you want to be known for that, you may want to try influencer marketing. Another influencer that has done this is LiliSimply in Youtube. She mentions products in her morning and evening routine videos. One particular product that she mentioned is a towel that you can use to dry your hair. But this towel is special because it doesn’t damage the hair while drying it. It is from Aquis Essentials and it is the main product that it is selling. Normally, people would not know what this product does and what it can do. But with the demonstration of the influencer in her video, the audience now have an idea about the brand and what they do. Such is the example on how influencer marketing can improve your brand.

How to Do Influencer Marketing

Now that you know what influencers can do to your business, you may want to start doing it. Here’s a 5-step process that can help you do that.

STEP 1: Influencer Research

It all starts with influencer research. You need to do this because you’ll want your influencers to be as targeted as possible. You’ll not want to promote a product to an influencer with a different target market. It will beat the purpose of influencer marketing.

To do this, you can search for your topic along with the word ‘blog’ in Google. You can also search for your topic on Youtube. This will uncover the existing influencers that have covered your topic.

From here, you’ll want to gather as much information as you can. As for me, I love to record the information in a spreadsheet. In here, I put the influencer’s name, URL, email and social profiles. You may need to do a little digging if you want to uncover an influencer’s email.

PRO TIP: I love to use email search services like FindThatLead to find and verify an email address. This allows me to know that the email I am sending to is working before I even reach the outreach process.

STEP 2: Tailor Your Approach

Here’s the thing. Every influencer is different from each other. What may work with one may not work with another. So it is very important that you hang around the influencer’s community before you even attempt on approaching them. How do you do that? It is simple. Buy their products or subscriptions. Watch their videos. Subscribe if you have to. Join their community. Keep track of their content and try to get to know them.

STEP 3: Prime The Influencer

After hanging out with the influencer for quite some time, it is time to reach out. By this time, you should already have some information about the influencer and can talk about a topic that interests him or her. This is what I call Priming. This is where you try to see if the influencer will respond to you when you talk to them. While it is easy to assume that all influencers are busy, it is still better to try. You’ll be surprised by how many influencers respond to their emails.

STEP 4: Connect

Next, you start connecting. More than just talking to them via email, you should also support their site. You can do this by liking their posts or commenting. It all starts with a simple connection. Imagine connecting with your influencer as if you are connecting with a friend. You first need to get to know your friend before you can ask them for any favor.

STEP 5: Provide Value

And if you have reached that point when you are ready to ask for a favor, please provide value. It is not enough that you just ask them to link to your site because you think you are amazing. Show how valuable your content or products have been to your readers and users and showcase that in your request message. Tell them how it has helped your audience and stipulate how it can help the influencer’s audience as well.

BONUS: Have a Special Referral Reward for the Influencer

One technique that has worked for me in the past the special referral reward or referral incentive for the influencer. In this model. I have a referral program and then I give away an exclusive discount code or freebie exclusively for the influencer’s followers. I usually include the name of the influencer in the discount code and then I tell him or her that this offer is exclusive to his or her audience. Once your influencer sees that the connection can win him or her even more recognition among his crowd, he or she will take your offer.

BONUS 2: Ask Your Influencer to Collaborate with You on a Product

You can also ask an influencer to collaborate with you on a product. This is good for creative niches like fashion. With this, the influencer will naturally promote your product because you have included them in the creation process.

So that’s influencer marketing for you. It is one of the best marketing methods that you can use to acquire high quality backlinks for your website. In fact, it is the only marketing method that still works up to today.

Have questions? Don’t be afraid to ask them about it below. 

5 Response to "What is Influencer Marketing"

  1. Comment From Rameir Smith

    I like this one, it’s really easy to understand.



  2. Comment From Jessica Simpson

    I like how there are steps, it’s a one stop article.



  3. Comment From Mia Anderson

    Very great article, more of these type please



  4. Comment From Cheyenne Mariz

    Oh, now I understand what it really is.



  5. Comment From Bruce Marks

    I don’t really believe they are this good. I haven’t tried it but it seems too good to be true.



Comments are closed.