Influencer marketing is a type of digital media marketing that focuses on using key players in a specific area to market a business, rather than the business or company themselves marketing themselves. Influencer marketing is a popular part of many successful digital marketing strategies and relies on key influencers getting the word out about a specific product or brand.
How does Influencer Marketing Work?
There are a few different areas of influencer marketing but all of them are centred around a company or brand paying a key influencer to promote them or their product. Key influencers range from bloggers and YouTubers to well-respected individuals within a certain industry, and brands will approach people who have a link to what they are trying to market. For example, a makeup brand may approach a beauty blogger and a digital marketing company may approach an SEO lecturer.
Influencer marketing is made possible through the popularity of social media, blogging and content creation as these are the resources key influencers use to tell their followers and fans about a certain product. Influencer marketing can be done by sending a key influencer a product to use and review, or by asking them to mention a brand.
Key influencers such as bloggers have a large outreach and therefore the price to pay for a product to be promoted is small. Some key influencers have upwards of a million followers on Twitter and therefore there is an opportunity to reach out to a million people through one paid promotional tweet about a product.
Using Influencer Marketing in a Digital Marketing Strategy
A number of Digital PR agencies and brands themselves will use influencer marketing as part of their digital marketing strategy for the following reasons:
- Followers and fans of key influencers trust that individuals views and will assume that if they are promoting a product it is worth buying.
- Key influencers have outreach to large audiences and these audiences can be reached instantly all around the world.
- Social media and blogging are popular online and with so many users it is a great source of potential buyers.
To conclude, influencer marketing is a digital marketing tool that focuses on paying key people within a specific industry to promote a product or service. It is used within digital marketing strategies and is channeled through social media, blogging and outreach.