How Influencers Affects Your Marketing

Versi Bahasa Indonesia.

Influencer marketing has potential to give a wider range of exposure to a certain brand.

Audience mapping is the key in marketing influencer.

Influencer marketing is a marketing technique where the brand collaborate with influencer.

Influencers are people with big number of followers, that usually plays a role in educating or influencing the market about the benefits that a brand could have. Influencer can also help the business to increase the number of the followers. Businesses that use influencer service depart from the assumption that influencer service will give added value to the business, whether it is from the similarities of the market, or other mutual benefits from collaborating with influencer.

Establishing the brand is the main focus of every business. Once the brand is established, it will has a wider network and it can have a better involvement with the customers.

Below are the benefits of collaborating with influencers in a marketing campaign:

• Making use of the traffic related to the influencer’s network to channels owned by the brand (website or social media)
• Developing brand through the use of hashtags; the hashtag used for campaign which is temporary, or unique hashtag of the brand itself.
• Recognizing customer behavior; by analyzing the content posted by the followers/customers from Twitter or Instagram post, marketers can distinguish the customer behavior and to react accordingly.

Influencer Role in Social Media Marketing

In general, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is online marketing procedure that include the creation and the distribution of the content through social media to promote the brand.

In distributing as well as amplifying the marketing message / campaign to the targeted market segment, we could use the influencer’s service. The influencer’s job is not only posting the content (text, picture, video-audio) to certain social media for certain days or hours, but they should also give the statistics, guidance and summary of the performance of their social media, to give optimum benefits to the collaborating brand. By collaborating with influencer, the brand could develop their marketing strategy (especially via social media) for their product.

Actually, influencers effect is not solely affect the customer preference on choosing the brand. There is also influence of KOL or key opinion leader. They are the expertise on certain fields, which is well-known by at least their followers.

Start with strategy

Before planning or executing marketing campaign via social media, brand shall designs a proper marketing strategy. There has to be the campaign objectives, the product or services to be campaigned for, choice of influencer, the budget making, KPI defining, etc.

Starting social media marketing promotion without a strategy is like going to the jungle without compass.

Influencer and their team analyzed the following problems when describing the objectives of the marketing campaigns:

• What aimed by the marketer to be achieved from the social media marketing is.
• Who the targeted audience of the product or the brand ais
• Which platform the audience use and how their behavior in social media is
• What matters to be communicated by the brain to the target customer in the campaign

Content Marketing Made by Influencer

Growth of this new marketing technique disrupts the robust traditional marketing. For the advanced brand, content marketing is a planned marketing method, that intensively create and share meaningful contents to the customer, until it can finally affect the customer behavior.

There are four important benefits that content marketing does to business:

• To maintain and to strengthen current sales
• To minimize the customer retaining budget
• To improve the customer engagement
• The content is valued for its ability to grab audience, and force them to be committed to online business on the sustainable source – as followers, customer, etc.

Influencer marketing is one of the new technique in marketing. It’s become feasible for the brand to sell the products and services to the follower of the influencer. Many industries suggest that influencer marketing via Instagram or YouTube is the most remarkable class of marketing nowadays.

Moreover, those social media, along with TikTok lead the fame of short videos. Instagram with the Reels, Youtube with its Short, and TikTok itself.

All the three social media has a big opportunity to succeed, for the visual-audio material gave positive impact to the sales.

The Hashtag Strategy with The Influencer.

As stated before, influencers use hashtags in a marketing campaign. Primarily, the hashtag makes us observe and analyze the dialogues with that hashtag.

The hashtag strategy has enabled many content creators or influencers to interact with various audiences. Thus, customers’ commitment is increasing, shown by the number of likes sharing and comments. Customer commitment on a brand with influencer can also be measured by the increase in number of followers.

Influencer – Omni Platform Marketing

Multi-channel marketing is applied by the influencer to attract the customer. Being available in various channels, the exposure from the influencer could be delivered in any channel preferable by the audiences.

Meanwhile, the brand wants more than that. They want to reach the customer through omni-channel  marketing which is to combine online and off-line approach in interacting with the customers.

The brand and influencers can collaborate in omni channel marketing through several ways:

According to AISAS marketing theory, marketing has to create such design that all the channels can be a part of customer journey, distinguishing whether the channel is in awareness mode, interest mode, or the others.

Dark side of influencer marketing

With all of the benefits, especially about the number of followers if may affect, influencer marketing has a big potential of drawback. Since the deal is with human which is not perfect, there has to be a weak side of the influencers that can risk the brand.

We shall mitigate those dark side by:

• Covering up the weakness
• Focus on the strength or the positioning of the influencer
• Instead of focusing on short form content, explore to use resources on long format campaign
• Prepare mitigation plan for the worst case scenario ( for example, the former case of shampoo advertising, which the billboard should be taken down from Senayan area since the model is accused to be in a viral indecent video)

Bahan Bacaan: Impact of Influencer and WOM Marketing.