Engaging in successful influencer marketing is a three-fold process. First you need to identify the people who are not only already speaking to the right topics, but also speaking to a community that acts off what that person says.
Once you’ve honed in on the right people, you come to the step that will define whether you truly end up engaging in influencer marketing, or just forcing an advert through another mouth piece – nurturing your influencers. In order for the campaign to be a success, for the influencer’s audience to take the influencer’s content around your brand as authentic, it’s important to build a relationship with that person. The influencer should ideally reach the point where they are not simply recruited by your brand, but get involved willingly as a brand ambassador. The audience will be able to see if the influencer really believes in your brand, or if they are just being paid to advertise – and the advert version will undermine that person’s influence instantly, negating their engagement rates on that topic.
The last step – measurement – not only gives feedback to whether the first two steps were successful, but also informs you to start the process over with valuable knowledge. Measuring the relevance of the influencers you’ve chosen and nurtured allows you to re-inform and re-identify the right influencers for your brand’s message.
Why Nurture?
The goal should be to “nurture before exposure”. The more genuine the influencer’s passion about your brand, the more authentic the marketing appears to your target audience.
It’s not enough to get exposure, to simply find someone popular with your audience, pay them to say your product’s great and leave it at that. It will be seen through instantly and the whole exercise would have been in vain for all parties concerned. Not only will your brand achieve a very low ROI from the experience, but you also risk completely undermining that influencer’s credibility on the topic – something very important to them.
Nurturing an influencer’s authenticity, ensures that both sides of the partnership are as positive about the collaboration as possible.
You want the influencer to genuinely connect on their own with what you’re asking them to create – once it becomes their own content, that simply aligns to your brand in some way, that’s when the campaign will find authentic exposure.
But in order for the influencer to connect and create authentically, it’s up to the brand to nurture that positive relationship. Nurturing leads to brand advocacy, rather than just a business transaction.
The nurture process is not about generating content, it’s about amplifying the brand message through influencers who experience it.
Successful Influencer Marketing will change the face of your brand
Bringing different voices into the mix can be an intimidating, as well as tricky, path to navigate. Before you can even begin to think about finding influencers in your field, your business needs to make sure that the entire process is being approached from the right angle.
Traditional advertising is all about the brand putting forward exactly the voice, persona and message that it wants the public to consume. There’s no such control in influencer marketing – and the whole point is that there shouldn’t be. The nurturing of an influencer simply allows the influencer access to enough raw materials from your business to form their own thoughts and content to share with your target market.
By allowing this process to flow unencumbered, you may lose clarity in your brand message, but you gain an authenticity and trust around your brand that no commercial ever could.
