There’s a lot of buzz about influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing seems to be gaining momentum—just look at mainstream news. Many stories relate to celebrities or other influencers. In many of these stories, the celebrities are influencing purchase behavior, driving brand conversations, and having an impact to revenue growth.
On the surface, it may seem simple to pick a celebrity and connect them to your brand. However, there are supplementary implications to consider besides social media power, PR buzz, and “cool factor” involved. When you review the social media power of a given influencer, be sure to evaluate the following.
- Does the influencer attract your brand’s target audience? Be sure to study demographics, historical social engagement, psychographics and overall interest.
- Does the influencer line up with your overall brand’s mission, key performance indicators (KPIs), and has real interest in your brand? At the very least, the influencer shouldn’t have spoken negatively about your brand.
- When engaging influencers, be sure to have legal consultation. There are SAG (Screen Actors Guild) and FTC (Federal Trade Commission) compliance rules that must be adhered to.
All of the aforementioned considerations assist in your consideration of choosing an influencer to partner with. Selecting the right influencers is important to ensuring your brand achieves engaged customers who trust the message that the influencer communicates.
After the right influencer is decided upon, the next step is the development of the social journey you envision the consumer will have with this influencer. The social journey developed with the influencer must be authentic to not only the customer but believable for the brand.
Consumers are fickle and have undisclosed guidelines about how brands interact with them and when it is OK for a brand to interact with them. It’s a fine line to walk. All of the content developed will need to leverage your available data (sales, demographic, psychographic, behavioral, etc.) to ensure that you optimize the results.
Don’t be afraid to request assistance of experts. Engaging influencers can be very complicated and it may prove ideal to hire a third party expert to help guide the process rather than stumble in the dark and miss your desired ROI.
Adele Lassere is a marketing/advertising consultant, freelance writer and author of “Elements of Buying” (a self-help advertising guide), available at Amazon.com. Adele was listed as Black Enterprise’s 2016 Women of Power in Advertising & Marketing and 2013 Top Women Executives in Advertising & Marketing. Contact: [email protected]
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