A key part of many brands’ marketing strategies these days is the use of influencers. For the past few years, many digital marketing agencies have really developed their offering to become specialists in this area, but there’s often a big question for brands as to whether they should take this route.
Brands such as Ceek have built out strategies for many brands, but are also keen to promote the fact it doesn’t work for every business and consideration needs to go into whether it’s the right approach for them.
So, how do you consider that and answer the question, should I use influencers?
Will they reach your target audience?
One of the biggest benefits of using influencers is to leverage of similar target audiences. For example, if you’re a retailer of kitchen utensils, using a celebrity chef or cooking influencer will provide you with thousands if not millions of actively interested eyes.
However, on the flip side, if you work in a niche business, utilising influencers could prove to be a waste of money unless you can find an active audience that will be interested in your product. You need to find a partner whose following matches your customer profile essentially.
Will influencers build trust in your brand?
You also need to understand whether working with influencers will help build trust in your brand and who the right influencer is to do that. For example, if you’re a pharmaceutical brand or provide a service that is quite science heavy, teaming up with an influencer that has been on Love Island, perhaps isn’t going to provide you with the credibility you’re looking for.
While that’s an extreme example, you need to find people that can add authority and trust to your brand, and that means having a close connection thematically to what they do, in line with the target audience point made, as well as ensuring they are a credible entity in their own right.
Do your due diligence around influencers to ensure they have no skeletons in their closet, basically.
Do you have the budget?
Finding an influencer who is a perfect fit for your brand can be easy, it can be hard. It’s almost always costly. One of the big questions to ask is whether you have the budget. So many businesses want influencer marketing but then don’t have the budget to fully commit, going into it half baked and then wondering why the results aren’t quite what they expected.
For it to be a real success, you need the budget to back up your campaign. That can vary depending on the niche and the influencer, but shop around, get costings and make a decision on what will provide you with the most amount of success.
Can you create engaging stories and content?
Finally, do you have the skills to work with them and create something engaging? It’s all well and good working with an influencer but you need the content delivered to be interesting to the audience.
That’s especially the case with channels such as TikTok these days, where it’s so easy to just scroll to the next video. You need people with the skills to create engaging videos that will then deliver the results you want. If you don’t have that, or the budget to be able to employ that, then ultimately working with an influencer is only going to burn your budget and waste your time.
