Why Working with an Online Influencer is Vital for Your Brand? (Paul Baron knows why!)
Do you remember Alice in the world behind the looking-glass, trying to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast?
Much like Lewis Carroll’s character, your targeted audience is reluctant to believe in flowery promises until they are convinced that your product or service entirely meets their expectations.
Establishing brand trust has always been a challenge for private label retailers in their effort to increase sales. In pursuit of trustworthiness, PPC advertising and sponsored content are taking a secondary role to let influencer marketing strategies come to the forefront.
In case you still don’t know (under which rock have you been living?) influencers are people who earned a large and loyal following on their social media channel. Influencers often partner with brands to represent and advertise products on their own pages. They leverage their followers’ trust and loyalty as a form of native advertising.
If you are ready to start crafting consistent and actionable influencer campaigns, meet Paul Baron – a sales and marketing expert and guest speaker at Seller Labs Annual Resonate Conference 2021.
With a rich background in brand building and social networking, Paul helps other sellers boost their brand awareness and build warm and long-term relations with their customers.
This blog post is covering the key points of the full video session with Paul Baron and Jeff Cohen as they talk about the power of network influencers, and nano influencers in particular, in this digital era. But, what does a social media influencer do? Let’s start from the outset.
Why Choose a Nano Influencer?
Influencer marketing, which can be applied within Amazon and beyond, is closely connected to brand community.
When a brand campaign launches, community members unwittingly promote your product by posting photos and videos on social media platforms, like Instagram or Facebook. It goes the same for influencers, but for the fact that they do it intentionally and generally on a paid basis.
Since we are going to dig into the social media influencer definition, it is essential to form a clear view of all the categories that influencers traditionally branch into:
| Mega influencers | With more than 1 million followers on their social media channels, they can be film or music stars, athletes, artists models, chefs… you name it! |
| Macro influencers | With a smaller follower count between 100,000 and 1 million, they usually gained fame through the Internet by means of blogging or posting inspiring and viral content. |
| Micro influencers | This category boasts audiences between 1,000 to 100,000 and focuses on a specific niche. Micro influencers are regarded as thought leaders in their specific field. |
| Nano influencers | “You and me” on social media. Everybody and their mother with a number of followers less than 1,000. Their audiences are mainly their loved ones, family and friends, sharing the same interests. |
While most sellers tend to engage mega influencers’ talents and popularity to drive external traffic to their Amazon brand, Paul Baron suggests shifting the focus to nano influencers.
Hiring an influencer with a smaller number of followers – and therefore stronger connections with their audience – is viewed as a marketer’s secret weapon. Most potential customers willingly draw on their friend’s recommendations while forming their own opinion on the brand. Thus, the established trust towards the influencer will have a halo effect on your product.
The trickiest brand-building challenge is to win the opinion-makers over to your side. Let’s delve into it while referring to Paul’s firsthand experience.
A Shortcut:
Compared with other influencer types, nano influencers boast a range of benefits. So, why choose nano influencers?
- Lower rates!
- An immense number to team with.
- Higher endorsement and trust from audience.
- Sincere affinity for a brand or product.
5 Essential Steps to an Effective Influencer Marketing Campaign
Showing your brand in the best light is the ideal way to present a collaboration offer as a win-win deal. So, here are the key steps for creating an appealing brand that encourages influencers to work with you and for you.
1. Create an irresistible brand story
Being the main means of human communication, storytelling is also a powerful marketing tool for building a solid online presence and earning customers’ trust.
Once you craft a story that resonates with your audience’s values, people will continue the plot further, if they feel they are a part of it. In other words, a good story contributes to your brand community and builds closer connections among its members.
2. Lean on your audience’s pain points
Understanding and answering your customers’ needs is essential for branding. Furthermore, it is essential for your influencer content. A customer-oriented brand strategy grants your social media influencers much more opportunities for posting client-focused and non-typical ads, and can appear to organically share their troubles, leading to increased trust and relatability.
3. Look at your competitors (and learn from them!)
Unless you sell a unique product, you must sleep with one eye open to diligently watch your competitors and their next moves.
What for?
Looking at how your competitors’ stories are propelling the product and then borrowing some strategies for your own brand is undeniably a good practice. Plus, isn’t it said that “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”?
4. Engage with people before asking them to promote you
Here is a golden rule to remember: Be it a potential customer or an Instagram influencer, before collaborating with you, people would prefer doing business with “a person” first.
Try to build warm relationships focused on trust over money, before asking people to create content and post their personal photos in digital ads. Examples could range from gamifying your product promotion by offering a reward system, where influencers get points for posting, commenting, or sharing your post and so on.
Don’t forget that macro and mega influencers often do this work professionally, and offering to “pay them in exposure” can be seen as outright insulting to established influencers.
5. Measure your success
Monitoring the results before you implement any new strategy is the best approach. Assuming you succeeded in finding influencers and teaming up with them, it is now time to prove that this whole effort was worthwhile. Here are the three key metric reports to rely on:
- User generated content. A number of posts published by your influencers over time in relation to the amount you invested. This will tell whether your campaign is effective and cost-efficient. (Side note: Some call this ROI – Return of Investment)
- Any trackable sales. Campaigns like affiliate links or UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module), shareable coupons, and custom group redemption codes will give you a better understanding of where your traffic is coming from as you are monitoring your strategy.
- YoY sales growth. Look at how the same SKU performs year over year and get an actual ranking picture to send additional traffic in case it is needed.
Time for a Recap
Working with online influencers opens up fresh opportunities for growing your brand on Amazon.
With an appealing brand story that showcases the highlights of your products and company you will discover how these new and effective strategies establish your brand identity.
However, you know from your own experience that pulling the right levers with keyword research, PPC advertising, and other Amazon brand management tools is the devil’s own job.
Don’t wait until you’re already overwhelmed with crafting your new influencer strategy before reaching out to experts to support you. Seller Labs Managed Services is ready when you are. Save your time with Amazon Advertising Campaigns and build up a strong home front for your brand.
Maria is an SEO Content Specialist at Seller Labs. Once captured by digital and content marketing in her student days, she keeps living and breathing it ever since.
