Being a leading digital marketing & SEO agency in the UK, we – at HQ SEO – have always had to push our limits to stay at the edge of what essentially is an expanding universe of opportunities. Influencer marketing is a great example of this.
It hasn’t even been two full decades since the internet became an essential business medium. Outbound marketing was – and, to some extent, still is – the norm for large brands and businesses. For smaller and younger businesses, however, the internet has levelled the playing field. Like guest posting, a carefully crafted and executed influencer marketing strategy allows your business to reach a highly targetted set of people through an extremely reliable medium – the influencer.
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Influencer marketing is a relatively novel form of inbound marketing.
The idea here is to leverage the popularity and reach of popular influencers to promote your products and services. The influencers could be individuals (popular social media pages/handles/accounts/personalities, bloggers, forum admins etc.) or websites (niche specific websites, review websites, comparison blogs etc.).
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Influencer marketing is somewhat of an uncharted territory when it comes to tracking metrics and optimising campaigns. This should, in no way, mean that investing in influencer marketing won’t give you good returns.
Here’s why businesses – especially the small and medium sized – need influencer marketing to keep up with competitors with deep pockets and deeper reach:
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A recent Nielsen survey revealed that despite buying products and services online, a whopping 92% of B2B businesses and end-point customers prefer to go with the word of mouth.
As things stand today, digital influencer marketing is as good a way of bolstering the good word of mouth for your brand as any.
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The social media influence is not just omnipresent – it can make or break your business. In times when social media platforms have changed the way we consume information – from news to entertainment – it’s no surprise that as high as 75% of buyers are influenced by social proof.
Influencer marketing not only creates social proof – it actively propagates it.
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If you’ve ever run paid ad campaigns on social media, you know how tough (and expensive) it is to generate engagement. Every like, every retweet, every heart drains your marketing budget.
Influencer marketing gets you around this problem. An Instagram celebrity with over 2 million followers is almost always going to generate better engagement for you than any PPC or PPA campaign.
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Our influencer marketing strategy follows a four-point approach:
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We work with you to identify goals and buyer personas for individual campaigns.
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We shortlist top influencers with a proven track-record of boosting conversions across platforms. This includes social media influencers and websites/blogs.
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We negotiate with the shortlisted influencers to get the best possible deal in order to give your campaigns enough room to grow.
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We work with your content team to create conversion-oriented content pieces that are amplified using the influencer platforms. If you don’t have an in-house content team, that’s okay – we can integrate our content marketing services into every influencer marketing campaign.
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We use sophisticated link tracking tools to track all favourable actions. We also optimise all campaigns in real time to clamp down on less successful campaigns.
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We have already seen influencer marketing generate some of the highest ROIs among all marketing strategies for our clients.
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Whether you like it or not, social media will keep influencing our lives – perhaps more intimately tomorrow than today. It’s time to use this influence in your favour.
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At HQ SEO, we have developed a fully home-grown influencer marketing strategy that combines all influencer platforms in one place. Get in touch with us today to know how you can grow your business using the power of influencer marketing.