When it first emerged in the marketing scene some years back, influencer marketing became a major buzz. Both the large company and the humble startup business jumped in the trend, hoping these influencers can boost their reach.
But with all the changes that have happened to the landscape recently, some wonder if it is still a viable strategy. So, let’s take a closer look to answer that question and find out how you can get the most out of influencers with our help.
The Relevance of Influencer Marketing In These Times
One of the biggest challenges that many businesses faced was finding the right influencers for them. While many have a large online following, not all of them can command this following effectively.
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Image from Vox
And then there was the issue of authenticity. With it being a lucrative trade, some attempted to pass themselves off as legitimate influencers through artificially inflated follower numbers. Businesses found themselves having a hard time distinguishing which are the true ones.
The Impact Of COVID-19
The ongoing COVD-19 pandemic also had a significant effect on the influencer trade. Travel restrictions meant that influencers had a hard time creating their content. Many fear that the situation can lead to a slowdown in the promotion of brands.
On the other hand, the pandemic also affected how people consume influencer content. No one would want to share product photos when people around them are getting sick. As such, brands and influencers had to be sensitive to the situation.
Influencer Marketing Still Going Strong
Despite the above issues, influencer marketing remained a viable strategy for marketing. According to a survey by Mediakix, 71% of marketers still see the strategy providing better quality traffic than traditional campaigns. Meanwhile, 49% of consumers are still more likely to respond to recommendations made by these influencers.
Image from Smart Insights.
These personalities are also highly responsive to the change in the marketing landscape. They are the first ones to pivot their content into a new direction following the above development. This has allowed them to stay relevant to current marketing trends.
The Growth Of Smaller Influencers
One of the significant changes that have helped influencer marketing stay viable is the growth of hyper-targeting. Here, your startup business doesn’t need celebrities with millions of followers. Instead, your focus is on smaller influencers to whom your specific audience is more likely to respond.
Image from Anvil.
These smaller influencers are a lot more accessible. They also have a tightly knit follower base that is more likely to interact with each other. With that genuine level of engagement, your brand has a higher chance of being more visible to your target audience.
How Your Startup Business Can Do Influencer Marketing Right
With all that, you can see that influencer marketing is still an effective strategy to rely on. But your startup business needs to do it right to succeed. Virtua Solutions Outsourcing can help you in this effort in various ways.
Why Outsource Your Startup Business Influencer Marketing Effort?
You would likely ask here why you would want to outsource your influencer marketing needs. Aside from the usual reasons to outsource anything, there are also more compelling ones for this move.
One such situation to consider outsourcing is if you intend to use influencers for multiple campaigns. Each campaign or audience will likely need a different kind of influencer. And reaching out to those can require a lot of resources. Through outsourcing, you can have multiple teams work on separate campaigns.
Finding The Right Influencers For You
As noted above, finding the right influencers for your startup business campaign can be laborious. For one, you need to sift through multitudes of candidates to find ones that match your needs. That search can involve a large amount of research work.
This is the first area where Virtua Solutions can help you. Our agents will handle the task of scrutinizing each potential influencer you want to partner with. We do this in the background so that you can focus on formulating a plan of engagement for the suitable ones.
But beyond that, we can also conduct extensive research on the influencer industry itself. As we have mentioned earlier, the industry is undergoing a lot of changes. We keep track of all those developments for you. Additionally, we look into related external developments that can influence the industry. All of this information will be within your reach, giving you a greater opportunity to refine your strategies.
Making Contact With Influencers
Once you have your list of desired influencers, the next step is connecting with and engaging them. Here, the challenge is attempting initial contact continuously until the influencer responds. Many startup businesses often find this part very daunting, especially if the influencer takes a lot of time to reply.
Virtua can also take on that work for you. Our agents will start by engaging with the influencer’s content. This can take some time but we know how to strategize and increase the visibility of our engagements. Once the influencer responds, we engage them more directly.
Note that you need to be patient here. You can’t immediately present a marketing pitch to them. Instead, you will need to build additional rapport. For that, we will continue communicating with the influencer in your stead. This way, they will warm up to your offer once the time comes.
Supporting Your Influencers
Our help doesn’t end with getting you connected with your chosen influencers. Once the campaign they are involved in starts, we can provide a variety of support. To start, our agents can serve as the liaison between you and influencers. That way, you can keep in touch with them throughout the campaign even if you are attending to other campaign matters.
Our customer support is also on standby to help you with the influx of new customers attracted by the influencer. We can answer questions about your product or services that they are not able to readily respond to. From there, we can guide these customers to your site for possible transactions. We also respond to customer concerns during the campaign.
Give Your Startup Business A Boost Through Influencer Marketing
As you can see, influencer marketing is still a potent strategy for your startup business. And with our help, you can successfully connect with the best influencers in your industry. Contact us today so that we can get started on this effort together.