How influencer marketing has become the hottest trend in marketing in 2018

New strategies continuously emerge in the market for better advertising of products / brands. Businesses keep growing by adopting new trends, of which a recent buzz-word is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing has shown significant growth in the past few years and is growing every year. Influencers are the people who have marked their   presence in the audience through social media like Instagram, blogs, youtube and facebook. They are the celebrities who are ruling generations of loyal fans who trust them completely and follow them strongly. Be it anything like gadgets, fashion, cell-phones, books, cosmetics, etc., influencer marketing is catching on. It is nothing but word-of-mouth marketing by trusted experts. When these celebs endorse any products or brands, it creates a very long-lasting impact on the minds of fans who follow them blindly.

Influencer marketing is becoming one of the best ways to build your brand credibility. It is becoming core part of marketing strategy by reaching out to potential customer through social media, starting the momentum for the brands by drawing attention of its targeted audience.

Right influencer for your brand or product can lead to achieve your targets easily, and hence, the influencer should be chosen wisely. We need to consider the following factors:

·         Reach of the influencer

·         Target audience

·         Fitment of your product / service in his/her area of expertise

Based on the above factors, you may use the framework below for identifying the right influencer for you:

·        Influencer’s Image: Brand or product which you are launching must match withinfluencer’s image, so that it can be easily be accepted by the audience.

·         Influencer’s Connect: How much the audience is connected with the influencer. Are his blogs and article read, reviewed, commented and shared by the followers regularly? How many of his old viewers are following him on social media versus new?

·         Influencer’s Reach: It is very important to find if the influencer has a good reach, thereby meeting the target audience.

·         Frequency of visits: To market any website, it is very important that visitors should turn back to the influencer’s posts very frequently.

·         Trust on influencer:  Story of genuine use of product or brand by the influencer is trusted more by the target audience than any sponsored or other reviews of brand or product.

·         Traffic Attraction: How much the influencer is able to attract the audience traffic through his blogs.

·         Influencer’s Social Media following: How many followers does the influencer have on social media platforms.

·         Content:  Influencers have a strong following who can drive traffic to your content

·         Alexa Rank:  Will also help in assessing how popular the influencer is, relative to others.

Online tools also help in assessing the Influencers:

1.       Blog Moz Rank: links to popularity of blogs; the higher the blog moz rank, the better.

2.       Buzz Sumo is a most popular tool. It is a search engine to find key influencers. It reviews the topics, content and domain they share. It analyses the influencers, filters the influencer by their reach, authority, influence and engagement. It is a tool that helps users to give a bigger picture of their activity online, while comparing them to other competitors and brands online.

3.    Twitter Counter: It compares with other competitors, monitors other keywords and hashtags, and manages data between multiple Twitter accounts.

4.    Hootsuite Insights: This tool provides deep level data across many of your social accounts and not just Twitter.

Influencer marketing has become an integral part of marketing strategy. It is much more reliable and cost affective mode of marketing than conventional marketing tactics, if executed well.