Growing your business can be a constant uphill struggle. A frequent issue that businesses young or old can run into is the challenge of spreading the word about your company. As social media continues to dominate the world’s attention, new opportunities have arisen for businesses to market themselves. One of our favorite methods is to partner with ‘influencers.’ Influencers are certain people that have distinguished themselves online and garnered a large following. When influencers sponsor a product, thousands of people take note, and in doing so, builds a larger demand for said product. Here are 5 ways that an influencer can boost your business today.

Reach a Wider Audience

Millions of people use Twitter and Instagram every day. Across any social media platforms, clear niches have already been established, whether it be a certain sport that a group of people focus on or any other hobby and activity. Within these groups, there are certain accounts and personalities that huge numbers of people subscribe to. The sheer volume of people that an influencer is seen by on a given day can be invaluable to a business, because it enables you to connect to all of the people that an influencer does.

If you were to partner with or hire an online influencer to feature your product in an ad, then all of their followers will inevitably see it. This audience is centralized online, and can be a tough audience to market for otherwise. Marketing techniques of all kinds are omnipresent in society. But an influencer has an audience that consciously chooses to follow them and listen to their statements, which means its an audience that chooses to hear our advertisements. This is a unique audience that is hard to approach otherwise, which makes influencers so useful.

Build Ethos with Viewers

Influencers online have built a huge collection of followers through their personality, interests, skills, and lifestyle. Oftentimes an influencer has already been successful in some certain industry, such as makeup or exercise influencers. People that follow them online originally come to see their skills up close while hoping to capture some part of that lifestyle for themselves. This mindset can be a powerful tool for marketing. When people want to live a life like the celebrities they follow, then an obvious first step is to buy the things that they do. If we can control the products that an influencer shows off, then we can keep our products in the eyes of consumers.

This concept is basically the rhetorical tool of ethos put to aggressive effect. We use the trust that an influencer has built with an audience, then connect that audience to our products. Because all of these followers want to be like an influencer, or at least value their opinions, then we can use that to our advantage as we draw this audience in with an influencer’s help.

Build Your Brand Identity

As we’ve already alluded to, an influencer builds their audience through their personality first and foremost. These personalities can be tremendously useful not only for marketing a product, but marketing a brand. The value your company’s image has can never be overstated, so its important to curate that identity and spread the word about your company’s values as much as your goods. (For more information, check out our other post on this topic, How To Curate Your Brand's Idnetity)

Curating your identity like this can be greatly aided with the help of an already popular and successful personality. An influencer can add more flavor and clarity to any brand. It’s the exact same reasoning that large companies hire A-list celebrities to be in their commercials: it’s exciting for an audience and it shows exactly how they want to be perceived. Our businesses may not be hiring Hollywood’s elite, but the same concept exists and should be taken advantage of immediately.

Expand into New Markets

As mentioned earlier in this blog post, social media has a very diverse audience with countless markets within. If your company is looking to burst into a new market with some new product or service, working alongside an established influencer can help kickstart this process. These influencers already have some pull over the audiences in this market, and can thus get the word out and build a relationship with this new market.

Solidify Space in Existing Market

But let’s say the opposite is true. Perhaps you already have a space in some market and want to keep your products from going stale in the minds of consumers. An influencer can be a refreshing marketing image that’ll wake audiences back up to your business’s value. Audiences will see that a product they’re familiar with is still relevant to an influencer, and thus it must be a more valuable product than they once considered it to be.

How Do I Start?

At this point, we can see that an influencer can be a crucial marketing partner in any business. So how do I go about working with one? This is actually a fairly straightforward endeavor. As with any other factor of your business, getting the word out is important. Influencers are aware of their valuable market share of the digital world, and as such, they expect a professional relationship to develop. Reach out through proper channels, which oftentimes consists of the influencer’s professional email address which they’ll link in their online profiles. Reach out confidently and correspond as you would with any other business contract, and ultimately you’ll come out the other end with a sponsorship and a large new audience to sell to.