What is Influencer Marketing and When Should You Use It?

Business is all about relationships. It’s largely the company’s responsibility to build and maintain positive, beneficial relationships with its customers, and sometimes that takes third-party help. This is where an influencer can come in.

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Business is all about relationships. It’s largely the company’s responsibility to build and maintain positive, beneficial relationships with its customers, and sometimes that takes third-party help. This is where an influencer can come in. .

What is Influencer Marketing?

An influencer is someone important to your industry who can talk to your customers on your behalf. They can bolster the relationship between you and your audience. But with that level of responsibility, you have to ensure you’re working with the right people, as they serve as an ambassador and can make for excellent PR - and increased conversions.

To find the right people, you first need to know your goals, then you can get a feel for who can help you reach them. Once you narrow down your list of potential influencers, decide who you can provide value to for a mutually beneficial relationship - because this type of relationship is just as important with the influencer as it is with your customers.

This infographic below shares more about what influencer marketing is, how it works, and how to make it work for your company.

A good example of this would be Youtube celebrity PewDiePie. He teamed up with the makers of a horror film set in the French catacombs under Paris, creating a series of videos in which he underwent challenges in the catacombs. It was pitch-perfect content for PewDiePie’s 27 million subscribers, and received nearly double the views as the movie’s trailer. Everybody won.

That’s the simple example. It’s easy to imagine a celebrity teaming with a company to pitch a product—even if the pitch is a series of 10 minute videos instead of a 30 second television ad. But people wouldn’t be talking about Influencer Marketing—you wouldn’t be reading about it, either—if it didn’t have a much wider set of applications. And the key is in the word, “Influencer.”

Influencers, unlike celebrities, can be anywhere. They can be anyone. What makes them influential is their large followings on the web and social media. An influencer can be a popular fashion photographer on Instagram, or a well-read cybersecurity blogger who tweets, or a respected marketing executive on LinkedIn. Within any industry, there are influential people—you just have to find them. They are easily recognized by their hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of followers, and that’s the target audience you’re after.