Influence Marketing Through Podcasts

You may be asking, what does an influencer marketeer look like? who should I use? and can I afford them? well I hope to be able to give you some pointers in this blog to help you make up your own mind and show you the power of podcast marketing for your business and why this really shluld be part of your marketing strategy.

The process of influencer marketing is about finding an “influencer” who has accrued a following that closely aligns with your ideal audience. Then, establishing a relationship with that influencer, and subsequently finding a mutually beneficial way to promote your business to their audience.

For example, you are the proud small business owner of a company that designs and manufactures a line of eco-friendly, vintage-inspired make-up products. You find an influencer in that domain – a blogger with an Instagram following numbering in the tens of thousands. This person tries new makeup styles and products, and reviews them and models them for their followers. Their followers, in turn, are highly influenced to buy and try these products for themselves.

Instead of taking the time to woo many different prospects separately, you instead target this influencer with a marketing strategy. The influencer, if you’ve managed to market your products to them successfully, will tell their followers about it. They influence them to buy.

Your target influencer knows the audience much better than you do. They interact with them on a daily basis, and already know what’s going to resonate with the audience and what will turn them off. With influencer marketing, the guesswork is taken out of the marketing strategy. Someone has done the hard work of cultivating a relationship with the audience for you already. Less pivoting, tweaking, and guessing is going to cut down on your marketing overhead.

In the internet age, the majority of online consumers, 84% to be exact, trust online reviews just as much as recommendations from friends and family. Furthermore, they want to hear from people that they idolize and respect (influencers). Consumers trust a recommendation from a person more than they believe in advertising from brands or businesses.

It’s much easier to get inside the head of one person, than thousands. This is the beauty of influencer marketing; it’s laser-focused and efficient. The more efficient something is, the cheaper it’s going to be. For small businesses and people with a constrained marketing budget, influencer marketing will get you a higher ROI than traditional marketing strategies which cast a wider net.

How effective is influencer marketing?

So, just how useful is influencer marketing, and what benefits are you going to see when you employ this strategy?

Organic reach on Facebook is way down and continuing to slide for businesses. This means paid reach is getting increasingly more expensive. Your influencers, on the other hand, have had years to build up their following and get them to interact with their content, so their organic reach is much higher.

Blog posts, for example, crafted by influencers and shared on social media see on average 11 times the ROI of banner ads. Also, studies show that a group of target customers who are exposed to influencer marketing will buy, on average, 10% more of a brand’s products than those who aren’t exposed to influencer marketing at all.

These influencer marketing stats not enough to convince you?

Here are just a few of the ‘hard’ benefits you’ll get with an influencer marketing campaign:

Increased conversions on your website.
Growth in your brand awareness.
Access to an already cultivated, highly targeted audience of buyers.
An expansion of your organic reach on social media, without paying a cent to Facebook.

Even better, there are a number of ‘soft’ benefits to influencer marketing. Your influencers are the ones who make the content, so, they’re the ones shouldering the creative costs. Often, the content they make for your brand will be evergreen, meaning you can reuse it again and again.

What are the different types of Influencers?

Now, let’s get into the different types of influencers, how to find them, and how to work with them to craft a budget-friendly influencer marketing strategy that’s mutually beneficial.

There are 3 characteristics to look for when on the hunt for an influencer: relevance, reach, and resonance (trust).

Relevance means how aligned the influencer’s platform is with your brand. If you sell only organic products, you might want to look for an influencer who has built fans that are eco-friendly.
For Reach, look for how many followers or fans the influencer has. What’s their domain authority? And their ability to reach the target audience?
Resonance is how well the audience receives the influencer’s message. Do they have a trusting relationship?

As well as these characteristics, there are also 3 unique types of influencers: micro, top, and local so it is up to you to decide how much you want to pay someone to influencer your product or service. Look for new influencers to as often these newbies on the block will be the small fish that with time will turn into the bigger fish that you can grow your brand alongside.