Picking the Right YouTube Influencer For Your Brand

(via Creative Commons)

It comes as no surprise that people use YouTube as a search engine. Fun fact: YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world. From discovering new products, to tutorials and how-to videos, YouTube is a great platform for your brand to create leads and turn them into loyal customers.

If using YouTube is part of your strategy, then you’re going to want to pay close attention to this: if your brand has got great content, but no one is viewing it then it’s time to turn to YouTube influencers to attract new customers. Here are three tips to help get you started.

Find Genuine YouTubers

The first step to a great influencer strategy on YouTube is finding the right YouTuber for your brand! Make sure to give them creative control in their content so that they can promote your brand organically, which will do far more wonders for your brand. If not, then you’re basically forcing an ad down consumers’ throats. That’s a big no-no.

The point of using a YouTube influencer is to provide a fresh, new position. These potential consumers are looking to their favorite YouTube personalities for quality information. Make it count.

Don’t be seduced by a high number of followers

Using YouTubers with a high number of followers could be detrimental to your brand. Yes, it’s tempting to use YouTube personalities with a great following, but it won’t make sense if the influencer’s audience is not the right fit for your brand. If your content isn’t relevant to the audience, then what sense does it make to use that influencer?

Nowadays, brands are moving to influencers with a smaller number of followers especially when they’re the right fit for the brand. Choosing a YouTuber in their respective niche provides a close community of consumers who are interested in your brand. This drives higher engagement rates and provides an overall greater impact. Besides, it costs less to use YouTubers with smaller followings. Choose wisely.

Use Creative Titles for your videos

Try this: write down the most memorable videos that you can remember, and check their video titles.

Choosing an original and memorable title for your videos can do more for your brand than you can imagine. Work closely with your influencer to craft video titles that fit your brand, as well as the influencer’s simultaneously.

While it makes theoretical sense to place your brand in the title, this may fail and lead to the opposite of what you were hoping for. Consumers see enough commercials on television; think smart and have fun with it.

People are going to listen to someone they trust rather than the advertising they see on any visual platform. The digital space is evolving and we all need to keep up with it.

Potential customers are look to reviews and recommendations from friends and family – not advertisements. Use an authentic YouTube influencer for your campaign and work closely together. Look further than a large following; find someone who is at the top of their respective market with an engaged audience that fits your brand. 

What’s your view on YouTube influencer marketing? Have you run successful YouTube campaigns? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

The Future of Influencer Marketing

The future of influencer marketing is bright. It’s an exciting time for marketers, and we’re thrilled to see what the future holds.

Does 150,000 followers on Instagram make an influencer effective? We’ve come to the conclusion that Instagram popularity does not lead to an increased influence. Algorithms for social networks are constantly changing, and marketers need to prepare for what lies ahead.

Consumers are gradually beginning to interact only with brands they trust. Marketers must realize that building trust can be achieved in various ways. If forgotten, brands are sure to lose consumers trust – which means less business. Brands are going to have to find ways to serve ads with value and trust.

It’s safe to say that the future of influencer marketing will cause the downfall of traditional digital marketing tactics. Since the majority of consumers are ignoring advertisements on digital spaces, brands are going to have to find ways to reach consumers without traditional advertisements, like banner ads and automatic videos.

Adblockers have destroyed agencies’ digital efforts. 47% of online consumers use ad block, and it has been detrimental for agencies. If consumers aren’t getting brand messages, how can marketing move forward?

Via Google Images

Social media channels have provided a great platform for consumers to talk and express their opinions. As a result, 74% of users rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions. Brands will need to pay extremely close attention to what consumers are saying online. For example, an angry customer with even a low number of followers can tweet a negative res for a product or service, which could possibly become a news story in the newspaper.

Consumers now want transparent and authentic marketing messages. An increasing number of people are looking to social networks for recommendations. Subsequently, brands are losing their importance in the digital world. Influencer marketing provides marketers with an opportunity to deliver authentic brand messages directly to networks that consumers trust. It can be extremely time-consuming for agencies to find the right influencers in markets. Thus, brands need to take initiative to find, connect, and manage influencers, as well as to practice measuring the ROI of influencer efforts.

The future of influencer marketing will develop closer customer relationships. 70% of consumers reported online customer reviews are the second most trusted source. With that being said, it’s clear that influencer marketing generates better customers for brands. Marketers will also be able to measure predictability for brands with increasing budgets.

Influencer marketing is becoming increasingly technical and brands will need to keep up. Finding the right influencers for your target market on the right networks and time will depend on patterns in data and new algorithms. If done correctly, sharing content through influencers in a niche market will triple conversions, in some cases increasing conversions by a factor of 10.

In creating a new age in customer intimacy that emphasizes trust for consumers, brands need to produce valuable content for audiences across the various social media networks. Marketers will be forced to move away from traditional advertising strategies to drive authentic engagement. The earlier this transition happens, marketers will be able to analyze growth and act on purchase patterns to understand and predict results. Brands have to practice the best influencer marketing methods to generate precise and quantifiable results.

Agencies will no longer need to focus their efforts on influencer marketing. Marketers will need to exercise their expertise on finding and training the right influencers. Influencer marketing will shift away from agencies especially because of the cost and resources needed.

According to a recent Forbes article, softwares are being implemented in marketing strategies in order to give agencies a truthful measurement of influence and impact on consumers. By driving more conversations on social media with consumers, trust is being built, which in turn, helps marketers to measure how engagement and interaction through analytics.

Where do you think influencer marketing will be in the future? Will there be a future for influencers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

How do Instagram Influencers get paid?

Photo: Liz Ezwein

 

New Yorker Liz Eswein, 25, is one of the most popular brand influencers in the world of Instagram. Joining the app shortly after it launched in 2010, she pursued her passion of photography and began posting pictures of her city under the account @NewYorkCity. Ezwein has since attracted 1.3 million followers. For each brand endorsed, she earns $1 for every like with an additional fee based on the number of photos she posts. For her photo above, she amassed close to sixteen thousand likes. Now, that’s a lot of money…

For those like Ezwein, who have learned to monetize their passion for quality photography, Instagram can be a wonderful place. With over 400 million users, the photo-sharing app has truly grown to be social media giant. According to The Guardian, 90% of Instagram users are below 35 years of age and more than 50% of those users use the app every day.

Brands ranging from Adidas to National Geographic have realized the potential in reaching a particularly younger market. Instagram stars that have thousands of followers can reach a wide audience with just one post. Nowadays, agencies have moved to Instagram as a staple for brands that are looking for exposure. 

According to a recent article by the Huffington Post, Instagram influencers account for over $1 billion in advertising spending a year, with most of that going directly to social media celebrities.

Currently, it’s safe to say that social media celebrities have more of an influence than actual celebrities do. The reason being is that people can sincerely relate to them.

Here are some ways in which brand influencers make money:

1. Sponsored posts

The main way influencers earn their income is through sponsored posts. These posts can go a long way for brands looking to produce a high ROI on Instagram. Brands decide what product/service as well as the messaging they want their influencer to promote. Influencers then go about creating their own content incorporating the company’s strategy in a manner that’s authentic.

It’s especially important for brands to choose an influencer with the right audience. To execute a strategy that works, choose an influencer with an audience or niche your brand will resonate with.

2. Documenting an event or experience

Instagram influencers are often paid to travel to exotic locations to promote an event or experience. Ezwein, for example, consistently travels the world to take pictures for various projects.

3. Hosting or appearing at an event

For immediate results, brands often ask influencer to host events. Whether it’s a party, restaurant opening, or any other type of event, influencers can drive brand awareness and traffic to events.

How much money?

There’s an incredible amount of money to be made in the world of social media advertising. According to Harper’s Bazaar, companies spend more than a billion dollars every year on sponsored Instagram posts. The amount of money that influencers make depends largely on how many followers they have. Essentially, the more followers you have, the more views you have to offer a brand, which means that you can charge businesses higher amounts for sponsored posts.

Are you an influencer that wants to get paid?

The amount of money to be made for influencers all comes down to views, and followers. For example, Dash Hudson, an agency that focuses on influencer marketing on Instagram, does not choose users that have less than ten thousand followers. If you want to appeal to brands, then it’s important that you consistently produce high-quality content for your profile. Thomas Rankin, CEO of Dash Hudson, is known to select connect brands with influencer that have a high engagement rate coupled with a large audience. All in all, work on your account. Engage with your audience and when the time is right, directly reach out to brands in your niche.

Within the next five years, influencer marketing is expected to be a massive $5 to $10 billion dollar market. It’s time to hop on board the influencer train and start making a difference for your brand.

Do you think brands should pay for influence? When should you influence for free? Leave your comments below!

Tips and Tricks to Increase Audience Reach

In order to make your brand’s social media strategy successful, a strong following across various channels is definitely going to be needed to reach your full potential.

Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or the various other social media channels, a high number of fans and followers is needed to make your strategy effective. Consider taking effective steps to increase your reach. It’s really simple: the more number of followers and fans your brand has, the better the reach.

For most brands, the ultimate objective of utilizing social media as a platform is to create leads. The key to a quality social media following is to truly earn and win your fans and followers. This is vital because these consumers will fully engage and interact with your brand online by liking and sharing your photos and videos, clicking on links etc.

It can be challenging to build a following from scratch, but here are some tips and tricks to increase your brand’s reach.

1. Create profiles on all the major social media channels

It sounds simple enough, right? We recommend that you create and maintain a strong presence on the top social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn because it’s highly likely that your target audience spends most of their time on these networks. If not these channels, then it’s especially important to focus your efforts on the channels that they are using.

No matter how big or small your brand is your consumers are constantly talking, and you need to make the effort to be available wherever they may be talking about your products and services. Maintain your presence.

2. Optimize your social profiles

A survey conducted by eConsultancy reported that 39% of companies agree that a strong social media presence increases search engine optimization. Adapt to the digital environment by choosing a simple, yet catchy username that makes it easy for consumers to recognize you. Try uploading a cool profile photo, like your logo for example. Utilize all tabs in each channel to maximize your reach: include a description about your company and what it stands for. Share a call-to-action to drive engagement. It’s important you follow these rules because you want your audience to find you easily.

3. Actively promote your social presence whenever possible

Be proactive! Whether its on your company website, blog, or even email marketing campaigns, your social media sites need to be everywhere and easily accessible. Your consumers need to know where you’re located so implement a “follow” button so that consumers can be led directly to your channel. In addition, take advantage of cross promotion. This means your Twitter followers can become your Facebook fans etc.

For example, Nike does a great job in cross promotion by simply showcasing their Instagram account on Facebook by simply giving their Instagram feed its own tab on their Facebook page.

(Via Facebook)

4. Share relevant, valued content

Nowadays, a like or share has to be earned. So you need to make sure your content is relevant to consumers. Make your brand worth following. Move away from product oriented content to posting a variety of content, such as, compelling images and videos, to keep your audience continuously engaged with your brand. Your audience is 44% more likely to interact with visually compelling content.

For example, McDonalds regularly shares fun pictures instead of simply sharing repetitive, boring pictures of their burgers.

(Via Facebook)

5. Interact and engage with anyone who mentions you

Monitor your social presence on all channels. Interacting with your fans and followers should be at the very core of your strategy. Some ways to do this is to ask your fans interesting questions, respond to their comments (especially when negative), and try implementing hashtags in your responses.

It will take some time for your brand to increase its reach, but if you use the tips above, you’re guaranteed to see results.

Do you have any recommendations on how brands can increase their audience reach? Let us know in the comments below!

How to Leverage Influencers to Build Trust for your Brand

Is your brand having trouble getting noticed online? There’s no denying that online branding has become increasingly challenging as consumers have become less trusting of any marketing content posted across social media channels.

It used to be that consumers wanted to interact with brands after viewing advertisements they actually enjoyed. Nowadays, consumers don’t even want to communicate with companies anymore. Instead, they want to communicate with real people with strong personalities.

Social media’s constant influx of content is a problem most brands have to sift through in order to reach a target audience authentically. The surefire way to build your brand online is through trust.

For example, Nike conducted a study and found that less than 25% of consumers trust advertisements online. Thus, its evident that the level of success of a brand’s marketing campaign online is centered on its ability to build trust.

While the advertising industry, overall, has been slow to adapt to the changing media landscape, newer opportunities are available for brands to influence their consumers. Welcome, influencer marketing.

Influencers are a great way to connect your audience to the ever-changing media channels. Yet, it’s important to utilise the most relevant influencer specific to your brand and audience in order to produce high-quality content that resonates amongst your followers.

Marketing content cannot reach its intended audience, no matter how creative, without trust, which is why influencer marketing remains a powerful tool for marketers. Influencers are essentially relationship-builders. They genuinely combine brand messages into their personal narratives which effectively leads to building consumer trust.

Why do you need a brand influencer?

It’s fair to state that most brands face an uphill battle in the digital world. A report from The Guardian saw that 69% of customers use the Internet as their main source of information.

Influencer marketing is powerful because your brand has access to a tailored audience. When carried out appropriately, marketing content appears more genuine and authentic. So, it’s time to move away from the banner ads and move towards implementing a strong influencer for your brand.

A study conduct by McKinsey discovered that online word-of-mouth advertising produces twice the number of sales than paid advertising, while also leading to a 37% higher retention rate. The optimal way to drive sales is to clearly identify influencers in your specific industry and leverage their voices to promote and communicate your brand’s message.

 

Benefits of Brand Influencers

1. Grow your brand equity

Influencer marketing does not only increase brand awareness, but also your brand’s true value. In addition, personalised campaigns can grow your follower base and increase overall engagement with your audience.

2. Gain customer trust and loyalty

When there’s an increase in consumer activity on social media, your brand grows. Consumers want to be reached with marketing content at the right time with relevant and applicable messages. Thus, trustworthy influencers can reach this audience and generate genuine engagement that could possibly go viral on the Internet. Moreover, they can also generate customer acquisition and nurture new leads.

3. Influence consumer buying behavior

We all do it. We’re all influenced by other people’s opinions and actions. But it’s important to note that we tend to admire people who we trust. More than 81% of consumers begin their buying journey online and 70% trust and follow the recommendations posted by others.

So, start implementing influencers for your brand today! The authentic messages they create and share on behalf of your brand will only result in a surge of consumer behaviour and an overall increase in your brand equity.

Since consumers are less trusting of marketing content online, branding has become increasingly challenging. Consequently, brands have to work carefully to build the trust needed for their target audience. If your brand takes the time needed to identify a specific influencer to highlight your brand to their audience, then earning that trust is relatively easy.

Does your brand currently work with influencers? Has it worked for your brand and built trust amongst your consumers? Let us know in the comment section below!

Images sourced within.

The Art of Using Humor to Impact and Influence

It’s not secret that any form of content containing some kind of emotion is beneficial to your brand, but if you can make your consumers laugh then you’ve got a great chance of being an unquestionably successful.

As we live in a very serious world, most brands needlessly ignore humor. Wait, but why? Humor provides us with a break from the seriousness surrounding us. Incorporating humor with your social media strategy is a fantastic way to grab your audience’s attention. Do you know someone that can resist a funny tweet, or a clever Facebook post?

Humor is an art and must be honed. While social media can be a fantastic tool to create a witty persona, there is an extremely thin line between comedy and tragedy, which is often dangerous for your brand to thread if used negligently. Here are some funny examples of brands that failed to make their consumers laugh.

IHOP

Although known for their dicey tweets, IHOP crossed the line when they posted this sexist tweet to all of their followers.

Fans immediately responded to the inappropriate tweet by calling IHOP out for being misogynistic. Stray away from profoundly offensive messages, especially when linking your product or service to human body parts.

The Home Depot

That’s a great idea: don’t be racist!

Now, lets take a look at brands that successfully implemented humor across social media channels.

Old Spice

When thinking of brands that have a funny social media presence, Old Spice comes to mind. With ridiculous, yet original, content, the brand successfully created a comedy character that appears consistently over all of the brand’s media channels, including an Instagram video.

If you had a beard before they got cool then congratulations—you’re 15,438 years old.

— Old Spice (@OldSpice) April 19, 2014

Taco Bell

Taco Bell’s social media accounts are no different. Witty one-liners and crafty photo updates sure make its audience chuckle.

Good morning texts are cute, but have you tried bringing her Taco Bell?

— Taco Bell (@tacobell) January 3, 2016

So what makes these brands successful and funny?

While humor is subjective (please don’t expect it to please everyone), here are some keys to being funny and receiving a positive response from your consumers.

1. Understand your target audience

The most important factor to being humorous is to understand your target audience and what would be funny to them. By doing so, your consumers will certainly remember you and freely share your content.

2. Keep your overall image in mind

Don’t be funny just for the sake of being funny. You need to make sure the humor fits within the context of your brand; otherwise it just won’t make any sense.

3. Be consistent

Your brand does not need to be funny across all your social media channels. But, don’t go around trying to make fun of politicians, especially when you’re in the food industry. Be smart in picking things to poke fun at.

4. Be tasteful

Steer clear of controversial topics and jokes in bad taste. For example, a tweet from male fashion brand, Kenneth Cole, compared their new clothing collection to civil unrest in Cairo, Egypt. This is a complete no-no.

5. Keep it simple

The best humor comes naturally. You don’t need to have a standup routine just to get a laugh from your consumers. Keep your posts short and sweet.

Humor is undeniably a risky path to travel, but if done right, it could separate your brand from your competition, who solely blast their social media channels with product and business information.

You have an incredible power to influence, and even change, brand perception. So your content must do more than just educate consumers about your product; try having fun with your content. Entertain and captivate your audience, and then watch the number of your followers rise!

What’s your perspective on brands using humor on social media? If you’ve got some great examples (or fails), comment and share the links below!

Images sourced within.