Being a full-time influencer is a relatively new profession which means that no strict rules apply to that business and all of that adds to the excitement and appeal related to it: you get to connect with a number of likeminded people and enjoy your opinions getting acknowledged.
However, this doesn’t mean an absence of any kind of structure and strategic thinking because that could be detrimental to your influencer business. While spontaneity is possible in the early beginnings of your influencer career, here are a few reasons why you would soon need a proper digital marketing strategy.
Finding your audience is easier
Having a structured strategy and a plan in the influencer business doesn’t mean you are limiting yourself, no matter how fluctuating and versatile the market may be. You need to set some guidelines to help you target your audience in a specific niche. That being said, you don’t have to be a big name in that area to be successful because micro-influencers are greatly respected in their niches for their knowledge, expertise, and the selfless sharing of opinions and experience.
By employing different digital marketing tools, you will learn more about the habits of your audience, such as their preferred social media channels, the time of the day when most of them are present online, which device takes precedence, which content format they react best to, and many other useful pieces of information. If you apply the data you find interesting in your strategy, it would be easier to reach your target audience, build your reputation, and land more clients.
Targeting is more personalized
As mentioned, software tools can, by and large, boost your digital marketing strategy by obtaining user-related data for you. But the story doesn’t end there since being an influencer is a specific profession which involves both promoting yourself and your clients’ products in a specific manner. What counts is how you decide to use that data to your advantage to get the most optimal results that would have long-term effects.
For instance, with the help of geotargeting, you can learn just the right time to post your videos or other forms of content to ensure it would be seen by a large percentage of your online audience. You may think that getting the time wrong wouldn’t affect the number of views because they will stumble upon the video eventually but in that case, you might be forgetting that everybody is constantly bombarded with information so your content may be overlooked because it arrived while they were sleeping. You might incorporate subscriptions to email updates which would be personalized so they don’t miss a thing.
It makes you more competitive
Social media is not the only means of gaining a competitive advantage and making your name be seen and heard not just in your city but globally. Your audience should be able to find you on multiple channels so you would need to think about your website as well because, depending on your niche, your audience might find website blog posts more reliable than only a YouTube video shared on Facebook.
While omnipresence is natural for social media, it takes a different skill set for a German website to be ranked at the top of the first search result page and get noticed by the US audience, for instance. It demands coming up with a customized SEO strategy as well as using different tools to monitor its performance. If you lack expertise or time for this undertaking, it is best to partner up with an experienced SEO New York company or whichever city you desire, to make sure you get the optimal results and outshine your competition. For a high-quality SEO strategy, you need to hire professionals that are experts on a global scale which means searching outside of your backyard.
Your business becomes scalable
Many people are reluctant to create a strategy because they believe it is constraining and refusing to evolve and change in the modern digital era is tantamount to failure. However, a digital marketing strategy is not something written in stone, something unchangeable and rigid but a flexible structure which can and should be adapted according to your needs or the expansion of your influencer business.
Some indicators that can help you realize that you need to adapt should be extracted from the data on your audience’s preferences. For example, you can see if more people interacted with your rant video about certain ingredients being used in some products or to an educational blog post dedicated to a DIY project. You can also learn the nature of their engagement, whether they’ve lingered on it, liked it, shared it or perhaps clicked on the link from your clients’ products. As your targets get more specific and your business grows to encompass a wider audience, your digital marketing campaign will adapt to those demands.
It integrates mobile marketing to your business
Almost no business, regardless of the industry, can persist without a mobile marketing strategy. Responsiveness is not a thing of the future but of the present since smartphones have become the preferred device when it comes to searching for information or doing shopping simply because they are portable and allow people to get things done while on the move. In this busy world, we live in, people squeeze in time for things they are interested in while commuting or queuing because it is difficult to set aside time for that due to everyday obligations.
This is why it is essential to make sure that your online presence is in its entirely responsive and your digital marketing strategy will help you to make subtle changes across different platforms to boost the visibility of your content. For instance, an image with too many details might not be the most suitable for those accessing the content from their mobile devices which is why you would need to reconsider your choice of image for that particular post across different devices.
Conclusion
A well-constructed digital marketing strategy can bring many benefits to a business of influencers. By implementing it, you will widen your audience base and attract more clients and like-minded individuals while making a profit so you can make this a full-time job.
Author’s Bio:
Jacob Wilson is a business consultant, and an organizational psychologist, based in Brisbane. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Bizzmark blog.