Influencer Marketing: Are you making the most of influencers?

I’m sure you all, like me, received a number of emails ahead of or during Black Friday from companies promoting their special Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals…. But did you actually take much notice of them?

What if you had of received and email from one of your favourite celebrities, such as pop sensation Katy Perry? Would you be more inclined to buy then?

Well, that’s exactly what Alibaba did. They use celebrity, big celebrities with huge fan bases in China, to help promote and influence the sales of “singles day”.

You may not have heard of it, but Singles Day is bigger than Black Friday, in fact singles day generates around $14billion in one single day which is more than Black Friday & Cyber Monday combined!

Singles day, or Guanggun Jie as it is now is the single biggest shopping day amongst a typically younger Chinese market.

Founded by Alibaba is has had around a consistent 40% year-on-year growth which makes it the largest online shopping day in the world!

$17.8bn is the reported total sales for Singles day in 2016.

Launched in 2009 to promote the launch of new Alibaba store Taobao, the event launched with rather modest sales of around $7million, compared to 2016 where sales reached almost $18billion!

Hollywood producers have been lined up to document the event which will see celebrities such as Katy Perry and other global celebrities kick off the event at a gala bash.

Influencers have helped push and make this event what it is today. The celebrity brand pulling power is still in full force and the ROI evident with the strong sales.

Now, you may not be able to hire Katy Perry to promote your product or brand, but there are other types of influencers you can use to power your digital marketing.

Bloggers, Vloggers and other social media stars are really changing the way brands do business. Big brands are now signing some of these internet superstars with millions of followers to contracts whereby the big brands can use them to leverage their targeted audience.

What you should be looking at, is how you can approach these influencers, the ones who have reach to a captive audience that is your market.

Influencer marketing is powerful because of the trust the personalities have with their audience. When an influencer recommends a product it comes with far more sway than a generic ad with no one or nothing to back it up.

You are more likely to make a decision based on a recommendation from a friend than you are from cold research.

Influencer marketing is big… and it’s going to get bigger for 2017… How could you utilise influencer marketing in your business?

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For 2019 the great thing about influencer marketing is that it helps build a brand and since we wrote this original article, influencer marketing has hit new heights.

Firstly, many celebrities are now told to mention when their tweets are promotional ads and you may even see the #ad hashtag at the end of a tweet – This is so their audience knows that they are being paid to promote the product.

Influencer marketing can help with your SEO and really help get your website ranking on Google, Firstly it helps build brand, if someone tweets our your brand name and the searches for your product/company increase and your search engine result gets clicked on from Google then this will help lift you up the Google rankings – Obviously this needs to be consistent over a period of time and just having thousands overnight as a one-off will not help you much.

Secondly if influencers are republishing your content it can get picked up by a wider audience – whilst sharing content doesn’t help SEO directly – The people who could pick up on it and link to it could give you a little SEO boost if you get a backlink from it.