One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is that there are a lot of different strategies that can be utilized to generate leads and drive ROI, and on top of that, new tactics are always being developed to further create engagement.
With that, influencer marketing has become somewhat of a buzzword within the digital industry over the last year or two, but when you think about it, influencer marketing has been around for years.
Think about it.
You see your friend with the newest toy or gadget, and then you go out and buy it. Why? Because they influenced your buying decision.
Here in the digital age, influencer marketing has been streamlined through social media channels like Instagram and Twitter, where it's easier for big brands to connect with their influencers and entice them to promote their product.
Taking it a step further, companies like InstaBrand have created their own influencer marketing platform, building relationships with hundreds of thousands of influencers across multiple social media channels, including Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Pinterest. What InstaBrand does is it connects big brands with popular social media users (ones with hundreds of thousands, and even millions of followers)-also known as influencers-and pays them to promote the brand's product.
InstaBrand boasts a powerful analytics platform that allows brands to target based on location, age, and other demographics, but with clients like Levis, Calvin Klein, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Samsung, the minimum buy can get pricey, as you can imagine. And because of that, it's perceived that influencer marketing is only for big brands with unlimited marketing budgets.
Luckily for small and medium businesses, that perception isn't a reality.
Companies like Blog Meets Brand, Neoreach and Triberr have all built their own influencer marketing platforms that connect business of all sizes with influencers on all major social and blogging platforms (each company specializes in different platforms).
Blog Meets Brand, for example, links businesses with bloggers in different verticals, and those bloggers then share the brand's messaging through social channels, which drives engagement and direct sales. Some of the vertical-specific blog areas that Blog Meets Brand serves include parenting, women's interest, men's interest, food, coupon, fashion and beauty, travel, technology, and fitness, health, and wellness blogs.
Red Mango-a popular frozen yogurt and smoothie brand in the U.S.-utilized Blog Meets Brand when they introduced a new probiotic smoothie to the Nebraska, Utah, Illinois, and Washington markets, where Red Mango wasn't as familiar to the general public. The results were impressive. BMB deployed influencers in the moms, diet, urban, and millennial categories, and that resulted in 258 branded photos generated across multiple social networks and 50 blog reviews published, which generated 2.3M+ impressions and more than 300 direct links for the FroYo business, which had a positive impact on their brand (read the full case study here).
And while Blog Meets Brand also boasts brands like Samsung, Jeep, and Microsoft as clients, businesses can work with Blog Meets Brand on a campaign for as little as $5,000, and that includes access to an analytics dashboard and comprehensive reporting to the brand, in addition to a kickoff and post-campaign review call.
The days of big brands' marketing budgets crushing the smaller guys are over. SMBs can now deploy successful, data-driven influencer marketing campaigns without having to take out a loan.
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