Influencer marketing is today’s buzzword.
I am not making this up. In fact it’s the fastest growing client acquisition method now.
There are many highly effective influencer marketing tactics available to choose from—Instagram influencer marketing, Snapchat, Facebook and even Twitter, to name a few.
But, since everyone is obsessed with videos let’s focus on that. Specifically influencer marketing on YouTube.
Every day over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos are watched which is way more than what’s consumed on Netflix and Facebook combined. The average viewing session lasts 40 minutes.
[bctt tweet="What’s fascinating about YouTube is that it can help promote your product and market it in tandem. " username="relevance"]
YouTube is also good for educating prospects and for visual branding.
Why is this important?
In marketing, a conversion is a downward facing pyramid with awareness and consideration coming first.
Before a purchase takes place, the customer must have a reason to want that product. There should be a problem in their lives or a situation warranting improvement. Something that needs a fix.
This thought of an ideal place where they want to be is different from where they’re in reality.
To get closer to this ideal place, customers begin searching for solutions, sometimes with a search engine and at other times by approaching friends and family.
This creates an opportunity where you can make them aware of your solution and transfer them to the awareness stage where they can just exchange some money to better their lives.
Let’s consider the example of an educative influencer campaign on Youtube with what Warby did.
Warby retails home-try-on glass models.
A YouTube influencer explains the model to viewers and provides a visual learning experience that goes beyond what can be achieved with mere pictures of the glasses. Influencers not only share their learning experience with the product but also share about the way they feel using the glasses. This is organic word of mouth that doesn’t feel forced or worse artificial.
Here’s the link to the video:
The details enrich the presentation, add authenticity and spike interest.
Let’s look at one more example.
Motorola promoted its Moto Z line of products targeted at youngsters via YouTube after realizing that their target demographic spent much of their time watching videos there. The product on offer was a customizable phone that did more than placing and taking calls. The plan was to get these influencers to talk about and show different use cases of the Z line of products. For instance Moto Z force could be strapped to rockets, to projectors, cameras and so on.
13 influencers over different verticals created hero YouTube videos featuring unique Moto Z case studies and ran social media posts.
The Results?
Over 80000 new visitors to their site.
How to pitch these influencers?
Before pitching influencers, you need to find out the right influencers.
Discover them based on your niche. If you’ve haven’t already done so, identify your core niche and draw tangents to find influencers that share common interests.
Let’s say you make geeky funny science videos. Partnering with individuals who love to write about Big Bang Theory could work. It’s a geeky comedy sitcom that despite its flaws manages to attract people interested in science.
[bctt tweet="The Big Bang Theory isn’t a direct subset of your niche but this is an example of a market that has many overlaps. Your ability to find such markets and pitch influencers is your ticket to getting traction. " username="relevance"]
Influencers lend authenticity to your campaign. Like we discussed above, influencer marketing is word of mouth amplified many times over.
It isn’t an advert, so don’t provide influencers with of tons of talking points to memorize and spit out. That takes the focus away from the influencer and makes it seem like an artificial endorsement.
Don’t put time limits on endorsements. It needs to go on as long as it needs to. Finally, the focus should delve on how the influencer’s life has been made better or the experience he has had with the product instead of asking them to describe a feature set.
Using hard metrics you know which campaign is getting the best ROI and you can work on similar campaigns in the future.
With customer UTM tracking parameters you can assign each influencer campaign unique tracking codes. You can go so far as to specify custom url parameters to each individual influencer in the campaign and track the number of clicks and conversions that happened because of one individual.
Above all, it’s mostly free and very easy to do.
Google has a free URL builder you can use.
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
In the first column enter the website address say www.google.com
This is followed by campaign source which in this case is YouTube.
Campaign Medium: Influencer
Campaign Name Say Moto Z rocket
Here you can enter the name of the influencer say Teddy The last one can be left unfilled.
And this is what it would look like at the end
https://google.com/?utm_source=Youtube&utm_medium=Influencer&utm_campaign=Moto%20Z%20rocket&utm_term=Teddy
Campaigns can be for purchases where you try to sell to a cold lead or it can be for acquiring leads who you can market to later after warming and coaxing them up. Once they’re on your list you get several opportunities to land the sale offering discounts and promos if the first mails aren’t converting.
Remember to keep the following things in mind.
Finally, combine your efforts by supplementing videos around industry trends in general. Trending topics can be discovered on Google trends and social media sites.
This gives a greater chance of your video going viral and acquiring many more conversions.
Finally don’t turn it into a cheesy advert. Then it becomes less of an influencer campaign and more of a watered down version of word of mouth that can get the video trolled. This could result in unintended results.
