With influencer marketing, you can get your message and your products to a wider audience tailored to you, by using the audience of influencers in your industry.
Marketing and social media professionals who have qualifications in the field, such as a masters in communication, will understand right from the beginning how influencers can help your brand to succeed.
What does a masters in communication teach?
When studying for a masters in communication, students will learn to think, communicate, react and plan in a way that will benefit businesses both in the short term and in the long term.
A masters in communication program is a fully online master of arts program that is usually studied online, meaning students will usually build up their professional experience alongside their studies.
This method of learning benefits both the student who is undertaking the masters in communication, as well as the potential employer because it allows them to put their skills into real-world practice while they are learning.
This is especially useful in the influencer marketing field as this area of PR changes rapidly. Students will be able to learn to adapt while they are studying and take that learning out into the professional world.
Communications Professionals Are Here To Help
Are you considering hiring influencers and adding influencer marketing to your strategy in 2021?
Working with influencers has become more popular in the last few years, and professional marketers and communications specialists learn to work with some of the top influencers in the world to help promote products across a wide range of sectors during their studies.
They will build the skills and experience to engage influencers on your behalf, help you to build a relationship with them, and ensure that your agreement is mutually beneficial for both you and the influencer or influencers you are working with.
Working with influencers is a great way to get your products and services out to a new audience, and influencers in your niche will already have an audience and fanbase who are ready to go.
As an added bonus, they will already be able to advise what sort of branded content works for their fanbase, and what numbers you will both expect to get from the pieces of content they are sending out.
What To Look For In A Communications Specialist
The world of marketing is changing at a pace, but there are a number of degree courses that keep students in the loop and set them up for a long and happy career.
With a masters in communication, you can be sure that your new hire has been taken through the ropes of what it takes to create a good campaign and how to run that campaign in a cost effective way.
One of the biggest benefits to students undertaking a masters in communication is the connections they will make with peers in their industry, a connection that for public relations professionals will be invaluable in the years to come.
When you are at the point of considering hiring a communications or marketing professional, consider the qualifications you would like them to have. A masters in communication is a great foundation for a social media or marketing professional to have.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing involves contacting influencers (celebrities, reality TV stars, or people with a high online following) who have a high amount of respect and authority in your particular industry or niche.
When engaged in an influencer agreement, the people you have chosen to work with will speak about your services or products and advertise them in a way that resonates with their audience.
It takes time and skill to build up a rapport with influencers, and communications professionals who have the qualifications and experience will know how to do this on your behalf.
When students study for a masters in communication, they learn a number of skills that will be useful when it comes to engaging influencers. Communications specialists are taught strategic thinking to plan out contracts, as well as the basics of content marketing and public relations, all of which companies wanting to engage influencers will be looking for.
How Influencer Marketing Works
Official Arrangements
For the most part, influencer engagements should be in an official form, with contracts and agreements.
This is something that your communications specialists can help you with. A masters in communications covers how to pair your businesses or brands with the right influencers in your niche as well as the correct way to approach them on your behalf with a proposal.
Unofficial Arrangements
Getting official influencers to work for your brand is always preferable, but sometimes an influencer may pop up who is already a fan of your brand or your products.
A communications specialist will be an expert at social listening and used to keeping their finger on the pulse. This will mean they are in a better position to discover the advocates for your brand or products that are already out there and talk to them on your behalf.
Turning an influencer who is already a fan of your brand into an advocate is a great way to develop a strong and believable campaign that will deliver the results you need.
Content Creation
Whenever you work with an influencer, it is important to make sure that they create the type of content that both their audience are used to and that is appropriate for your brand.
It is a delicate balance and during a masters in communications course, communications students will learn how to work out agreements between brands and brand influencers to ensure that everything goes smoothly.
They will help you to manage the agreement between you both, make sure that the influencer is providing you with the content you are expecting, and help you to create high-performance campaigns that will put your products and services in front of the right audience.
Examples of the type of campaigns you may be looking to run include:
- Beauty influencers – Influencers who will be able to share your products with their audience, show off how they are used, and what to expect when using them.
- Tech reviews – An influencer who has an engaged tech fan audience, who are used to seeing hands-on unboxings and first impression reviews from their trusted source.
- Lifestyle vloggers or bloggers – Influencers who are happy to do an ad read for your useful product or service and get it out to a varied audience. Lifestyle vlogging is incredibly popular with buyers of all kinds of products.
- Niche vloggers or bloggers – Specific to your industry speaking about your very niche product or services to a very tailored audience.
Why should you do influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is all about the return on investment (ROI) and reaping the benefits of working with people who already have leverage in your industry or niche.
With the right management and services behind you, influencer campaigns can provide rich pickings for your business, and open your products and services up to a whole new audience.
Building authority in your brand will help to build trust with both your audience and trust with the search engines, having a positive knock-on effect on your search engine optimization (SEO).
What Is Included In An Influencer Marketing Strategy
If you are looking to invest more into your digital marketing and take it to the next level with a well-planned influencer marketing strategy, three core areas will be the most important for you to focus on: the content strategy, the audience engagement, and the reputational gains your brand will get from working with influencers. A person with a masters in communication can help you with all of these.
Content Placements and Content Strategies
Hiring a qualified communications specialist means you will get help to work with your chosen influencers to build contracts, set expectations, and agreements that suit you both.
Creating content is what the influencers are good at, but you need to make sure that you are protecting your brand reputation too.
Depending on the type of influencer and their fanbase, the influencers may share content that could include images, videos, or blog posts. Expanded further, this could include reviews, unboxings, first impressions, giveaways, or just being seen with the product (brand endorsements).
With the right influencers and the right content placement, your brand could be put in front of thousands, if not millions of people globally, and to an audience that is already warm to your product.
Audience Engagement
Influencers do not become influencers by ignoring their audience. Influencers are probably the best social media managers on the internet, and most of them do it without the masters in communication that your hired specialist will have!
To keep up with their audience, the influencer’s content needs to feel like theirs and needs to feel original, this will help them (and you) to ensure their audience trusts the products that they are advocating.
In niche markets, audience engagement is even more important to keep that trusting relationship up.
Your communications specialist will help you to develop a set of responses for your influencer to work with, decide on what sort of language you both expect, and how to handle complaints and criticism from the audience.
Armed with the right information about your brand, and professional with a masters in communication, both you and your influencers will be able to work through any issues that may arise and turn their fans into your fans effectively.
Building The Trust
Once your influencer has promoted your product and discussed why they like it, you will have a whole audience of potential customers and warm leads that could be a good fit for your business to market to.
Influencers who are trusted by their audience will in turn likely trust your brand and product, leading them further down the sales funnel than a cold lead.
Your communications specialist should be able to help you find the right influencers and manage this customer journey from inception right through to conversion.
How much does influencer marketing cost?
The price of influencer marketing varies considerably depending on five key factors:
Social media platform
The social media platforms you and your influencers are using may vary quite a lot in their audience.
An Instagram audience is going to be made of mainly under 35s, but a LinkedIn audience will be considerably older and expect different content.
You and your influencer should never use the same content for all of your social media channels, as each audience is different and expects a different approach to messaging.
Number of followers
A smaller number of followers may make the cost of influencer engagement more attractive.
It is important to remember that a smaller audience is not necessarily a bad thing. A smaller but more niche target market, usually called micro-influencers, is always preferable to a bigger fanbase who may not be exactly the type of audience your brand is after.
If you are working with more than one influencer, you may wish to consider collaborations as another way to boost your campaign’s reach.
Engagement Rate
Influencers who have a high engagement rate are great to work with.
When you hire an influencer who has an active fanbase, and who is involved with their followers regularly, they are going to provide your business with a better ROI, but may cost more than an influencer with a big but largely inactive following.
The Product
Some influencers will change their pricing requirements dependent on the product they are advocating. Put simply, a higher value product is likely to cost your business more when it comes to engaging influencers.
The Campaign
Being an expert in public relations, your communications specialist will work closely with you and your influencers to ensure that the campaign you are running is working for you and that it is as cost-effective as possible.
The higher the number of posts and the more complex the requirements, the higher the price of the campaign, but as a marketing professional with a masters in communication, they will help you to decide where to spend your budget to get the best results for your business and the best return possible from your influencer marketing campaign.
They will also work with you to interpret the data insights from your campaign, so you can see where it went well, and where you can improve in future campaigns.