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The 7 ‘terrifying’ mistakes when working with influencers

November 18, 2021 No Comments

Collaborating with these influencers doesn’t have to be a chilling experience.

Some brands are still “afraid” of venturing into influencer marketing despite being an industry that is in full growth. In fact, it is estimated that social commerce can reach a global value of 604 billion dollars by 2027, with an annual growth rate of 31.4 percent over the next seven years, according to data cited from Internet Retailing.

Collaborating with these influencers doesn’t have to be a chilling experience. It’s about creating key and valuable relationships with them; understand that they are not employees but strategic partners, with whom brands can effectively manage their relationships.

Before starting a collaboration with influencers, consider these seven terrifying mistakes to avoid if you want your campaign to have an impact:

1. Have a ghost target

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The first step in creating a winning strategy is setting your goals and objectives. Without goals, there is no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI).

In the same way, you have to know what the brand’s target is and what its budget is. If you do not have a set goal at the start, the campaign will be created without direction, will be subject to course changes midway, and will be doomed.

2. View the audience as a zombie

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If you believe that audiences are behaving like zombies, that is, that they are all looking for the same thing, your campaign will fail horribly. Before thinking about a collaboration with influencers, you need to make sure that your audience matches your buyer persona. For example, it wouldn’t do any good to ask a swimming influencer to share soccer tips. Although most swimmers play another sport, your audience won’t take it very seriously if you give advice on soccer socks.

However, choosing people who represent your brand values and avoiding misleading metrics can be challenging.

3. Believe that influencers are Frankenstein’s monster

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Obviously, influencers promote brands for monetary or other compensation, but they also choose to collaborate for other reasons. This applies particularly to micro-influencers: the suggestion is to treat them as customers and not as a monster over which you think you have control.

After all, if they don’t like the products or services the brand offers or the treatment they receive, they probably wouldn’t join the campaign in the first place (unless they are offered a huge monetary compensation that makes them rethink their decision ). The public knows when their favorite people in the networks endorse something that they really like. The goal of collaborating with influencers is to nurture and leverage that trust.

Followers trust influencers and it’s not easy to create a community of people who like and trust you as a brand. What is easy is losing their trust, so they will only promote companies they trust and like to work with.

4. Treat your motivation like the invisible man

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Don’t ignore what motivates them. You have to see what moves them. A great long-term relationship between the brand and the influencers it works with can only be achieved if both parties are happy. It can be achieved if the brand asks the influencers directly what their expectations of this collaboration are and if there is something they specifically want from whoever contacted them.

For example, some micro-influencers prefer exposure over monetary compensation. Those influencers can be made happier if the brand shares some of their posts in which they talk about their products or services instead of paying them.

Other influencers who are interested in what the company offers might want product or service discounts, while some might prefer samples that they can offer to their followers. To find out, you have to ask them at the beginning.

5. Scare away your creativity

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Creative freedom is of the utmost importance to successfully collaborate with influencers. Who knows the audience best? The brand or the influencer? Without a doubt, the influencer.

They know better the tastes, preferences and opinions of their followers. This means that the influencer knows what type of content will engage their audience in an authentic and organic way. Their motto is to publish content that not only attracts followers, but also hooks them.

6. Forgetting to do a good “spell” for the campaigns

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To see what works and what doesn’t, you need to track the content of each campaign. Members of the company that hired the campaign can do this daily or weekly, but the important thing is to have a monitoring system and record the results of how each post has worked.

7. Drive them away with a scare compensation

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When managing the team of influencers, it is very important to motivate each of them. Like any company that wants to obtain the greatest benefit for the investment it has made, motivating influencers, especially micro-influencers, is crucial in this process.

If the deal is with smaller micro-influencers, you can exclude the monetary reward if you have some other lucrative and creative way to compensate them. This is important because if they are rewarded exclusively with money, they could lose their intrinsic motivation and see this collaboration as just another job.

Brands can also offer promo codes and giveaways that influencers can give to their followers and create a win-win situation for both them and the brand.

Feature Image Credit^{: Depositphotos.com}

By Luís Marçal

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

How to make your brand stand out on TikTok

September 3, 2021 No Comments

By Ismael El-Qudsi

We are all influencers is a motto in which I firmly believe because the size of our audience does not matter but how we speak to them.

Some brands seem to have understood it very well and applied it to their strategies with influencers on TikTok , the social network of the moment.

Amazon, for example, has been able to take advantage of the videos that users create organically to reuse them in their favour and promote certain products.

Thus, the e-commerce giant is taking advantage of organically driven video trends such as “ Things TikTok Made Me Buy ” (“Things TikTok Made Me Buy”) or “Things You Didn’t Know You Needed From Amazon” (” Things You Didn ‘ t Know You Need Of Amazon ”) to share unsponsored content that users create on their TikTok accounts.

To know more: TikTok is already the most downloaded app in the world, according to Nikkei

In addition to amplifying organic user-generated content, Amazon is investing heavily in influencer marketing for TikTok through collaborations to promote offers and increase brand recognition during the year’s busiest commercial campaigns such as Mother’s Day. , back to school, the holiday season and, of course, Prime Day.

Reply to @itsdai_ebb ## greenscreen ♬ 20min by Iil Uzi Vert –

The key to Amazon’s success with TikTok influencers is that they give them the creative freedom to innovate and create out-of-the-box content that is perfectly suited to the unconventional language of this Chinese-born social network.

Another brand that has known how to find influencers among users is the fast food chain Chipotle, which today has positioned itself as a benchmark for challenges on TikTok.

Chipotle leverages hashtags and influencer marketing to engage customers and create trends on TikTok. It is not intended to create scripted blockbusters, but genuine and creative user-generated content. The key to his videos and challenges: spontaneity.

For example, the #LidFlipChallenge drove a digital sales record for the company and generated more than 110K videos related to this challenge. The #GuacDance Challenge, launched in collaboration with TikTok creators including Brent Rivera and Loren Gray, generated 500 million impressions from 250K fan videos submitted.

Got it to land w / o catching it in mid-air ## ChipotleLidFlip ## lidflipchallenge ## lidflip ## lookmanohands ♬ Flip – Future

Endorsement from TikTok influencers and content creators, whether sponsored or organic, increases brand awareness and builds trust and connection with the audience.

What should we do?

Audience The first thing every brand should ask itself before considering TikTok as part of its digital strategy is if its audience is on that platform.

If the answer is positive, there is no better time than now to start building a presence on TikTok and not wait, as happens with many brands with other social networks, for the social network to be saturated with marketing campaigns to launch and try to draw attention.

Content . Creating content for TikTok is challenging because you only have a few seconds to grab attention before users decide to move on to the next video. TikTok users expect to be entertained or informed, or both, with each video, so you have to be absolutely clear about what the end goal is. In terms of content creation, brands need to understand that authenticity, entertainment, and originality are highly rewarded on TikTok.

To know more: TikTok is testing the ‘stories’ in the style of Instagram

The aforementioned examples from Amazon and Chipotle are a sign that these brands understand that TikTok requires its own approach because it is a different audience that expects to see different content that grabs people’s attention from the first second and is useful and educational, but not boring.

Hashtags and Challenges . Know the culture of TikTok well and find ways in which the brand can communicate and integrate naturally. Knowing which hashtags are trending and joining or creating viral challenges will help increase brand awareness, gain followers, and show your community that the brand is part of the TikTok movement.

Influencers . A recent study conducted among advertisers and influencers in the United States, Europe, and Latin America showed that TikTok is driving social commerce, but the impact comes from user-generated content, demonstrating the power and importance of integrating influencers into marketing strategies. TikTok marketing of brands.

According to the survey, 68 percent of content creators reported making a purchase based on a post from someone they follow on the platform.

To learn more: We explain why not being on TikTok is a big mistake

Finally, remember that the best allies for a brand can be found on the same social network … because we are all influencers .

Feature Image credit: Amanda Vick vía Unsplash

By Ismael El-Qudsi

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

What Is Darkposting on Social Media?

August 27, 2021 No Comments

By Quina Baterna

If you’ve ever come across the term darkposting on social media, here’s what to know about what it means…

Gone are the days that all ads look like ads and influencers don’t have to disclose sponsored content. These days, social media is becoming less intrusive, but more transparent when it comes to advertising with darkposting.

Darkposting is the middle ground between obvious brand posts and influencer lifestyle content. But exactly is darkposting, and how does it work?

What is Darkposting?

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Pioneered by Facebook, darkposts are social media ads that don’t show up on the brand or page’s timeline like a regular boosted or sponsored post.

For most social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, you can choose between boosting your organic content or creating a darkpost.

However, darkposts are enabled by default on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.

Darkposting is commonly used to A/B test ad performance, such as testing different headlines, markets, and images.

It’s a great way for brands to keep a clean social media appearance on their main pages, while being able to experiment with their audience feed posts. In combination with whitelisting on Facebook, creators can give brands limited use of their handles or pages and post darkposts for them.

While under the name or handle of the creator, darkposts appear on timelines and feeds without affecting a creator’s main channels.

How Does Darkposting Work?

Darkposting creates the illusion that creators create and share the content themselves. However, if you’re thinking that your favorite influencer replied to your message on a darkpost, chances are it’s actually a brand representative talking to you.

Clicking or interacting with darkposts of any kind counts as interacting with a sponsored post. With this, interacting with a darkpost will affect what kind of ads you will be served within a social media ecosystem in the future.

Don’t Get Tricked by Advertising

When it comes to advertising, social media sites are becoming sneakier with how they present their ads.

While most people would agree that darkposts are a lot less annoying than regular ads, it’s always good to mindful of how they impact your social media experience.

That being said, ads aren’t always bad. They’re the trade-off that many social media sites use to provide us their services. Darkposting is just another way for them to blend into our feeds seamlessly.

By Quina Baterna

Sourced from MUO

In News

Facebook Paying Influencers $1B to Use the Platform

August 5, 2021 No Comments

By Trey Alston

These days, Facebook is known as the social network for the generations of people that may not really understand how the computer works. Parents, grandparents and, somehow, all of your older co-workers have made the platform home, driving the younger demographic, and subsequently its influencers, to newer social media sites like TikTok where they’ve built their own followings. But Facebook has revealed that it has plans to bring influencers to its platform so who knows how the social landscape will change in the near future.

Facebook recently unveiled its plans to pay influencers $1 billion to utilize its products, in a program that’s set to run until the end of 2022. Its mission? To revive the platform and stop it from being the place to go to see what your old teachers are up to nowadays. This also goes for Instagram which has quickly become second fiddle to TikTok.

Deadline reports that Facebook will reward creators, especially those just starting, and will include a new bonus program that compensates eligible creators for hitting milestones using Facebook tools. The company will provide seed funding for creators to make their own content.

“We want to build the best platforms for millions of creators to make a living,” CEO Mark Zuckergberg said in a Facebook post. “Investing in creators isn’t new for us, but I’m excited to expand this work over time.”

Some of these new programs are reportedly already available via invitation for select creators. Some of these are IGTV ads bonuses which enable creators to earn a one-time bonus for signing up, Reels Summer bonuses, which pays Instagram creators for creating Reel content on the platform, badges in Live bonuses, which rewards creators that reach certain milestones, and the Stars Challenges Bonuses, which involves gaming creators hitting certain monthly Stars milestones over the next three months.

More change is set to come soon because a dedicated place for bonuses will arrive in Instagram this summer and Facebook this fall.

Feature Image Credit: Getty/ Alex Wong

By Trey Alston

Sourced from PAPER

In News

Five Ways To Drive Traffic To Your E-Commerce Store

July 29, 2021 No Comments

By Damien Coughlan

It’s no secret that e-commerce is growing. It’s estimated that there will be 2.14 billion global digital buyers in 2021. The global pandemic has fast-tracked a change in how we, as a society, now purchase goods and services.

Customers are becoming more tech-savvy and are now familiar with making and taking payments online. People today want speed, choice and convenience. They’re often willing to browse and shop around to find the best deals, and as a result, they may not remain brand loyal to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. Instead, with the click of a mouse, shoppers can compare features, prices and shipping costs.

The following are five ways to drive traffic to your online store.

1. Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads is an ad system for businesses that allows them to showcase their products and services to Facebook’s users. The platform has a number of different ad types that you can choose from. These include image ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, canvas ads, lead generation ads, offer ads and event response ads.

In terms of e-commerce, I find that one of the most popular ads is the website conversion ad. This type of ad allows you to optimize your ads for people who are most likely to perform an action, like making a purchase. These ads are easy to start with on Facebook, and you can set a daily budget of just $5 to get up and running.

Facebook has various data points on its users; it knows the posts users interact with, the brands they follow and the stores that they visit. As a result, the platform is extremely clever at finding your ideal customers. Further, by installing Facebook Pixel, you can track site activity, which gives you information and data on what’s happening in your store.

When creating your ads, you can target people based on age, interest, demographic, location, occupation and even salary. For example, dog moms in California, who are 45 and older and earn over $100,000 per year.

2. Google Ads

Google Ads are similar to Facebook Ads, but the main difference is that Google Ads are intent-based. What this means is that the ads are designed to attract people who are actively searching for the products you’re selling. An example might be, “best coffee in Miami.” The power of intent-based advertising is that the shopper who’s performing the search is already committed and interested in purchasing the product or service you may be selling.

Some of the Google ad types available to you include search campaigns (text), display campaigns (images) and video campaigns. Again, you can start for as little as $5 per day.

3. Influencers

Influencer marketing has become popular over the last few years due to the explosion and growth of social media marketing. Think of an influencer as someone with a specialized skill or knowledge that has amassed a large, loyal and passionate following. Their following might be on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.

Let’s say you sell a fitness product that helps mothers lose weight post-pregnancy. You can search for influencers within that niche who may have an audience that you can leverage. Perhaps, the influencer is someone who coaches women with weight loss but isn’t selling a physical product. The agreement is usually made between the influencer and brand based on a number of story and feed posts or based on the number of sales made through their link.

One important factor to consider when finding the right influencer is to check the level of engagement on their posts and whether the audience is a good fit for your brand. An influencer might have one million followers but the engagement rate might be low. This usually means that the influencer might have purchased those followers, or they don’t really have an engaged enough audience to make the promotion worthwhile.

It’s often best to start with a low-budget promotion and test the results.

4. Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for years and isn’t going anywhere. Email marketing allows you to essentially remarket for free to your existing subscribers.

You can create campaigns that are one-time promotions, like Valentine’s Day or Black Friday offers, or you can set up flows that are automatically sent based on a user’s profile activity. An example might be when someone subscribes to your newsletter and you send them a welcome email where you nurture them, talk about your product and brand and, at the end of the email, offer them a one-time special offer to become a customer at a discounted rate.

Building an email list is hugely powerful; in my experience, I’ve been able to reach up to $1 per subscriber in monthly revenue. You can use pop-ups and exit intents to capture emails by incentivizing visitors to subscribe to your newsletter for value or offer some type of discount coupon code.

5. Blog Posts

I highly encourage you to start creating blog posts. It does take time to create blog content and be consistent, but it’s so important to the long-term success of your business.

Ideas for blogs are endless and can be scheduled out automatically over the month. You can also invite guest bloggers to help you write if you find that your time can be more valuable elsewhere.

When I sold in the dog niche, I had a very passionate dog customer of mine who found a blog article I wrote and asked me if she could write about her life with dogs. Of course, I said yes, and to make it a win-win for everyone and to encourage her to write great articles, I offered her free dog merchandise.

These are just a few of the many ways to drive traffic to your store. Remember, not everyone who visits your store is going to buy. In fact, I’ve found average store conversion rates are usually 5% or less. Keep delivering great content and run retargeting strategies to convert your non-buyers to buyers.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Damien Coughlan

Damien is the founder of damiencoughlan.com; he helps businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs explode their e-commerce businesses. Read Damien Coughlan’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Fed up of influencers not labelling paid posts and flaunting rules. UK’s advertising regulator is now naming and shaming influencers who breach their guidelines.

July 6, 2021 No Comments

By Neha Tandon Sharma,

The world of social media is turning into a school of sorts where teachers (read: rule regulators) will call out the defaulters for failing to follow guidelines. The UK regulator for advertising called Advertising Standard Agency (ASA) has launched a new initiative in a move to make influencers more transparent about what they are paid to promote on their social media. The advertising watchdog has named and shamed social media influencers who failed to disclose paid promotions on their accounts namely Chloe Ferry, Chloe Khan, Jodie Marsh, and Lucy Mecklenburgh.

These names have graced a designated website designed to highlight influencers who fall foul of the rules citing reasons as “routinely failing to clearly disclose when they are advertising to consumers.” interestingly Chloe Ferry, Chloe Khan, Jodie Marsh and Lucy Mecklenburgh all rose to prominence after their appearances on UK reality television shows and now boast hundreds of thousands of online followers and now all will unite again and spotlighted for three months. It is not only influencers who will be watched and controlled, but brands too need to follow all guidelines. “We will also be looking to take action against brands that repeatedly fail to disclose ads or do not provide assurances that they will properly label ads in future,” said the ASA.

Feature Image Credit: Via Instagram / @chloe.khan

By Neha Tandon Sharma

Sourced from Luxurylaunches

In Uncategorized

7 Powerful Ways to Use Twitter Influencers

February 8, 2021 No Comments

By Joe Sinkwitz.

Twitter has come a long way over the last 14 years.

From the early days of random egg-shaped avatars screaming into the void over 140 characters about why one celebrity’s dress was better than the other to modern election cycles. The cynic might view Twitter as nothing more than megaphone-assisted political diatribes without an edit button.

While this certainly exists to some extent, Twitter has grown to over 50 million accounts and as a top-five social media destination in the United States, maturity brings out additional use cases that brands should not ignore.

One big step in this maturation process has been the emergence of Twitter-specific influencers. Due to their relatively inexpensive acquisition cost comparative to professional networks like LinkedIn combined with a Swiss Army knife-like malleability similar to Google My Business influencers, there’s significantly more to the process than meets the eye.

Let’s explore seven different ways a business can employ Twitter influencers to solve a variety of use cases.

Build your next Twitter influencer campaign with Intellifluence now.

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Use #1: Social shares

Why: Amplify existing content such as previously written blog posts and hosted videos that exist outside Twitter in order to drive more exposure.

Details: This is one of the easier of the use cases for most brands to grasp. Twitter’s share functionality in the form of Retweets, Quote Tweets (and now likes injected into activity feeds) feel more disposable in nature than the intimate sharing with friends that exists over Facebook. The lower barrier to activity results in higher campaign acceptance rates for brands reaching out to influencers looking for these shares.

Since the amplification use case is designed more to maximize eyeballs than specific audiences, the targeting aspects are more relaxed.

A rough equation used at Intellifluence and other influencer networks would be to suggest Exposure-per-dollar wherein Twitter audience size is divided by the amount the influencer is looking to charge for a simple click.

This use case works best with content targeted towards a broad audience to ensure later KPIs for activity take place.

Use #2: Social engagement

Why: Driving deeper engagement on a conversation can not only increase exposure towards a desired audience as the comments show in the target activity feed, but conversation amongst authorities and industry peers provides an air of legitimacy, acting as social proof.

Details: Much like acquiring social shares, a brand in this case is looking for activity surrounding an existing asset; the primary difference is the asset in this example already exists on Twitter.

Further, pricing can be a little higher as the influencer is being asked to apply some critical thinking and needs to be judicious in word selection when commenting for engagement’s sake (though not as much as a review, which we’ll get to).

Targeting for engagement is also a bit more focused than simple social sharing, as the engagement that matters most will be from individuals the intended audience will respect. One easy method to locate these individuals is via Twitter’s own search functionality for specific keywords, both hashtags, and plain text.

An additional tip is to draw in specific influencers to a conversation occurring on Twitter.

This requires more nuance to not appear spammy.

By comment mentioning @NameOfInfluencer in reference to something s/he posted or commented elsewhere, the probability of ego baiting said influencer into the conversation increases dramatically. Don’t overuse this technique as it will become obvious what you’re doing and never do it if you have already pitched monetary compensation to the individual and were turned down.

Use #3: Social review

Why: When the KPI you are chasing requires eliciting a specific action such as sale, newsletter signup, or other lead generation activity, it is necessary to provide a more detailed endorsement than a Retweet or comment can provide.

Details: The individuals needed for a product or service review on Twitter should be hyper-focused on what you are selling.

Celebrity aspirational influencers only make sense in the context of the product having broad geographic and socioeconomic appeal.

Start with the best of the best: the industry experts you might have wanted to target your social engagement campaign. Get these industry experts to act as proxy authorities on your offering as well as social peers to your intended buying audience.

Expect the prices charged by influencers to be higher as the work they are required to put in is more of a time investment in order to accurately describe their endorsement via Tweet.

In previous years, social reviews over Twitter were similar to a Quote Tweet with a few sentences acting as an endorsement with a link out.

While this is still part of the strategy, the effectiveness of the method has evolved somewhat to where the initial Tweet can be thought of as the primary call-to-action language complete with the necessary URL, backed up with a Tweetstorm explanation of why the endorsement is taking place, such as a list of reasons.

The Tweetstorm threaded formatting enlists deeper readership by the influencer’s audience and a stronger probability of comment-driven engagement to extend efficacy of the campaign itself.

Use #4: Video reviews

Why: It is extremely difficult to convey a complex matter over 140 characters; 280 isn’t much better. When dealing with complex explanations, a good video can go a long way.

Details: Before starting, pour a drink out for Vine. Now pour another out for Periscope.

Vine was a wonderful short-form video service purchased by Twitter that was subsequently shut down. The demand for the humor-driven short format service has since shifted to rapidly growing TikTok.

At the beginning of writing this article, the video review solution for using influencers on Twitter resided then on the hope of Periscope. Unfortunately, that will now be sunset in March of 2021.

So how can brands get video reviews on Twitter?

Twitter Live.

The main concepts of Periscope have been adopted into the core Live product. Live reviews are objectively the same as regular social reviews in terms of influencer compensation and needs, with one caveat: timing.

As Live implies a time constraint, the timing of your influencers’ content needs to be managed to coincide with the time when a brand’s prospective audience is most likely to be on Twitter.

For specific use, Live content is ideal for both explaining complex matters and providing time-sensitive offers to spur the desired action.

Use #5: Contest/Giveaway for account growth

Why: Sometimes the best way to get attention is by giving away attention. When the KPI is to increase Twitter accounts following legitimately, contests and giveaways are the best way.

Details: The concept is relatively straightforward. If a brand is looking for a more authoritative account, the last thing you want is to purchase low-quality bot traffic and fake followers.

Instead, allow for self-selection of followers by periodically running contests and giveaways that somehow tie to the core product or service.

In the case of Intellifluence, the desire was to increase the number of influencers paying attention to the CEO’s account and the main brand account. To satisfy that, a simple giveaway was created to offer cash in exchange for a minor hoop-jumping activity.

The result was the positive lead generation of new influencers and a lot of additional attention.

For brands that are looking for specific paying users of their site, the giveaway could be a free subscription.

For brands selling a physical product, the giveaway could be the physical product.

The Retweets and comments in the example above were all from influencers recruiting more influencers, a virtuous cycle of activity.

If the contest is remotely successful, interview the winner like we did and re-run the contest again with a larger audience baked in to share your message.

Use #6: Press relations

Why: In short, influencer marketing is having someone tell your story for you.

Details: The PR world has been on a collision course with most mediums in the digital world since the advent of the Internet.

Influencer marketing is simply the latest collision.

For a brand’s purposes, the Twitter press relations game can be thought of as a multi-step process.

Keep in mind that the real power of press releases from an influencer perspective is to get the attention of those journalist contacts for the purposes of generating media interviews and garnering follow-up attention.

How to do this?

Step 1. Hire an authoritative influencer in your niche to write a positive story about whatever milestone you are looking to promote. This influencer doesn’t necessarily need to be Twitter-specific, but it helps if they have a strong Twitter following.

Step 2. Employ Twitter-specific influencers to Quote Tweet this content, utilizing mentions to the specific journalists you want to get in front of.

Step 3. Have your active listening customer service team (more on that below) comment positively in the thread that mentions the journalist and casually mentions being open to discussing what you’re building or doing.

It. Really. Works.

Use #7: Sneaky sales and customer service

Why: A happy customer might tell one person. An unhappy customer might tell ten people. An anti-vaxxer will probably tell ten thousand.

Details: All jokes aside, the premise is outreach with speed. When a prospective customer, current customer, or former customer is venting on Twitter, it is a prime opportunity for you as a brand to interject into the conversation and redirect.

The faster the response, the more appreciated and effective the outcome.

Anyone on Twitter has seen how angry frequent travellers can get at their airlines for poor customer service and take to put them on blast.

What’s the outcome? In most cases, if the Twitter user is prominent enough, a representative will jump into the conversation and try to make the problem right.

If you pay closer attention, the airline wasn’t always mentioned in the complaint, so they’re employing active listening. It is not enough to pay attention to brand mentions, but also the relevant hashtags and keywords used to know when a customer service nightmare needs to diffused before it explodes.

The same comes into play with sales.

A frustrated prospect might complain into the void about the need to solve problem XYZ, which just happens to be what you do! By having a small group of engaged influencers working on your behalf via active listening, compensated by a mix of hourly wage and per acquisition, they can redirect the prospect’s pain into your solution.

It’s sneaky because not only are you growing your sales, but you might be directly doing so at the expense of your competition.

Are there more use cases for Twitter influencers? Absolutely.

As with any advanced medium, there are far more use cases for Twitter influencers than the seven listed above. The limitations are constrained only by a brand’s imagination.

Build your next Twitter influencer campaign with Intellifluence now.

By Joe Sinkwitz

Joe Sinkwitz is the Co-Founder and CEO of Intellifluence. Joe has close to 20 years of experience in SEO, leading several successful marketing companies, and providing expert consultation. Joe recently published The Ultimate Guide to Using Influencer Marketing, available in print or ebook.

Sourced from Jeff Bullas

In News

More than two-thirds of US marketers will use influencer marketing

January 27, 2021 No Comments

By Debra Aho Williamson

Although some marketers cut spending on influencer marketing during the pandemic (such as travel marketers), the interest in working with influencers actually increased; between 2019 and 2020 the percentage of US marketers using influencers grew from 55.4% to 62.3%, according to our forecast.

And budgets for influencer marketing look ready to rise. In July 2020 research by Kantar Media, senior marketers worldwide said they expected to increase budget allocation for branded content shared by influencers by 48% in 2021.

What it means for marketers: Influencer marketing has its pitfalls, but an increasing percentage of marketers are working with influencers. Considering the important role they play in other trends in our list of social media predictions for 2021, such as social commerce and livestreaming, the impetus to use influencers will continue to grow.

By Debra Aho Williamson

Sourced from eMarketer

In News

Social media coach shares ‘insane’ business secret about how influencers make money

January 12, 2021 No Comments

By Morgan Greenwald

Have you ever wondered howI influencers are able to afford all of those designer clothes and extravagant trips? Well, tax deductions might have something to do with it.

Recently, digital marketing coach Mila Homes shared this mind-blowing fact with her 471,000 followers in a now-viral TikTok.

“I was today years old when I realized YouTubers do clothing hauls on their channels so that they can write off the clothing on their taxes,” she said in the video. “They literally get all this cool [clothing and] make a video of it so it’s considered work and then they get to write it off. THAT’S SO COOL!”

This might sound too good to be true, but Holmes is right. According to tax advisor Handy Tax Guy, all you have to do is prove that your clothes are necessary for “accomplishing your job as an online influencer” in order to write them off as a business deduction.

That’s not the only thing influencers can write off when they’re doing their taxes, either. Travel expenses like transportation and lodging can be considered essential for an influencer, which makes them a tax write-off. Prizes used in giveaways, charitable donations and meals eaten while discussing work can also be written off as business expenses. For bloggers and influencers, the list of write-offs is seemingly endless.

On Holmes’ video, many influencers noted that the amount of things that can be written off during tax season is “insane.”

“And as a travel content creator I get to write off my travel,” travel blogger @whereintheworldisnina said. “And lots of other stuff!”

“Being a small business owner has its perks,” another person added. “I write off my entire house mortgage because my office is in my basement.”

Other people who aren’t as familiar with the business of being an influencer were just plain shocked.

“This is crazy,” one person said.

“Brb making a YouTube channel,” another joked.

“I’m bout to save so much money,” a third added.

Before you make a YouTube channel just to get “free clothes,” you should consult a tax expert to learn more about how write-offs work. Write-offs lower your taxable income, thereby lowering how much you owe in taxes. At the end of the day, you will still be paying something for those trips and clothes.

By Morgan Greenwald

Sourced from ITK

In News

Top 9 Growth Hacking Strategies Every Start-up Must Try Out

November 13, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from TECHMAG

Brands are always looking out for new and effective methods and tricks to enhance their growth. These tricks are often referred to as growth hacking strategies, and implementing the right ones can cause phenomenal growth.

With many strategies to choose from, choosing the ones with the highest success ratio and return on investment matters a lot. Before that, if you need to know the exact definition of growth hacking, it is an experiment-driven technique, striving to find the most efficient methods to grow a business.

Growth hacking is especially crucial for start-ups with a little budget to market their offerings. Let us take a look at the nine best, and tested growth hacking strategies start-ups can readily utilize.

Growth Hacking Strategies For New Start-ups

1. Have a Simple, Intuitive Homepage

Your business’s website is the digital version of a storefront. And the website’s homepage can be the doorknob. If the doorknob is too complex to use, customers will have a hard time entering the store.

The same is true for your business website. Remove all clutter and always opt for a simple homepage. Customers must not be even slightly confused while navigating it. Make the CTAs approachable, and the company information clear and concise.

2. Create an Email Waiting List

Even though many refer to email marketing as an old school technique, it still rocks in 2020. For every single dollar invested in email marketing, you can expect a return on investment of $42. Collecting email addresses and creating an email list is an effective strategy, even if you’re months before launch.

Along with creating pre-launch hype, email marketing can be used to deliver critical information regarding your product. You can also utilize an email list to maintain a consistent relationship with your customers. The key is to utilize email marketing to add more value to the user journey.

3. Learn From Your Competitors

You have a lot to learn from your competitors, especially those who made it into the industry a long time ago. Look at how they market their products. Check out their levels of interactions with customers.

Since they made it into the industry before you, they will probably have tried, failed, and succeeded in many strategies. This will allow you to avoid strategies with lower success rates and focus only on those that guarantee remarkable results.

4. Offer Discounts for Shares

Word of mouth is still a useful marketing tool. The more customers you satisfy, the more number of friends they will bring along. You can also offer specialized discounts to users who are keen to refer to your products.

For instance, Dropbox increased its sign-ups by 60% by offering users extra storage space for each referred friend. If you succeed in gaining social desirability for your product and your brand, you will soon experience more inquiries and sales. Even something as nominal as a 5% discount will do the trick.

5. Collaborate With Influencers

Irrespective of your products or services, there will always be an influencer who rule your industry. Finding those individuals is as easy as searching for your products on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Connect with such influencers and allow them to creatively introduce your company. You can include influencer marketing as a top priority marketing strategy and experiment with multiple influencers.

You can also collaborate with influencers to co-create content that can be published on your channels or profiles. For branding, you can start your videos with a memorable intro. You can use free into makers like VideoCreek, for that matter. Visit VideoCreek for more information.

6. Try the Path of Exclusivity

People love acquiring exclusive products. You can use this as a marketing strategy and restrict access to your products. If yours is a product company, you can release only a specific number of units at a time and keep the customers waiting for the next release.

You can even follow an “invite-only” strategy to build the hype. Gmail used this strategy in their initial days, and only users who received an invitation could sign up. Even Pinterest benefited a lot from exclusivity.

7. Build a Cheerful Social Media Community

The majority of customers will be spending most of their time scrolling through the endless feeds of social media networks. So it makes more sense to connect with your prospects on such platforms.

Along with paid social media campaigns, there are numerous organic strategies you can utilize. With consistency in publishing content, responding to customer reviews, and actively keeping up with the latest trends, you can organically grow your follower base.

You can use witty social media copywriting and graphics to entice and convert people. You can also utilize social media networks to advertise your products. With the help of an online ad maker, you can craft convincing ad creatives for your campaigns and serve it to potential customers using paid advertising. Have a peek here guys for more info.

8. Use Third-Party Platforms to Pre-Launch Your Products

You can utilize third-party websites like Product Hunt to launch your products and validate their concepts. In such platforms, people review products and projects and vote for their favorite ones. Doing so will help you gain significant exposure at a nominal cost.

9. Leverage Q&A Sites

Q&A websites like Quora are the go-to sites for internet citizens to get answers to their questions. You can use such websites to generate relevant traffic to your site and improve your brand’s exposure.

Reddit too is a powerful platform for that matter. If you are a SaaS company, you can use professional platforms like Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, and StackOverflow as well. You can also utilize such platforms to converse with prospective customers and understand their take on your product.

In Conclusion

Contrary to popular belief, growing a company doesn’t always have to be challenging, time-consuming, or let alone an expensive process. The key is to follow the growth strategies that have been proven in the past, and the strategies listed in this article will surely be useful.

Sourced from TECHMAG