What is an influencer, and should you become one? Here’s everything you need to know about influencer marketing and how to be a successful influencer.
What is an Influencer?
An influencer, meaning someone who influences their audience in decision-making, is becoming a more popular career path. They can encourage their followers to purchase from a brand. For instance, a fitness influencer could post about a certain home workout product, add the link to the product, thus encouraging their followers to purchase it.
Influencer Marketing
Through influencer marketing, influencers can make a decent amount of money and get free products. The brand may offer you a portion of the sales. The average monthly income of an Instagram influencer is $2,970, while micro-influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers earn an average of $1,420. However, influencers with over one million followers average $15,536 each month!
So, it’s possible to increase and/or replace your full-time income through influencer marketing. This marketing industry is estimated to reach $16.4B in 2022, almost double what it was in 2016 ($9.7 billion). This growth in influencer marketing is because it allows individuals to offer a personal, authentic view of a product or service to an audience that already trusts them.
Become a Successful Influencer
Do you have what it takes to become an influencer, meaning spending a lot of your day on social media, creating content and responding to people online? Here are five tips to become a successful one.
1. Pick a niche
You won’t become a successful influencer by marketing to everyone. Decide what you are going to focus on. For instance, are you going to talk about beauty, fitness, finance, travel, etc? Who are you going to target? The more specific your niche, the easier it will be to target and grow your audience.
2. Know your audience
You need to understand your audience like the back of your hand. What challenges do they face? What problems can you solve for them? Which platforms are they using? It doesn’t make sense to set up Instagram if all of your audience is on Facebook or TikTok.
3. Post content consistently, with a content strategy
Content consistency can be more important than content quality, especially at first. Focus on posting content several times a week to daily.
4. Stay up to date with trends and current events
As an influencer, you should understand what’s going on in the world. Of course, know what is trending so you can optimize your content with trending sounds, filters and ideas. But, you should also understand current events to ensure what you are posting is sensitive to what’s going on in the world. For instance, promoting a Russian product after Russia invaded Ukraine could cause you to lose your audience’s trust, or worse, get cancelled.
5. Focus on building your community
Most importantly, becoming successful at marketing is about building trust with your community. Work on building your relationship with your audience by understanding them and their needs and offering content that will be truly valuable to them.
Work with Local Brands
Are you looking for brands to work with in the Netherlands? We’re a PR agency looking to connect stellar local brands and influencers. Reach out to learn more.