Marketing

Strategies for Finding Your Influencer Marketing Niche

An effective influencer marketing strategy requires you to find the right people to develop into brand ambassadors. Regardless of what caliber of social media creators you are working with, whether they are macro-influencers, micro-influencers, or mega-influencers, arguably the most important consideration is their fit with your brand.

What makes social media influencers the right fit for a business? Several different things could make an influencer good or bad for your business. The most important consideration is who the influencer appeals to and who you’re trying to appeal to. The goal is to find influencers where both of those align.

If your influencer campaigns feature creators that align with your product’s niche, their followers are more likely to be interested in your product. This will make you much more likely to generate sales from the social channels you have targeted and lead to a more successful influencer marketing campaign.

Finding relevant influencers is extremely important, but it can be difficult if you are unsure of the niche your product fits best with. Finding the ideal influencer is no easy task but not impossible. Here are the strategies to help you find out which niche influencers your campaigns should be targeting on social media channels.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a data-backed way to find the right fit for your business. It is a strategy used everywhere, from social media marketing to website design. Simply put, A/B marketing is when you test two different versions of something against each other to find out which one performs better. All influencer marketing firms should consider this because it easily helps to find an influencer marketing niche your product resonates with.

In the context of influencer marketing, A/B testing would require brands to segment their influencer outreach. For this to be fair, they’d have to target social influencers with similar audience size and level of engagement in different niches.

They could then run a similarly scaled campaign in each of the niches, whether it is the travel niche, environmental niche, or whatever two niches they believe best suits their brand. They could then compare the average engagement rate for the influencer posts, the number of affiliate links used in each niche, and the general overall success of the campaign. This will provide them with data-backed insight into whether that niche works for their brand.

Buyer Personas

One audience-building strategy that brands have utilized to define their marketing is the creation of buyer personas. Buyer personas help businesses zero in on their ideal audience by creating a comprehensive profile of what they figure their perfect customer to be. Using this profile, they can flush out the type of influencer campaign they want to run.

Many different things should be included in a buyer persona, and for an influencer campaign persona, it should be centered around your ideal customers’ usage of social media. A buyer persona typically includes standard demographic info, such as how old would your buyer be? What socioeconomic status? What part of the country do they reside? But it should also include hypotheticals, such as their values, pain points, and ambitions.

To make your buyer persona specific to social media, consider several different things. What social media platforms do they frequent most? What type of influencer are they likely to follow? How much stock do they put into what their content creators have to say? Consider the type of content they favor and other details. Use market research and data to shape these hypotheticals, and then make them a key part of your influencer marketing strategy. Tailor your campaigns to best fit these ideal buyers, and you’ll find the right niche for you.

Survey Your Previous Buyers

One valuable resource to utilize when flushing out your target audience and the best potential influencer to work with is your previous customers. While you consider the best marketing avenue to reach potential customers, don’t forget that if your business is post-launch, you likely have a bunch of previous buyers that you can mine for information.

To find your audience demographic and the spending habits of your typical customer, dig deep into that email list. If you have the email addresses of your previous customers, don’t hesitate to reach out to them with a survey that covers information such as their age and opinion on your business. While you don’t want to ask any invasive questions, if you could get information about their social media habits, that would go a long way.

The best way to find your ideal audience is to look at who your business has already connected with. You likely have a wide range of customers that can provide you with important details that will allow you to craft an influencer campaign that resonates with the types of social media users your product will connect with.

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