First of all, everybody can be an influencer irrespective of their career or calling in the offline world. Okay
Some people with no clear goal in mind have stumbled into fame and riches by just being active and relevant in the early days of social media. So why can’t you, if you have the desire, the goal and better knowledge of how things work?
In this article, I will share the steps you can follow to get your journey right to the top as an influencer marketer. (And they all easy )
First things first, before setting out, you need to sit down (it can be done standing anyway) and think where you can function without being compelled to. Find your niche, your field of calling and area of expertise.It can be a place where you are naturally talented, or a hobby, it can also be learnt ( but don’t allow education to kill the genius in you). The main reason being that it will be easier and fun to find contents and to create content when you are in your area of interest. And believe me, the limits of your ideas will be infinite when what you are writing or creating is your passion. That is the only fire you need to keep you burning bright, even on lean days.
Your passion may be anything, shoe design or fashion is an example. As a digital marketer, I can come up with 10 or more categories of ideas on the spot on how to create shoe fashion content. shoe history, shoe colors, shoe design, shoe companies, how shoes are made, groom and best man shoes, show for the royal persons, unisex shoes, shoe materials, and so on. One can never run out of ideas if you keep to your passion. The reason I probably got all these ideas was that I have been in the field for some time now.
However, you can select a combination of 2 or 3 related interests. Don’t stretch yourself too thin by making your areas of interest very broad. You may be tempted to include more than 2 or 3. Resist the urge for some good reasons. Find your niche and stick with it.
When your niche has been chosen, decide on the social media platform that relates well with your niche. Don’t be sentimental about it. Choose the social media platform that has your kind of audience and supports the content medium you will mostly create.
If you are going to talk mostly with images and pictures, go with Instagram
If you are witty and humorous, you can join Twitter and Facebook
You can find other social media platforms that are popular to join too.
Whichever platform you decide to join finally, your profile and how well it is set will determine how serious people see you. Pay attention to fill in the tiny details about yourself in the profile
About me: The about me is not really about you, there are 3 billion people in the world and counting. So nobody really cares who you are unless you are already super-rich or a celebrity. About me is all about the value you will bring to any company that hires you. In other words, it is little of your actual self and more of the person that is reading it.
Make your bio stand out: Your bio has a lot to say about you. So tell your story in a human and impressive way. There is beauty in every story, yours will not be any different if you look for the beauty yourself. Fill in your location, where you are, your name ( or Pseudonym), 'contact me' details, interests, and expertise. Just be professional and intentional about your profile. What doesn’t add value to you should be ignored.
Your profile picture and cover picture: You should never leave your photo box and cover photo blank. You should not put up a low-quality picture of yourself either. Pictures say a thousand words and you can through your pictures tell a thousand things about yourself. Selling yourself as an influencer marketer starts from your profile picture, that's what people see first before coming to read about you, your likes or check if you are married.
Your contents, when you would have started posting will depend on who your audience are and what they like . Fortunately, if you went for your area of interest, your likes will be akin to that of your target audience. So this one is no brainer.
To understand your target audience, first create a buyer persona of who is very likely to like you, your page and what you will be creating. It starts mostly with adding your close friends and family members. You can as well use sentimental analysis to come up with things that may be of
interest to your prospective audience. People sometimes have proven not to know exactly what they want.
For an already created and running account, there are free tools available in almost all the major social media platforms built for this kind of insights into your audience. Facebook insights, Twitter analytics and others. These insights provide you with the locations, gender, and likes of your current followers.
Here, your journey has commenced in earnest. Roll your sleeves and buckle your shoes. Let's get started with creating contents, posting, scheduling posts, and advising your audience. Whatever content you are producing, it should add value to your audience. This is the only and surest way to get their attention in the first place.
Here , I will pause to remind you that social media is not a one way megaphone. Listen and you will be listened to, comment and your posts will be commented on, like and you will be liked, share and yours will be shared, these are the golden rules of social media influencer. Aside from that, you will need to have a content strategy, it will be created to house a combination of content types to keep your contents spicy and anticipated. Don’t repeat your posts too often, you could get banned for it. While posting, remember to allow your human side to come along.
Furthermore, you may choose to bring your personal day-to-day life along with you to your page or choose to leave it entirely offline. Whichever one you choose, there are reactions to it. If you choose to leave your life out of social media entirely, curiosity will keep people trying to know about you, thereby retaining them as your followers, on the other hand, openness will make people trust and feel comfortable with you, after all, you have shown your authenticity, that you are not perfect.( nobody is).
Your choice depends entirely on you.
When you have a sponsored post, it is your duty as an influencer to make sure the post blend well and naturally with your other posts or most of them( this is more reason why it is advisable to go with the niche you have some passion and likeness for.) because sponsored post that blends easily with your other posts have more chances of performing well with your audience and getting a good reception among them.
Instagram, for instance, is the biggest influencer platform because it encourages frequent posting and the algorithm gives more preference and audience to accounts that post regularly. To get around this pretty easily, create a content calendar and schedule posts at intervals or days. This will give you more time and space to think on new ideas to adopt.
TIP: Check on other influencers' pages and see what it looks like, and know what they are doing or not doing well.
Select posting hours, days
Select posting frequency
Select platforms for a particular post
In all, be consistent with your chosen time and frequency. Though study revealed that there are best times and days of the week when your posts are more likely to have maximum engagement.
You will probably not know how big some of your audience will think and believe you are. With your impressive bio, beautiful profile picture, and the quality contents you produce, some of your audience will believe you are too busy to see their comments let alone respond to them. So, when you do respond,, you will have turned a follower into a disciple. This is as simple as that. Responding to comments, answering questions, liking and sharing are those tiny details that endear you to people’s hearts. And they will reward you accordingly for it. This way, you will be doing what over 60% of people don’t do and that will set you on the path to standing out.
Social media is primarily for socializing, don’t make your post, comments, or engagements sales. Don’t convey the idea that you are too busy all the time. Of course, you may not respond to every comment when you see them, and you may not be able to handle it when comments are pouring in in thousands. You just showed that you are human too. Make it a priority to respond to a certain amount of comments or questions per day.
Engagements such as these will bring you closer to your audience and make your influence strong with them.
Tip: Be generous with likes
Though your audience, while sharing your content are promoting you organically, you will however need to pitch yourself to the brands that need people like yourself. Don’t keep quiet, shout about it.
Few tricks to nail your first client at influencer marketing
a. Have a captivating graphic design that shows what you do and how well you can do them.
b. Join influencer platforms and groups and speak up
c. Tag brands when you make mention of them or their product in your posts.
d. Build an email list of 20 to 50 brands in your niche and in your demography and send them cold emails.
Tip: Don't add any link in the emails ( send at most 10 per day)
e. Ask your audience to recommend you to companies, friends or family members that operate the niche business you are intoOffer to volunteer or support young and upcoming brands. You never can tell who will dominate the market tomorrow.
f. A good name is more precious than gold , so protect your good name early on.
In summary, get to work, for in working you will get the experience to test what works and what doesn’t. In my case, I have seen that opportunities abound and continue to abound in digital marketing once one is ready to work and they are not that hard.
In the voice of Morgan Freeman : ‘Get busy earning or get busy spending.
In summary, when you watch out for these trends, putting in efforts to be relevant in 2022, you will not miss.
I hope my article will point you in the right direction and get you ready for the next big things of your life.