faizan

Influencers, as we all know are social media celebrities. People follow these content creators and love to watch their content in their social media feeds. Not only that, 49% of them refer to their favorite brand advocates when making certain purchase decisions.

So, do these influencers contribute to conversions? The answer is an absolute yes. About 40% of users made purchases after watching a product on Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram.

Many brands have incorporated influencer marketing in their marketing strategy. But, to make the most out of it, organizations need to convert influencers into their brand advocates.

And how will you be able to do that? Here, we bring you six ways that will help you to achieve this.

Normally, when companies conduct influencer marketing activities, they send their products to influencers or ask them to shoot testimonials. Influencers publish that content on their social media while tagging the businesses.

That’s a traditional influencer marketing tactic. Here, you turn the tables around. You ask influencers to take control of your social media for a certain period of time. This will give your brand a face people can relate to. It will also help in recalling your brand when that same influencer will appear on their mobile screens.

For example, you can invite influencers to take a master class using your brand. Influencers of Pakistan shared their influencer’s video highlighting how to keep COVID away.

Educating the audience about your product or business, discussion sessions, launching a new product, or interacting one to one with the audience can be best done through Live sessions.

Not only that, when such sessions will be hosted by influencers of your niche, people would want to see what the session is all about and what will they get from it. This will put the audience’s trust in your brand.

For example, a service-based business can provide training or hold a session about a certain topic. This will make the audience hook with your brand.

While posting influencer-made content in the form of ‘take over your social media’ is a good tactic. An upgraded level of the same tactic is to produce content serially. That is, either you take one influencer to speak on different topics related to your niche. Or take different brand advocates to speak on a similar topic.

Also, multiple sessions of different influencers altogether can be held to create a panel discussion between influencers and the audience. Podcasts or interviews can be another way to communicating your brand message through an influencer’s voice, on your social media.

For example, Influencers of Pakistan arranges its training programs periodically with different influencers sharing their expertise about how to become and grow as a successful influencer.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to bring conversions. Whenever a sale takes place due to an influencer, s/he gets paid with a certain percentage of the sale amount. 

You might face challenges while converting your influencers into affiliates i.e. they might not trust your product or ask for an amount to promote your products as affiliates. 

But, if you have already established a good relationship with influencers and conducted the above-mentioned activities with them, they will be able to collaborate with you on a commission basis.

In normal practice, influencers are given instructions to create certain content. However, they are also given the freedom to create content in a way that meets the objective of collaboration. 

But, when you give them the liberty to create content as per their understanding, the results will be different. Because these influencers understand your audience better than you. They know what kind of content they love and engage with.

By giving influencers the liberty to create content, they feel comfortable and friendly. Thus leading to a long-term relationship. Also, when influencers have a better understanding of a brand, they feel more comfortable working with them and generate better ideas.

For example, you may ask your best influencers to create a WOW moment at your product launch, by making their presence surprisingly.

When you look at the content created by influencers, you might look at good numbers of engagement, but is that the only metric with which you can measure ROI? We think not. Below we present some ways to track and measure your influencer campaign performance.

Remember we talked about asking your influencers to become affiliates? That’s where Walee comes in. Using the platform of Walee, your influencers can get their UTM link with which you and they can track their performance in terms of website clicks, impressions, and most importantly; sales.

Check whether is there any spike in the number of brand mentions and their context too. How people are talking about your brand or any communication of your business. This can easily be done by our Walee Enterprise Social Listening tool, which fetches every post or tweet mentioning your brand name.

As influencers start advocating your brand, see whether it has changed your brand perception (from negative to neutral or positive). Do people recognize and recall your brand in the market?

From where you are receiving the most mentions and traffic? Is the source relevant to your industry or niche? Are the topics related to your business?

As you track and measure these technical points of your post-collaboration, and you match the results with the objectives, you can find room for improvement.

This will help you to focus on the concerns your audience and customers might have regarding your brand.

Do you feel trouble finding the right influencers for your business? Or do you think it is too time taking to search for influencers? You might have found the influencer you want to work with but don’t know how to approach them?

That’s where you will need Walee. We help you in finding the best fit for your influencer marketing campaign, provide you relevant details like their niche, the content they create, their audience details, etc.

With Walee, you make informed decisions on every corner and measure performance in real-time so that you control your campaigns promptly.

Tried and trusted by leading brands such as Reckitt Benckiser, Burger King, and more, with a community of 100k+ influencers and affiliates, we make sure you get the maximum satisfying results of your campaign and therefore, turn influencers into your brand advocates.

Lets’ connect now and tune up your influencer marketing.

If you aspire to become a successful influencer on Instagram/TikTok or are already on the path of creating content but struggling, then this post is surely for you which will motivate you to keep going on.

Since we all know that influencer marketing is growing at an exponential rate, thanks to the influencers. Today, many people who want to become an influencer enter this field to collaborate with brands. But, collaboration with brands should not be the primary purpose of becoming an influencer.

 Many influencers you see with millions of followers today started with the purpose of sharing. Be it entertainment, expertise or any talent, they started with sharing that asset with people to relate with them and build trust. Brand collaborations come later.

Walee brings you an inspiring story of the Transformation King of TikTok, Hassan Abid. Hassan is one of the most promising young influencers with a lot of fan pages. Initially, he started with TikTok and then moved towards other social media platforms like Instagram and Snack Video. Walee is proud to provide the first-ever paid campaign opportunity to Hassan. With his remarkable efforts, he recently hit the mark of 200k on Instagram. He believes in making decent yet fun content for his die-hard followers.

 Let’s find out how did he took off his journey:

I made some transition videos at the start to post on TikTok and got good feedback. My family was not that supportive at that time. However, I wanted to make positive and decent content that one can see while sitting with family. So, I kept doing it and now Alhumdulilah my family also supports me.

I made some transition videos at the start to post on TikTok and got good feedback. My family was not that supportive at that time. However, I wanted to make positive and decent content that one can see while sitting with family. So, I kept doing it and now Alhumdulilah my family also supports me.

I started making basic-level videos back in March 2019. At that time I didn’t even have a phone for myself, I used to make these videos on my brother’s phone. Later on, I bought a phone for myself and made so many videos and received a lot of love from my followers.

Yes, Alhumdulilah. At first, they were a bit hesitant and concerned about it but now they are happy and support me because I made such content that would not bring any shame to my family. Whenever I make a new video I show it to my mother first and ask her for approval if the video is okay before uploading it.

I would advise them to strike a good balance between the two because in the end, every parent wants their child to be good at the academic side and studies rather than the social media. No parent would want their child to be a model or an influencer, everyone wants to have a doctor or an engineer child, it’s how our culture is. 

So, I would suggest the young influencers prioritize their studies of course. And then in their free time, as a side hobby, they should make content for social media. I am a student of Computer Science, currently in my sophomore year in university. I take both things side by side, as both are very important to me.

Well, it’s not easy because whenever anyone does something for the first time, it takes him a lot of time to understand the whole process. Once we keep on doing it with consistency, we keep getting better at it, we find the easy way out of it. So at the start, it took me a lot of time and effort to make these videos. Now, it takes less time but the effort is the same or even more than it used to be at the start.

One should have a good understanding of what the brand wants. Usually, the brands look for good dressing sense, good video quality and aesthetic sense, decent content and a good voice (so it could be used in voiceovers if needed). And the market is quite saturated as there are already a lot of people in the industry, and now the influx of influencers is quite high. So, one should always bring in new ideas and new unique trends that can attract the brands.

I would pick Instagram because I think the audience and users of Instagram are more educated and decent. They know what’s appropriate and what’s not, TikTok is accessible by everyone and has all sorts of audiences. Other than that, Instagram is the most used social media platform and almost all of the brands approach influencers for marketing campaigns on Instagram rather than Tiktok.

So, my first ever marketing campaign was in fact with Walee. I was very excited and I didn’t even have a bank account at that time. So, I gave my father’s bank account instead. I took my family and friends out for a treat. My parents were very happy that I am earning and making an income of my own, so they started supporting me even more after my first paid campaign.

Lastly, if you want to become an influencer and are looking for ways to start, we suggest trusting your gut and being authentic. Identify a niche you think you’re best at and start creating valuable content.

You can also join Walee as an influencer to attend our Influencer Training Sessions so that you can receive learning and insights from senior influencers of different niches.  

LinkedIn – as we all know, is a platform for professional activities. Whether you connect or follow a LinkedIn influencer, like, share or discuss anything, they all are backed by a professional purpose.

With the recent updates and features, the platform has been able to bring engagement and more users to interact. According to LinkedIn, the number of globally registered users has now reached 756M+ (and still growing). 

As more professionals become available on the platform, LinkedIn Influencers (also known as the opinion leaders) arise from the community. But, what does it take to be an influencer on a professionally populated platform? 

This is what this blog will answer. If you are thinking that only a good number of connections will do the job, check out our blog: Followers VS Engagement, which one you should be concerned about.

Let’s uncover the tips for becoming a LinkedIn influencer.

Regardless of the platform, content is the single most vital thing for anyone becoming an influencer. However, the content can be categorized and created as per the platform’s protocols. For example, Facebook and Instagram can be used to share casual content whereas, on LinkedIn, you will find content related to the professional life of people, career growth, management of work, etc.

Talking of content delivery, video is the number one choice of audience. It is the best way to share long-form content, stories, How To’s, and discussions. (Source: Animoto) 

LinkedIn’s algorithms also regard the video format. The platform has made some upgrades for video format such as it plays automatically while you scroll with it. Another innovation is the introduction of LinkedIn stories which helps people share instant news, countdowns, raw or behind the scenes moments of their efforts. 

So how can this format help you being a LinkedIn influencer?

Like mentioned earlier, people engage more with videos featuring a human element. You may share an interesting story or start a discussion or podcast with your peers or other industry experts. 

As you take leverage of video, don’t miss out on the ‘value’ part of your content strategy. Your content (either static, video, or any other format) must provide value to your followers.

You may come up with a professional series of videos discussing how manageable business can be while working from home? In which you share online meetings/interviews with other industry peers.

Breaking-the-ice question: Is it only us or have you seen that most of the LinkedIn ads you see in your feed are in video format?

You might have passed through many situations in your career from which you learned something. Whether it is rejection or promotion, or how you helped out someone in the workplace, leadership or people-handling skills of yours, such experiences help others relate and connect with you.

So try to share the stories through your LinkedIn profile and people who have or haven’t passed through such experiences, people who may or may not know you will notice you. Some of them will relate, some will discuss or ask, and some will share their guidance with you.

Nevertheless, all of this will be happening around your story. That’s what an influencer does, right? Share, engage, inspire, influence.

A number of people possess the desire to be an influencer, however, they don’t get on the ground with their own content. They stay quiet and keep checking (and interacting with) their feed. Remember, if you want to be an influencer, showing up with your own made content is important. 

Yes, it is possible that people on LinkedIn might disagree with your opinions, but that will end up as a healthy discussion. However, if you keep producing honest and authentic content, you will periodically grow as an opinion leader on LinkedIn.

Any content is worthy enough if it is valuable for its readers. Posting randomly will fill your profile with haphazard content. Plan out your content and the purpose it should serve. A well directional content strategy is vital especially if you are becoming an influencer.

Create and post what you think will bring value to your audience. Whether it is a poll, a factoid, info-graphic, statistics, or even a simple status update, it has to be valuable enough for your followers.

Video consumption on LinkedIn (Image source: MWP Digital Media)

A good LinkedIn influencer profile is one that invites its followers to participate and share what they feel. This has become easier with the introduction of LinkedIn polls. But other than this feature, how can you bring people to participate in your content?

There are different ways through which you can produce such content. See the examples below:

Offering help is good and common too, however, asking for help as an influencer might sound odd but it is actually not. Rather, it is a great way to increase engagement. For example, you might ask your audience to join you at a specific place to help you with shooting your next vlog or interview. 

That way, you will not only help your audience by sharing valuable content, tips, and consultation but also making them feel helpful by including them in your social media activities too.

Challenges and giveaways are great ways to get people to land on your posts and even bring others. One might think that giveaways are part and parcel of Instagram or Facebook, but that’s not true. 

There are challenges and similar activities people do on LinkedIn while maintaining the platform protocols. 

So as long as you can keep it relevant and interesting, people will take part in those giveaways.

Now you know what it takes to be a LinkedIn influencer, the stage is set! Move on and start creating content you are best at. Use these tips and learn more along the way.

If you are already on the way to becoming an influencer, how about signing up on Walee today and start collaborating with brands. 

Are you a business looking to push your brand through influencer marketing? Contact us now!