Having a certain niche, gives you a clear USP and is what brands look for in authentic, long-lasting partnerships. For example, if you’re a new brand wanting to increase the sales of a specific tennis racquet, you’d want to directly target sport fanatics that watch and play tennis. Think about it. If you were to target a beauty influencers audience, there might be only 10% guarantee that your advertisement is reaching the right people. However, (& I know that this is obvious to the majority), if you want to grip a large audience of potential customers of a tennis racquet, the brand should be looking to invest in a partnership with tennis players or commentators with an engaged social media following.
The engaged social media following is important here as often brands are on the look out for the content creators with stats over the one million mark, for example. This is where brands are going wrong. Talent with 10k followers may be way more valuable for brands than someone with 1 million followers. This comes down to visibility – who is going to see your post? Who is going to engage with the content? Who is most likely to click through to the brands website and have a look at the product or service the Influencer is highlighting? This often correlates to creators online that hold a good influence.
Having a good influence comes down to if you have an intimate relationship with your audience. Are the comments section full of long, meaningful comments for back and forth conversation from the audience to the creators? Are your numbers high on the amount of people who have shared your post to their own story to initiate their own conversations between them and their friends? Are both the content creators audience and the brands audience going to be receptive to this partnership? Is it going to spark new conversations? This is a topic for a whole separate blog post but is really important when considering who to partner with.
Now that we’ve identified a good influence online as well as having an engaged social media audience, let’s come back to having a niche. Some influencers are afraid to label themselves under that bracket from being cut off from the opportunities of exciting brand deals and partnerships. However, really, having a niche makes you a lot more ‘sellable’ because your audience are much more likely to be the brands direct consumers and can target you more. Therefore a valuable brand partnership would look to partner with an influencer with a niche around your specific subject. You’re more likely to see a higher return on investment for whatever you’re advertising because of the quality of the audience. In my eyes, this is what makes up an authentic partnership where both the influencers audience and brand are getting value from the partnership.
If this is what you, as a brand, are getting out of a partnership – I promise that Influencer Marketing will be something that you return to again and again.
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
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