For many of us, influencer marketing has become something of a love affair. Fair enough, it’s been knocking around for some time now but the rise of influencers has brought the industry to the general populous and even invaded the c-suite. The community that has arisen off the back of it only serves to expand the remit and open new opportunities and career change for those in marketing looking to do something more exciting than the traditional efforts.In this series, I ask a selection of influencer marketing industry leaders for their insights on how influencer marketing should be done. They try their best to answer many of the burning questions that have been asked and answer them from a practical standpoint.

Although more and more companies are realising the importance of influencer marketing, not everyone will be on board as soon as you say you’re interested in working with them – you need to sell your influencer marketing campaign to your clients. So, I wanted to find out how the industry experts do this.

How do you sell influencer marketing to potential clients?

“Funnily enough I’ve seen a big direction change on this in the past year – now clients come to us asking for influencer marketing campaigns. I’ve never been on a business development department selling what I do but if I had to justify why influencer marketing is what they should be doing I would go into the statistics – clients love that,” commented 

Natalia Cortázar, influencer marketing manager at Procure Worldwide

“Working with small and medium-sized businesses, we still find a lot of caution around influencer marketing. Many have tried it but have gone it alone and have had mediocre results at best.Often we need to build trust with our customers through the marketing methods they are used to (content, social media etc) before they are willing to explore influencer marketing. This is no bad thing as we always aim to use influencers to compliment other marketing methods – so it is easier when we already have input across the board,” said Owain Williams, founder of Make it Mana “It’s more about the need for more and more content, and I think the biggest gap within the market at the moment is the push for additional content.More brands are operating on social at the moment but how many images do you have? Do you have enough content to update your Instagram five times a day? What about all the Facebook ads you’re putting out? Where do you get the imagery from? With influencers you have the double impact of not only getting good quality content, which you can use for your marketing campaign but it’s already being amplified to an engaged audience ready to absorb those recommendations,” said Mark Dandy, B2C marketing specialist, and co-founder at Bee Influence“I show potential clients the value of influencer marketing by explaining that:
  1. By now we have all learned to skip, ignore or opt out of online ads, as they are just a disruption. So, if you want to reach potential customers online, you’ll need a new strategy and influencer marketing should be part of that.
  2. People trust people. Brands? Not so much. That means that if you want to gain trust from potential customers, you should invest in the kind of third-party social proof that influencers can provide.
I am also careful not to try to sell them on ridiculous stats such as ‘investing $1 in influencers brings you $8 in return’ – because that sets the wrong expectation that they’ll see an immediate return on investment,” explained NG aka 

DearMishuDad, influencer marketing blogger, speaker, and teacher

“Influencer marketing is an excellent opportunity to get engaged with a young audience that is hard to reach via traditional media but also use ad blockers often to avoid advertisement. Authentic influencers are though able to entertain their audience and give brands the exposure that they deserve, ” said 

Benedikt Baecker, account executive at InfluencerDB

“Most of the time I don’t have to ‘sell’ it but I have to explain what it is capable of doing and then explain how it’s done. In short, it’s about reaching a target audience and moving them to take an action via the influencer,” commented 

Tom Augenthaler, influencer marketing expert and consultant

Take a look at Part 2 of the series here.

Tell us how you sell influencer marketing to potential clients in the comment section below.

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