digital marketing Archives - Wellons Communications

You’ve probably heard of influencer marketing before. Maybe the term brings to mind visions of Kylie Jenner sharing a product she loves on Instagram, and it seems out of reach for your business.

But to be honest, that’s just not true. There are options within influencer marketing for many types of businesses. You just have to find the right fit for you—and get started.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing blends the ideas of traditional advertising, public relations and celebrity endorsements. It involves working with a brand or person who has influence in your space, likely on social media or a digital platform, to drive awareness for your brand and/or drive sales.

The sticking point for many people is that they envision these elusive influencers as celebrities with millions of followers. But influencer marketing can also mean working with what are known as micro influencers—a somewhat misleading term for influencers who have a smaller following, but who speak to a specific niche and have very engaged fans. These influencers might reach fewer people, but they tend to give you a bigger bang for your buck.

How to develop an influencer marketing strategy for your business

In short, influencers can make a big difference for you (we’ve seen it!), whether your business is a nationwide product or a local restaurant, drawing new fans to your pages and property and building that bottom line. You just have to find the right fit for you. Want to learn how? To start, you need to think long and hard about your brand and your goals. Check out our best tips below.

Define your goals. As with most things in business, you need to go in with eyes wide open as to what you want. Do you want to drive SEO results for your company with seeded keywords? You might want to focus on bloggers rather than social influencers. Do you want to reach young people with a wow-worthy, trendy product? Maybe TikTok is for you. Do your users have a big Instagram community? Maybe Instagram influencer marketing is the best way for people to discover your product.

This decision is going to drive all others—and ultimately determine how happy you are with the results—so choose wisely.

Outline the ops. Before you actually start working with an influencer, it’s a good idea to work out what that will look like. How will you package your product (special touches might stand out!)? How will the influencer check into the hotel or make their restaurant reservation, and how will you communicate to staff what’s going to happen?

At this stage, you will also want to think about budget. Many of the best influencers have a media kit outlining their rates for things like a blog post or social story. Others will accept products or experiences—depending on the value—in exchange for a reasonable scope. Some businesses also offer affiliate benefits for partners, allowing them to earn a commission on sales. Decide what your budget will be for this campaign and how you will handle it.

Find your fit. Now comes the fun part. Get on your chosen platform and do some research. Find the go-to influencers in your space. Explore hashtags, or check out other brands you admire to see who they work with. Do a quick search. When you find someone you think is a fit, look deeper. What kinds of things do they post? How many followers do they have? What is their engagement rate, and who is their target audience? Make sure they have enough sway with the right people to help you reach your goals, and make sure they’re someone with whom you want to align your brand.

Make it happen. Find your chosen influencer’s contact info and shoot them an email or just reach out on their popular platform. Outline what you’re thinking, and see if it aligns with their vision and standards. It might help to draw up an informal influencer agreement outlining what both sides can expect for the partnership. If this is a paid partnership with a big budget, you might even draw up a contract, like you would with any other ad deal. Be sure to ask influencers to follow all guidelines regarding disclosures. It can also be helpful to provide your influencer with your own media kit, especially if there are certain messaging points you’d really like to hit. Influencers will often pull from this so they can give their followers reliable information, and it can support your overall branding goals.

Track and reuse. Your influencer received your product, loved it and shared. They came to your resort and wrote a glowing blog. They visited your restaurant and posted a swoon-worthy pic on Insta or video on TikTok. Amazing! Now, you need to see if your program worked. Follow up with your influencer about their experience (you are, hopefully, building a relationship, after all!). Ask them to provide any internal stats they might have about performance (page views, reach, etc.). Take a look yourself at your web traffic or social analytics and see what can be tied to the partnership. This will all help guide you in future influencer partnerships.

And don’t forget a vital step—reuse this influencer content wherever you can. Influencers produce some amazing content for your brand, and you should be engaging with it, reposting it to your page and sharing blogs and vlogs to make the most of your partnership.

Influencer marketing can work for you

Now that you have the steps, tweak and repeat. Despite the sometimes bad rep influencer marketing gets, when done correctly, it can be a great thing for your business.

Feeling a little overwhelmed by the prospect of starting from scratch? Call in the pros. At Wellons Communications, we’ve put our PR savvy to work for years building influencer programs for everything from national products to local restaurants. We understand how the process works and have built great relationships with all kinds of influencers. We’d love to put our know-how to work for you. Give us a call at 407-339-0879 or email will@wellonscommunications.com, and let us get started working for your busines

The shift toward an E-economy arrived with bewildering speed during the past decade. While it did not catch businesses off guard, E-marketing surprised many with the speed by which it overtook traditional marketing processes.

Now, with the entrenched presence of the COVID pandemic for the next year or so, E-commerce has become not just another adjunct to your marketing program, but, for many, the primary means of reaching customers.

It’s important to recognize that E-commerce has advanced well beyond simply initiating a Search Engine Optimization program and hoping you show up in generic Google searches. It’s an ever-changing process that is the marketing program for many businesses.

E-commerce, however, is not a one-trick pony.

It requires marketing agility, the necessary resources required to gain a foothold in the E-commerce battleground, and the know-how to present one’s values and benefits to customers so the business can jump off the page and become recognizable…and wanted.

E-commerce success demands more than digital outflow

Successful digital marketing requires a mix of activities, not all of them online. You need communications that will reach and attract your potential customers before they head to their computer screen.

We’re talking about the kind of activity that will build online interest in your brand, products or services and draw people to your site. This could be special events, attention-getting visuals, storytelling in a compelling fashion, news, information only you can deliver, or best of all, having the story told by someone who already has an online following.

Next, your digital marketing needs to make customers want to continue to return to your site.

But it can’t end there.

Your online marketing needs to engage prospective customers so they not only recognize what you do and what you stand for but want to buy your product or service.

Is your E-commerce approach still fresh…or is it getting tired?

Even if you are an E-commerce veteran, you need to constantly review how you are doing things to ensure your E-commerce marketing is firing on all cylinders.

Your approach to E-commerce marketing and communications cannot remain static.

You have to maintain a balancing act of familiarity, like your logo and your headline, along with something fresh and new that signals that you are in tune with whatever changes your industry is experiencing and reflective of your ability to remain in touch with what’s around the next corner.

Amplify your E-commerce marketing with a strong PR program

Most often, our clients call on us to develop and implement aggressive media relations programs to support their keyword strategy and boost their site’s performance on search engines.

We rely on building a focused, multi-faceted communications program that calls attention to their keywords and aggressively addresses those niches where those keywords have the most potential to augment someone’s message…like appearing in an influential blog or a magazine article.

But there’s a lot more to PR than simply reinforcing keywords.

We seek out and create opportunities for others to present you in a credible, favorable manner people will want to view … and Google will rank. And, when we capitalize on these opportunities, there’s the added benefit of of countering Google’s changing ever-changing algorithms.

No black hat nonsense, or SEO “experts” seeding your content onto poor websites to chase backlinks.

We are talking simple, easy-to-understand, practical distribution of information and ideas to sources like bloggers, vloggers, traditional media and influence leaders who will understand the value and importance of your message at a glance and want to share it with their audiences.

Messaging and communications are where PR comes into the picture

From employment of visualization using photos and video to special events, PR can serve as a springboard to generate attention both inside and outside of E-commerce channels of communication.

PR can reinforce what you are all about and amplify your messaging through news and communications outlets beyond your normal scope. PR can serve as a different kind of driving force to direct people to your website so they can learn more about you and see what you can offer them.

The cost is relatively inexpensive, particularly when it compares with paid advertising, which online readers recognize and often bypass, to get to whatever subject is most important to them.

Look at your E-commerce marketing with a fresh set of eyes

Even if you are well-versed in E-commerce, it doesn’t hurt to take another look at what you’re doing.

E-commerce has advanced and will only continue to do so. The pandemic has brought that to light more clearly than ever before.

Our approach? Developing and executing awareness-building programs that encourage online readers to put your company straight into their search bar.

We maximize E-commerce marketing efforts by clearly identifying and establishing those qualities that what make you special: your expertise, authority, personality and ability to deliver. And, once we attract reader attention, we aim toward making your potential customers feel completely confident in buying from you—and in recommending you to others.

Find out more about how we can help you energize your E-marketing.

Email me at will@wellonscommunications.com (or call me… 407-339-0879) and let’s talk about how we can add new life to your digital marketing.

Tag: digital marketing

How PR can help you get ahead in today’s E-commerce marketing environment