Influencer marketing: Gordon Glenister’s concise beginner’s guide

Gordon Glenister

More and more of us trust influencers and content creators than corporate giants. Influencer marketing is now a multi-billion dollar business as more brands invest in this media to get their message across. Even celebrities understand the importance of influence and fan base engagement

Taylor Swift realised this at a very early age. In fact she supported fans for 13 hours at one meet and greet event. Even though she met 3,000 fans she realised what great brand advocates they could be. Taylor Swift has over 280 million followers on Instagram alone.  So if you do the numbers, if each of those fans shared a photo on their social media, the average Instagram account user has approximately 335 friends so you can see the potential exposure is to over 1 million. And look at her now the youngest billionaire and her Swiftie fan base have helped her become that.

Around the world in China we have other examples of amazing influence. Becky Li sold 100 Mini Cooper cars in under 5 minutes. She is known to have a phenomenal level of influence over her followers shopping habits.

In fact in China, livestream influencer lead shopping is huge and its why e-commerce platforms like Alibaba and Amazon have highly successful influencer and affiliate marketing programs.  Many of these influencers act like personal shoppers and guide us through these products and benefits in a way that most other media cannot match

Influencers are able to articulate their brand story and everyday life in such a way it resonates very well with their audience. We have also seen niche communities develop on the back of it.  Even video creator @francois_bourgeois43 became famous for his amazing train spotting experiences. He now has over 2.4m followers on Instagram

Everyday folk can literally become famous overnight by creating entertaining content online from chefs to bricklayers and so many more.

One of the key components of influence is trust and authenticity and that’s what some of the best creators exude. Great content needs to be inspiring, entertaining or educational. That’s not to say that some content can’t be negative and deliberately provocative.

To be a successful creator or influencer you need to

1.  Be super clear on your niche and what type of content you will specialise on

2.  Be consistent in posting online at least daily sometimes even more in today’s competitive landscape

3.  Research and use content that engages your audience by strong hooks that are focused on value outcomes.

4.  Engage with audience by liking and responding to their comments.

5.  Tag brands that you want to work with and therefore showcasing what you can do for them

6.  Be patient it takes time to build an audience – test and measure to drive greater content performance.

7.  Use a limited number of relevant hashtags with a view to appearing on the Explore page

Gordon Glenister is an international speaker and author of best selling book Influencer Marketing Strategy. Gordon also hosts the Influence Global Podcast