Influencer marketing has gradually emerged as an important strategy and many business owners are using it quite frequently for driving sales. With the advent of social media and the availability of various social media platforms, influencer marketing has found a solid ground. It is not just helping marketers reach a new audience and build brand credibility, but it is helping them in search rankings as well. It has indeed become an integral part of customers’ purchase process.

According to a survey, 92% consumers around the world trust word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising. As a matter of fact, customers are more likely to make a purchase with a peer recommendation as compared to when they are exposed to conventional marketing tactics. When a customer is in a real dilemma as to which products or services to purchase, a review or recommendation from an influencer can greatly impact their decision. This brings a great opportunity for business owners to leverage influencer marketing as a strategy.

If you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner or for that matter running an established business, influencer marketing can be a potent tool in order to increase sales, create brand awareness and make new customers. “Today, as we are inching closer to cut-throat competition in terms of brand promotion, the audience has become immensely valuable, so are the crisp words of influencers” – Nicholas Chachula, co-founder of iCustomlabel was quoted as saying.

Here are some ways with which you can use influencer marketing to your advantage in order to grow your business:

1. Engage your customers

Consumers now like to discuss products and brands across various social media platforms. This presents an effective case for them to make their voices heard, so you need to start following people on their social media profiles. Then begin engaging their content by liking, commenting and sharing their posts. Leveraging influencers to share content in a creative way keeps your audience engaged, which in turn increases the number of positive comments about your brand. In this way, influencers will help your brand stand out from the rest of the crowd because customers tend to trust them when they say your brand is genuine. This means influencers help drive sales quite comfortably.

 2. Build customer loyalty

62% people accepted that they will buy a particular product if any influencer they follow on social media recommends it. Also, 60% of YouTube subscribers admitted that they would follow the advice of their favorite YouTube creator rather than a usual celebrity. This shows that people deeply trust in influencers and the recommendations they provide. Since a word of praise regarding your brand from an influencer attracts people’s attention. As a result, you are able to establish your credibility in your audience. Although building customer loyalty could be tricky because it requires those influencers whose ideas should resonate with what your brand actually stands for. However, once it is done a trust factor comes in and people start associating with your product or service. 

3. Incorporate an effective content marketing strategy

In order to promote your business and reach out to as many people as possible, you need to give your content marketing efforts a big boost because it is an integral part of social media strategy. So, you need to rope in trusted influencers to drive sales and who could write engaging content with interesting storytelling on your blog. Or you can have them share your content in order to attract more customers and maximize web traffic. It will eventually help you earn high-authority inbound links and build up social shares.

4. Enhance search engine optimization

Influencer marketing greatly benefits your marketing strategy because the influencers bring together all the followers who follow their every product review or recommendations. They help build a strong link profile, which is very crucial for your website’s rank in competitive queries on search engines. Furthermore, an influencer who shares your link also increases chances of having other people to share the link. These well-respected links eventually help generate more organic traffic. This means increased popularity and greater chances of brand promotion.

Influencer marketing is a rising trend and social media has provided a lot of significance to it. So brace yourself to apply influencer marketing strategies to boost your sales.

The way competition among startups is getting heated up for the last few years, entrepreneurs need to strategize their plans even more powerfully. Luck alone cannot have a say as far as the success of small businesses is concerned. The sphere of entrepreneurship is getting larger and larger and conversely their chances to succeed are shrinking in equal proportion. This is an example of the natural law of inverse variation.

Even if you have started with a killer business idea in your mind, you still need an effective implementation and execution strategy in place. Else, chances are this whole exercise of running a startup and wanting to earn profits will, unfortunately, become futile. You cannot wait for an opportune moment to implement your strategies.

Using effective business tools is one among many aspects that entrepreneurs need to focus on. The fact is your competitors must also be using smarter approach to become efficient in order to stay ahead in the race. Though there are numerous business-oriented tools and technologies on the market and it is really hard to tell which among them are best. However, having a personal experience and a thorough research, we have the following beneficial tools for you:

1. Google Analytics

It is a free web service that provides analytical tools and statistics for search engine optimization and business marketing purposes. Google Analytics is highly helpful for small and medium sized business websites. The tool has many features: you can create multiple dashboards to see statistics for traffic and goal completion, you can find out which online campaigns are bringing the most traffic, you can determine where your core visitors are located, and also know what people are searching for on your site. You can also identify your worst performing pages.

2. SBA Business Plan Tool

Writing a business plan is one of the most essential parts of starting a business. But it can sometimes become a time consuming and painstaking process and it is important for you to streamline it. Therefore, the SBA Business Plan tool helps in creating executive summary, company description as well as financial projections in complete detail. You also need necessary research to gather required materials and information. So, i n addition to the tool you need professional writers from a writing company who could be of great help for you in conducting the desired research.

3. Buffer

One of the many difficult and time-consuming tasks for startups or small businesses is to manage social media accounts. Today, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. are increasingly becoming powerful social media platforms, and it is really a heck of a task to efficiently manage all these simultaneously. So, Buffer is a tool which is best suited for this situation. It effectively manages personal social media accounts to business accounts. It schedules social media posts well ahead of time; it can find images that are used for posts. It provides daily and weekly reports on reach, clicks, time optimization, and other metrics.

4. Slack

Slack is an innovative team communication tool that offers a high degree of collaboration and optimization of your team. It is a multi-featured and multi-purpose tool that is must for the success of any startup. Its channels help you to separate messages, discussions and notifications. For sharing sensitive information, you can create private channels and invite the team members whoever you want. It allows you to share all types of files and the robust search functionality enables you to search messages, notifications, files, everything. All in all Slack is a revolutionary innovative tool.

5. DropBox

Usually for small businesses, tracking documents and data files across different computers, smartphones and users is a challenging task. So, DropBox is a one point solution for all these problems. It allows you to back-up, share, and sync files with other users across different platforms. It can provide you a vast storage backup to store important files and data in different places ensuring that they will always have a copy. Apart from being reliable and fast, DropBox has a robust security in order to leverage powerful administration controls. Its Access Channels include desktop access, online access, and mobile access. It also helps you create personalized folders and save your documents accordingly.

Wrap Up

Starting a business is one thing but running it successfully is quite another. There is a world of difference between these two states and an entrepreneur has to leapfrog from one to the other. This is where come strategies, best practices, powerful approach, and use of technology and tools. In relation to this, the above tools are among those that will never disappoint small business owners.