5 Ways to Promote Your Product Launch with Influencers
Influencer marketing is by far one of the most effective ways to market any product. But how do you start? What do you do?
Working with an influencer needs to be just as strategic as Facebook ads, marketing copy, and social media — and for good reason. A recent study by TapInfluence discovered that influencer marketing had 11x higher ROI than any other form of marketing out there.
It’s easy to get wowed by the number of followers and the high engagement that someone has on social media. But it’s important to know exactly what you want them to do for you before you launch the partnership.
Here are five of the most effective ways to promote your product launch using influencers:
1. Have Influencers Create Something with Your Product
Creating content is probably the most important thing you can do to market any business. Influencers know this, and they thrive on content. After all, their content is the secret to their success.
If you have a physical product, one of the best ways to showcase it is to simply send it to the influencer and to have them create something with it.
If your product is an ingredient, you can send it to a chef and have him or her make a dish with it. If it’s a clothing item, you could send it to a model or a fashion expert and have them take pictures wearing your product.
But the question is, how you will find influencers who can help you launch your product successfully?
Zoomph can help you discover relevant influencers by identifying micro-influencers within a certain social conversation or interest group. Grin is another tool that can help you by providing an influencer CRM, email tracking services, and tools for measuring partnership ROI.
Mercedes Benz had a great campaign during which they let influencers drive their new 2017 Mercedes GLS, and shot a video of them going about their day. One of those videos featured the famous chef Chris Coombs, and showed him going out to find the ingredients he needed for his Thanksgiving menu. It was a very effective way to show how slick the car is.
2. Do a Giveaway
People love getting things for free. You can really engage an audience if you have their beloved influencer hosta giveaway of your product. The key is to find an audience that is engaged and passionate enough about the topic.
If you wrote a book about small business or entrepreneurship, you could find an influencer whose audience includes young entrepreneurs, and offer your book for free.
If you invented the next generation of skateboards, then find an influencer who would love to offer it to their audience as a giveaway. It’s a super catchy way to market yourself.
Leadpages recently did a giveaway on OkDork, the marketing blog that Noah Kagan of AppSumo runs. They offered a one-year subscription of their platform to one lucky reader with the best comment on the post.
Of course a bunch of people commented, and they got a lot of engagement and positive feedback from people using the product, etc. The best part?All f of those positive comments will remain on the blog forever, getting traffic for months to come.
3. Let Them Tell Your Story
Another great way to work with an influencer is to have your influencer tell the story of your product in his or her own words. This is a perfect campaign to run with lifestyle influencers whose content revolves around activities and places.
For example, NatureBox is a healthy snack company that is known for their non-gmo, vegan and gluten free options. The company hired Barefoot Blonde, aka Amber Fillerup Clark, to represent their brand.
Amber took her kids out for a nice healthy picnic and took some pictures with the NatureBox snacks.
The results were incredible. Besides the hundred of Instagram comments, the blog post that Amber published about NatureBox received 319 comments.
4. Have Them Review Your Product
Reviewing products is a great strategy to build your brand. Leesa is a luxury mattress company that doesn’t have any physical stores. So it’s really hard to sample the product, though they do offer a return policy of 100 nights.
That’s why they hired the famous blog Sleepopolis to write an objective review of their product. They even included a video and a coupon with the review.
Through this campaign, Leesa got more than 100,00 clicks on their website and also led to sale of more than 400 mattresses since the launch of the project.
5. Influencer Takeover
Last but not least, doing an influencer takeover on social media can return great result–and it’s not as intense as it sounds. It’s giving an influencer creative license to post to your brand’s social media page with whatever content that they’ve agreed to create for you.
One of my favorite examples is when the city of Las Vegas had DJ Khaled take over their Snapchat account for a whole two days. He then proceeded to visit his favorite spots in the city, eat at restaurants, visit the famous Las Vegas sign, do a concert, all while being trailed by hundreds of loyal fans.
The campaign was so successful that Las Vegas’ Snapchat account got 400,000 views, and grew by 25,000 new followers in just those two days.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful ways to promote your product and grow your brand, but you have to plan strategically.
Then you need to see which type of content will work best for your brand. You can either do a giveaway, a review, let the influencer make something out of your product–or a combination of any of the tactics mentioned above.
As long as you match the right influencer with the right content type, you can ensure that your influencer marketing campaign and product launch will be successful.
Do you have any questions about the strategies mentioned above? Or do you need any help promoting your product launch? Tweet me at @shane_barker!
Originally published at zoomph.com
About The Author
Shane Barker is the Founder and CEO of Content Solutions and Gifographics. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
