Influencer marketing is a mutually beneficial relationship between influencers and brands. You pay influencers in cash or commission to campaign for your products and services, raise awareness, generate and convert leads. In recent years, influencer marketing has become a vital marketing strategy in a consumer’s journey. This article explores the various phases and techniques an influencer can use to help your brand make sales and substantial ROI. 

But first, a recap of the idea behind influencer marketing.

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Overview of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a budding marketing toolset; some say it is currently the most important. It is a marketing collaborating strategy where brands work with different tiers of Influencers to improve the brand’s popularity. There are different scales of influencers you can settle for, depending on your marketing budget. Influencers can be celebrities or popular social media personalities with large followers.  

Brands understand just how valuable Influencers are to raising awareness or generating leads. Since 2016, there has been a 465% increase in google searches for the keyword “influencer marketing.” Thankfully, Influencers are everywhere— in every industry across all continents, and you only need to find them. For every dollar businesses spend on influencer marketing alone, they profit $5.78 ROI. Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube Influencers are often favored over others for e-commerce products.

For your business to thrive in this day, you must identify the best social media and web platform with your target audience, as well as which phase of the market funnel the influencers will focus on. 

Phases Of The Marketing Funnel

Source: eCommercefastlane

The marketing funnel, also known as the consumer journey, refers to the stages a consumer goes through before and after purchasing a product. A marketing funnel visually represents the journey a person takes from the moment they have any interaction with your brand—like reading a blog post—to the moment they make a purchase. Marketing funnels include different stages that correspond to different points in that journey. The widest part of the funnel captures the biggest group of people who might be interested in what you sell. As you engage with these folks through marketing activities or direct communication, they move down the funnel until they either drop off or buy your product. 

There are six (6) stages in the consumer journey. They are:

• Awareness: This initial phase aims to market your products or services. It primarily teaches clients about your company and assists them in locating information on topics that interest or are relevant to them.

• Consideration: Once people know your brand, you want them to learn more about your offers and conduct more research. This stage seeks to pique interest through early engagement.

• Activation: This stage is about gaining more knowledge and developing a tighter rapport. It promotes a stronger connection and gives a more personalized method of capturing consumers’ attention.

• Conversion: This is where the magic takes place. Sales! Include any other important calls to action that your brand associates with conversions.

• Retention: This is also known as the loyalty phase. It aims to maintain loyal clients and encourage restocking.

• Referral: If sales are excellent and the client is on the high side, you have nothing to worry about. This stage encourages existing customers to give ratings and reviews and spread the word about your brand.

Even if your business is small or large, new or old, you won’t be using an influencer at every stage of your marketing funnel. You’ll want to ensure you’re getting the most out of influencer marketing consistently and quickly because it may be expensive. Popular marketing strategies focus on three out of the six phases in the marketing funnel. This is the Top Of The Funnel(TOFU) phase – aka Awareness; Middle Of The Funnel (MOFU) – aka Consideration and the Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) – aka Conversion.

The Three-Stage Models of Marketing Funnels

When prospects convert, the traditional funnel model follows them straight from the top to the bottom of the funnel. The problem is that this isn’t always how marketing funnels function. People don’t always join a funnel from the top and work their way down till they reach the bottom and become new clients. Before converting, several individuals may enter, exit, and circle the funnel, and they could reach the bottom of the funnel and gasp their way out, vanishing without a trace. While the marketing funnel appears to be linear, the target audience’s actual purchasing behavior is not always linear. Hence, it is critical to understand the customer journey from the point of awareness to the point of conversion.

Understanding how the various tiers of the conventional marketing funnel model work is a big part of it. It’s critical to grasp the minor differences between marketing and conversion funnels, which are sometimes confusing.

Model 1: Top Of The Funnel (ToFu)

In this phase, prospects first become aware of and interact with your brand at the top of the funnel (ToFu). Because clients may be unfamiliar with your product or service at this point, influencers focus on content and marketing materials that raise brand recognition.

Sometimes, an influencer begins by helping the audience realize they have a problem that needs to be fixed. For instance, if the brand is pharmaceutical, the influencer makes them question the kind of illnesses they have and if they need to patronize the brand. This could go both ways, either they start looking into it to find the real source of the issue, or they ignore it and carry on. An influencer may help those who want to be answered and those doing the study. Influencers can discuss the signs and problems that naturally lead to the top of the funnel.

Or let’s assume your business sells weight loss or keto gummies; your influencer may talk about how unhealthy some brands are or how costly surgeries can be; they may also dwell on how painful and expensive exercise or gym sessions could be. The influencer can also include before and after pictures of people who have used your products.

Model 2: Middle Of The Funnel (MOFU)

In this phase, potential consumers interact significantly with your brand, such as joining your email list, following your official profiles on social media, or signing up for a webinar; they reach the center of the funnel (MOFU). Once this append, the influencer creates more engagement to encourage and gain confidence in the brand.

For more context, the customers are aware of their issues and are actively looking for workable solutions. They are probably not prepared to consider particular manufacturers and products but rather suitable remedies for their main issue. They follow your brand because they think you know what they need. Your marketing team’s and influencers’ current goal is to persuade consumers to use the kind of service you offer. Note that while branded mentions of your items are advantageous, they shouldn’t take up the majority of your influencers’ postings.

Model 3: Bottom Of The Funnel (BOFU)

Customers must now select a specific provider/brand and location to buy the solution once they have finished the consideration cycle and are aware of the desired solution. Customers know they want original, tested, and proven weight loss gummies but are unsure which brand to purchase. Here, your influencer’s job is to make sure their followers choose your brand and product. This includes giving it a positive review or recommendation, making comparisons to the goods of your competitors, or giving their followers a voucher for a discount.

Making sure your influencer doesn’t come off as advertising rather than someone trying to help their followers with a decent product is the key to pulling this off. The influencer’s usage and enjoyment of the product in their own life are favorable. The consumer completes the decision step by making a purchase, hopefully from your business. From there, by offering exceptional customer service and a superior product experience, you may either try to turn new consumers into promoters or try to convert them into recurring customers.

Strategies To Consider When moving Customers through the marketing funnel

Your brand itself determines the right influencer marketing strategy and the phase to focus on.

You can simplify this by using the following four steps:

• Decide which stages of the marketing funnel you want to focus on or where you want your clients to enter or exit.
• Establish the campaign’s objectives.
• Ascertain whether your main objectives are suitable with influencer marketing tactics.
• Match the different marketing funnel stages with the influencer marketing methods.

Step 1: Choose Your Marketing Funnel’s Phase.

Brands spend money on marketing with the hope of recovering their costs. Simply put, they spend money to create money. Customers, on the other hand, aren’t often eager to go through the sales process and show businesses a quick return on their investment (ROI). Instead, they are traveling and may stop at several locations along the way, perhaps to check out your rivals. Customers must therefore be assisted through their journey to your brand’s goal.

When executed correctly, marketing campaigns provide clients with the roadmap they need to get from destination to destination and take the action that firms want. Whether you’re sending customers to the entire marketing funnel or just one section, it’s important to know where you’re sending them for each campaign.

You may accomplish your goals by concentrating on the stage that you want your clients to reach, setting campaign objectives that are appropriate for that stage, and choosing strategies that support it.

Step 2. Establish the campaign’s objectives

The next stage in campaign design is to identify your goals after deciding which level of the funnel you’re heading to. Therefore, ask yourself, “What will success in this campaign look like?” and “What vital calls to action and quantifiable outcomes do I want it to achieve at the end?”  

Common online marketing objectives for growing brands include: 

• One hundred thousand unique visits to your website. 
• At least 1,000 followers within the first month.
• Increase social engagements and interactions across the brand’s social profiles by 30%.

Step 3. Establish your influencer marketing campaign’s strategies.

The activities your brand or partnering artists do to get the desired effects are known as campaign tactics. You can give the team of influencers a  brief on how you want the campaign to be and the preferred types of information you prefer. However, it would be best if you allow them to express some creative freedom for the best results. 

Common techniques used in campaigns include making a blog entry, posting content via social media platforms, or creating content like youtube shorts, Tik Tok videos, and Instagram Reels.

How To Select An Influencer For Your Brand

Since influencer marketing is the most user-friendly strategy for achieving quantitative results, you need to establish the requirements that the appropriate creative partnerships must meet. Age, gender, geography, niche, diversity, children (and their ages), household income, hobbies, tonality, purchasing patterns, and frequently purchased or discussed items should all be considered. Then, carefully review their followers to determine the demographics of their audience and whether or not it corresponds to your specific target market. Check their interaction rates again to ensure they are genuine, active followers, not fake followers. Finally, if you’ve found the right partners, get in touch with them and work out a sponsorship deal for a campaign or a long-term ambassador program.

Evaluating the effectiveness of your influencer marketing strategy. The following should be the outcomes after your influencing team takes on the project:

• Clicks
• Making contact
• Leads
• More recipients of the newsletter
• Likes and followers on social media
• Landing page and website traffic 
• Increased sales 

Bottom line

A key element of a successful campaign is understanding how to use influencer marketing to move customers through the marketing funnel. Choose your marketing funnel phase first to develop campaigns that will yield significant results. Next, decide what the campaign’s objectives will be. After that, choose the tactics you’ll use for your influencer marketing campaign. 

Remember! Choose influencers that are consistent with your company’s goals. Finally, align the strategies with the correct stage of the marketing funnel and watch the results pour in. Your brand will surely surpass expectations with that combination and provide excellent results.