Influencer marketing is becoming a powerful tool in a company’s digital marketing strategy. While it delivers results for B2B and B2C brands, how does influencer marketing work for manufacturers?
Like any other industry, brand marketing for manufacturing companies is an important aspect of business growth. It raises awareness, broadens reach, drives traffic, and helps increase conversion rates. Influencer marketing takes your approach to the next level, building credibility and connecting with your prospects on a deeper level. This enables you to form lasting relationships with your audience, which is important because 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers.
If you’re interested in developing a digital marketing strategy that reaches its full potential, you must understand how influencer marketing works for manufacturers.
Key Takeaways
- In influencer marketing, someone with a large, loyal online following endorses your brand and products to raise awareness and drive traffic to your site.
- Manufacturing and industrial companies can use influencer marketing to demonstrate machinery, explain processes, test products, and deliver service reviews.
- From researching influencers to assessing results, developing an effective influencer marketing strategy can be achieved in five simple steps.
What Exactly is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is using an expert or someone with a large social media following to endorse a brand’s company and products. Their authority, knowledge, or connection with their audience enables them to impact their viewers’ purchasing decisions. A highly effective element of content marketing for manufacturing companies, influencer marketing provides numerous benefits for today’s brands.
Influencer Marketing:
- Raises brand awareness: By getting influencers to talk about your company and products, you’re capitalizing on their broad reach and introducing more people to your brand.
- Grants credibility and builds trust: People trust Influencers. Getting a reliable influencer to endorse your brand gives you credibility and builds trust among their audience.
- Reaches a niche audience: People follow influencers because of their expertise on a particular topic. That means followers are typically a niche group with very specific interests.
- Builds deeper connections: Influencer marketing works because it’s delivered by real people others can relate to.
Influencer marketing for manufacturers is an impactful addition to your overall marketing strategy if you’re interested in driving website traffic for manufacturing companies for more conversions.
How Does Influencer Marketing Work for Manufacturing Companies?
The goal of influencer marketing is to use recognizable people in your field to help promote your brand and products. This applies to (and among the popular trends in marketing for) manufacturing companies. Whether you’re building machines or distributing equipment, there are experts in your industry that people follow for useful and important information surrounding those topics. By partnering with these known individuals, you can capitalize on their knowledge and social standing to reach a niche market and build awareness about your brand.
From machine demonstrations and process explanations to product trials and service reviews, influencer marketing can be highly effective for your manufacturing business. The number of video content views you’ll gain with influencer marketing will be much more affordable than if you were to hire a content creator and post paid ads online. You’ll also be able to tell your story much more effectively with an influencer than with paid advertisements, which are less personal and aren’t as trusted. For these reasons, influencer marketing is effective for manufacturing and industrial companies.
Image Source: Influencer Abom79 on YouTube
5 Steps to Developing an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy
Influencer marketing ranks among the successful marketing trends for manufacturing companies. To answer the question, “How does influencer marketing work for manufacturing companies?” you must develop an effective strategy in five simple steps.
Step 1: Research Influencers
Your strategy begins with choosing influencers that are relevant to your needs and can help you achieve your goals. Search on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram to see which influencers are leading conversations. Test various hashtags to see which influencers pop up, and then look at their engagement level and number of quality followers.
Identify niche communities, like Facebook and LinkedIn groups, where manufacturing influencers are succeeding. Once you’ve found some potential influencers for your niche, investigate each to see who might be the best fit for your needs. Remember, finding the best influencer is about identifying the person who can best promote your products to the right audience within your budget.
The following video gives helpful insight into how to find, vet, and partner with the right influencers for your campaign:
Source: CADENAS PARTsolutions USA on YouTube
Step 2: Build a Strategy
Consider your goals for this marketing campaign. Why do you want to use an influencer in the first place? What do you hope to get out of this experience? With these questions answered, you can refer to your list of possible influencers and determine which ones you want to work with. See what kind of content has performed well with them and begin to map out your content strategy.
Start small and aim for low-hanging fruit. Choose your target audience and decide the easiest way to reach them. Implement that plan first and set a deadline to reassess and scale your efforts as needed.
Step 3: Connect With the Right Influencers
Developing a partnership with an influencer is all about engagement. Interacting with their content will help you establish a relationship, laying the foundation for a future partnership. Adjust your settings, so you get notifications when they publish new content. Leave comments on each new post.
All of this will increase the likelihood that they’ll recognize you when you contact them. This can help entice them to form a partnership with you and help promote your brand and products to their loyal followers.
Step 4: Come to an Agreement
Ultimately, an influencer marketing plan should mutually benefit you and the influencer. You get to capitalize on their target audience, and they get subject matter for new content. When you’ve decided which influencer(s) to use, set terms for an official agreement. Decide what compensation the influencer will receive. This could be monetary payment or some additional benefit that helps them reach their own goals.
Take this opportunity to set expectations about your content and make sure you’re both on the same page about your marketing campaign. Consider:
- Content topics and details
- Frequency of posts
- Any restrictions (naming competitors, etc.)
You should itemize all of this in your agreement.
Step 5: Assess Results
You must measure your success to ensure your influencer marketing campaign is effective. After you’ve launched your campaign, you need to assess the results. Look for insights about whether:
- The audience found value in the content
- Engagement increased or decreased
- Number of overall views
- This partnership is mutually beneficial for you and the influencer
This data can help you adjust your campaign to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. You’ll see what parts of your strategy are working well and what needs improvement for optimal results.
Make the Most of Influencer Marketing for Manufacturing
Shanahan Strategy helps manufacturing and industrial businesses plan for growth and success. An experienced marketing agency, we help you create effective digital marketing strategies that can build awareness, drive traffic, and close sales.
Contact Shanahan Strategy today to learn how we can help you create an impactful influencer marketing strategy.
