5 Ways YouTube Influencers Can Help Your Business Grow
Leveraging influencer marketing on YouTube is one of the best ways to build your brand and grow sales for your business. Here are 5 ways YouTube influencer can help you grow your business today.
Create an Audience That Matches Your Brand
The first step to working with YouTube influencers is to first find influencers that create content that match your brand’s persona. Identifying influencers by both their content and their audiences is critical in ensuring that you will be able to run a successful influencer marketing campaign. Carefully analyze an influencer’s audience using tools that give you transparency into creator audiences. Factors to consider when looking at an ideal audience for a brand is understanding who your target customers are. Audience factors like audience gender, location, interests, brand affinities. These audience characteristics will help you figure out if the product you have will match your product that you are trying to sell. Additionally, you can use platforms and tools to find influencer characteristics like word analysis that enables you to see what influencers are saying in their existing videos. Once you have identified several creators that match your audience, create a plan to leverage the influencer’s content and their audiences within your YouTube influencer marketing campaigns!
Build Relationships with Influencers
Building strong relationships with influencers requires you to really understand what influencer’s audience care about and how the influencer creates content to cater to their curated audiences. Communication with your influencers is key and managing that communication and workflow is important so that your influencer partners. Beyond negotiating a fair deal for payment, commissions, and affiliate agreements with your influencers; you need to make sure that you are curating your product selection for an influencer and their audience, sending product to the influencer in a timely matter, and sharing their creative vision. Use stronger productivity and management tools instead of Excel or Google sheets in order to manage your relationships with influencers. We have found that when you don’t use dedicated tools to manage your influencer relationships, it is easy to fall behind and break the momentum you build with influencers.
Engage Them Through Social Media
The power of brand engagement on social media allows an influencer’s audience to see that you are a brand that truly cares about the ambassadors that represent your product. You should begin engaging with the influencer’s content across all of their social media channels. Even ahead of your engagement with them, it would help to start commenting on their posts and getting their attention. This will not only help with making recruitment easier, but also give their audience a chance to learn about your brand. Between commenting on their corresponding Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube videos, you will start to build strong brand awareness with the influencer’s core audiences – making your YouTube influencer marketing efforts way more powerful.
Promote Products and Services
Once you have sent your influencers your products and have agreed upon a vision for their content, be sure to come up with a strategy to promote your products and services across all creators and channels. You should combine your creator’s content with promotional discount codes that are specific to them and their audiences. This will show how you have a true partnership with the influencer instead of them being a one-off collaboration partner for your business. Additionally, when thinking about how content will impact your YouTube influencer marketing results, you will want to understand what ads (if any) or other products and services the influencer will be promoting in your video. If this is not something you want, be sure to make this a restriction and work with your influencer on figuring out what the appropriate amount of product placement should occur in the video. Remember, most of the audience that comes to an influencer’s video is looking to see the content they make. Forcing an influencer to make content that is overwhelmingly promotional, can end up backfiring as the audience may not enjoy being forced to exclusively watch promotional content.
Leverage Their Reach
Lastly, maximize your YouTube influencer marketing campaigns by fully leveraging the influencer’s audience. Since the content you have created with the influencer can be licensed, you should whitelist the creator’s content across different paid social platforms. Using paid social tools or agencies will allow you to promote the creator’s videos across a much larger audience that will be more receptive to your product. Whitelisted content has been proven to perform better than any other form of content. Especially when it comes to video content whitelisting, brands see upwards to 5x better returns when comparing it to image or non-user-generated content. Additionally, if an influencer is making video content for you, you could also request them to make Instagram Reels content and TikTok video content. By enabling your creator to make varying formats of content for you, you can leverage these across paid social channels that cater to mobile users. Most consumer purchasing decisions are heavily impacted by the presence your brand may have on social media mobile apps. By combining this content and promoting snippets or shorter form versions on Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and TikTok Ads, you can take your YouTube influencer marketing to the next level.
Building your influencer marketing program on YouTube can be one of the best investments you make in growing your business and your brand. Brands from all industries have been able to leverage YouTube as it is the most powerful long form video platform on social media. In order to successfully leverage it, make sure that you first identify the right audience you want to target, build strong relationships with influencers, and engage with them through social media even before your professional engagement with them.
