App marketing is an indispensable part of reaching out to the target audience. Choose a channel, create a strategy and do the marketing. That should be enough. This is the mindset that most of the app developers or development companies have. How come then, an app with less features and functionalities goes on to become a phenomenal success and another app with double the efforts is left far, far behind?
The answer lies in ‘Influencer Marketing’, which is a practice that focuses on a set of key individuals instead of the target market. These individuals are influencers and are so called because they have an influence over potential customers. They are leave a mark on them, channelizing their thoughts and buying-decisions. Talking about app marketing in particular, they are individuals, who have an influence over your target audience in your niche.
An influencer is not ‘chosen’ by any one per se. They can be either potential buyers, manufacturers, companies, internet celebrities or professionals such as technical experts, journalists, reviewers, individual brand advocates, academics, industry thought leaders and trade analysts, whose work can influence a major part of the world’s populace. Even friends are considered as influencers.
One of the most obvious steps in influencer marketing is to find the best influencers and leverage their potential to enhance the visibility of your brand and increase the sales.
Influencer marketing: Four main activities
Influencer marketing is at an all-time high owing to the growth in the number of social media platforms and an ever-increasing number of users on these platforms present nowadays. It is now considered as one of the most powerful marketing methods, which hold tremendous potential to reach out to the target audience, raise awareness about products or services and influence purchase decision when it comes to mobile app marketing.
Influencer marketing basically comprises of four main activities, which include but are not limited to –
• Identifying and ranking influencers in the order of their importance or popularity.
• Marketing to the influencers with the motive of increasing brand awareness within their communities.
• Marketing through influencers and using them to promote a brand to the target audience
• Marketing with influencers includes the step of turning influencers into brand advocates
It is these four main activities, which done correctly, leads to a successful campaign in influencing your potential customers. Sometimes, the influencers may become brand advocates for your products or services but then, it is not an overnight process and it takes time to build long-term working relationships with influencers. This is something that you need to consider before going ahead with your influencer outreach campaign, which basically starts with finding influencers in your niche.
How do you find influencers in your niche?
Finding influencers who are relevant to your niche requires a lot of research. One of the best ways to do that is to use a great social media management tool. Here is an article explaining all about how to use social media management tools and which are the best options. In addition to that, a number of online tools to find and rank the best influencers in your niche are also available. Here are some of the tools and influencer metrics, which will help you in your endeavor.
Klout – It is a website and also has a mobile app. It is one of the best tools, which uses social media analytics and ranks its users as per their online social influence. This score is Klout Score, which can be between 1 and 100. Higher Klout Score indicates that the influencer is better than the others. So, to check whether an influencer is relevant for your niche or not, check his or her Klout Score.
Klear – Klear is yet another essential tool that helps in influencer outreach. Use it to find and create relationships with topmost influencers in your niche and connect with them.
BuzzSumo – BuzzSumo serves as a content curation tool, which helps you find the most shared content on any topic and on any domain. You can filter trending content in a particular date range, type and find out the topmost influencers in your niche. You can also check the inbound links, which the influencers cited as well as their favorite linking domains.
Followerwonk – Explore and expand your social graph with Followerwonk. Apart from finding and connecting with new influencers, the tool also helps you delve deeper in Twitter analytics by giving you information about your followers, their bio, locations and when do they tweet. Use its avant-garde visualizations to compare your social graph with others in your niche and share it if needed.
Authority Spy – Authority Spy claims to be ‘The Most Powerful Software for Finding + Analyzing Influential People and Blogs on the Web’. The software helps you find top blogs in your niche, having an active audience as well as a large following. It also helps you quickly generate influencer lists and export them.
Inkybee – Mainly used for blogger outreach, Inkybee can prove to be of immense help when it comes to finding influencers. You can use it to analyze the influencers in your Twitter followers as well as discover new connections.
BuzzStream – Do you want to build online credibility and cultivate long-term relationships with influencers across the web? Opt for BuzzStream, which simplifies the process by allowing you to research online influencers without fuss. It allows you to have an instant snap of the metrics, which you can use to prioritize your activities. It lets your outreach be more effective.
Twtrland – Twtrland is more specifically relevant to those of you who want to find influencers on Twitter. You can use it to search Twitter profiles and filter them according to name, skill and location and specific type of influencers.
Commun.it – Another tool, which is more into Twitter management, works in maintain relationships with influencers. It allows you to identify three categories of Twitter users – influencers, supporters and the engaged members. An easy to use platform, you can straightaway start using it.
Google Alerts – You can also set Google Alerts relevant to your app to identify active bloggers on the topics. Say for instance, you want to promote an app, which comes under the Games category. So, you can use Google Alerts to find out platforms that talk about games apps and use them to your advantage.
Social media channels
Social media channels are a hotspot for finding top influencers for your niche. They are present on every kind of social network and social sharing websites and you just have to find out their profiles/accounts on these websites. Let us find out how you can find influencers for app marketing on these channels.
• Facebook – Influencers on Facebook are not necessarily individuals, but pages that have a huge fan following and user engagement. Manually searching for such pages or groups can be highly time-consuming. The solution? Well, go to the search bar of the website and type “admin” for specific type of pages and in the search results, you can view the most popular groups/pages.
• Instagram – Instagram is also coming up as one of the hubs, where you can find influencers in your niche. Type “SFS” (share for share) and you will find accounts, which have a huge number of followers. You can confirm some of the top influencers here by taking a look at the photos shared and whether they interact with users through likes and comments.
• Twitter – There are many tools available online, which provide Twitter support to find out influencers. One of them is BuzzSumo, which not only allows you to find influencers in your niche, but also to promote your content.
• YouTube – A regular search on the keywords related to your app will prove to be useful when you want to find influencers on YouTube. For instance, you can search for “interesting entertainment apps” and then, filter the results to view channels list. Take your pick from them, based on the niche and the total number of subscribers.
Webinars
A webinar is an online event and it consists of live video and audio sessions. It is attended by influencers, clients, customers, followers and fans virtually. By attending one of these webinars related to mobile apps or any other relevant niche in the ICT industry, you can directly contact and network with thought leaders in the industry. Participate in discussions and engage with them and take it from there. More often than not, this turns out to be a crucial step in influencer marketing. You too can host your own webinars and derive immense benefits from the same.
Use Hashtags
Whether you want to find influencers on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, you can use this simple method to find influencers. Simply type keywords relevant to your brand on the search bar using a hashtag. Alternatively, you can also search for most popular hashtags relevant to your niche and use the same to find out the influencers on these platforms. If you do not know the hashtags relevant to your niche, you can use web resources such as Hashtagify.
Once you have found the influencers for app marketing, here is how you can interact with them for mutual benefits.
• Many influencers quickly respond to the commentators on their blog/websites. You can take this opportunity to get favorable results.
• Contributing to their blog (if any) as a guest blogger also establishes a cordial relationship with the influencer.
• If you have a really interesting content, which has the potential to go viral, you can very well reach out to the influencers and ask them to share it on their profile or websites/blogs.
Wrap up
Influencers really do have an important role to play when it comes to marketing of your apps. A clear goal and strategy by implementing the aforementioned pointers will definitely work in your favor and help you get in touch with the top influencers in your niche. Have a word to share on this? Do post your views in the comments section.
Read also:6 Winning Marketing Strategies for Any App Category
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