Did you notice the shift? Young consumers today rely less on celebrity endorsements and more on recommendations from their friends and peers on social media. So if you want to get more people to download your app, you need to go where they are looking. Social media is abundant with influencers in every niche and these influencers have very loyal fan followings. If you can get these influencers to endorse your app, you are likely to get an entire fan-base to download it.
As opposed to impersonal and aloof celebrities; social media influencers are perceived as ‘people-just-like-us’ and hence drive more credibility. Deloitte’s Digital Democracy Survey 2015 shows that 81% consumers rely on recommendations for making purchase decisions and 61% trust online review or social media recommendations. On the other hand, just 42% of consumers rely on reseller/partner websites or manufacturer websites.
Clearly, getting people with large social media following to recommend your app is the way to go if you wish to effectively market your app to the maximum number of users.
Which Platforms Work Best For Influencer Marketing?
Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? Which platform would be most suitable for your app is a fundamental question. A sizable budget is required to rope in influencers and run campaigns across platforms and hence, choosing the most suitable one and starting with that is a sensible move. Once your influencer marketing efforts begin to find their feet, you can spread to various platforms.
YouTube
As has been increasingly seen, YouTube is a highly popular medium for all kinds of marketing efforts including influencer marketing. A site that boasts 1 Billion monthly users and is the second largest search engine, YouTube is the perfect platform for reaching out to the massive number of fans that are eager to try out what their favorite YouTubers are using.
Instagram too has taken the world by storm and has over 300 million monthly users. According to Kissmetrics, 70% Instagram users have already looked up branded content on Instagram. There is huge influencer marketing potential in Instagram when done right.
According to eMarketer, Facebook captured 68% of the world’s social media revenue in 2016. Visited by millions of users on a daily basis, Facebook is undoubtedly a great platform for influencer marketing.
Others
In addition to these, Twitter, Pinterest, Vine and a number of other platforms are extremely fertile for influencer marketing. However, you need to carefully research where your target audience hangs out and pursue those channels.
Choosing the Right Influencers
All your efforts can be futile if you don’t work with the right influencers. Do your homework before you hire an influencer to make sure they are suited to your target audience and your app. Take some time to go through their previous posts and make sure they are able to consistently create good quality content and draw in a significant amount of followers. Ascertain that they are truly active on their platform and engage their followers enough to inspire action.
When looking at the number of their followers, it is important to look at the kind of followers instead of just counting unique visits or traffic. A small but loyal and active following is more valuable than a large but mostly unresponsive following.
Start with a few influencers and stay with them for a set period, say a month or a quarter. At the end of the period, retain the ones who brought in more engagement and return on investment, and let the others go. Add new influencers again while you retain the performing ones from before. Also look for influencers who have a good standing on more than one channel. Somebody doing well on Facebook as well as Instagram is bound to be a catch.
Read also:How to Find Influencers to Market Your App to Millions of Users
Best Practices for Making the Most of Your Influencer Marketing
Once you’ve got your pick of the lot, it’s time to create a good influencer marketing strategy. Here are a few pointers that will help you make sure you and your influencers drive higher engagement and more conversions-
Stay with your performing influencers for a sizeable amount of time
Successful Influencer Marketing doesn’t yield results overnight. The idea is to create a steady presence on social media channels. An influencer posting a random video or blogging about your app just once is more likely to come off as a marketing gimmick than a genuine recommendation.
Give your influencers creative freedom
Essentially, influencers are inventive, creative, tech-savvy youngsters who have amassed a rich social media following purely with their personal style, attitude and innovative content. They know best what works for their followers. Asking them to take a detour from their personal style and follow a certain company protocol will once again, make it look like a marketing attempt and not a true-to-heart recommendation. Followers too, are highly aware and sharp people who aren’t going to fall for such a gimmick. It is only wise, therefore, to brief the influencers about your goals and ethics, and let them take it from there.
Conclusion
App marketers are constantly in search of innovative and more impactful ways to market their app. The Millennial and Gen Z consumers that are smart, aware and tech-savvy tend to see right through marketing gimmicks and refuse to fall for them anymore. Influencer marketing is the most effective way to engage these consumers and the above steps will help you not only find the right influencers but also utilize their talent and fan following, for the maximum conversions and returns.
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