As a barbershop owner, you share the same goal with every other business out there: to make profits exponentially and become a big player in the industry. And as you might already know, your marketing strategy plays a huge role in achieving this. Speaking of which, influencer marketing is the current most powerful way to grow your brand awareness and achieve all of your marketing goals. Primarily, influencer marketing is all about paying social media celebs to promote your services. Popular product designers have been using it for years before now when saloons, barber shops, and other beauty service providers started hopping on the business trend. So, if you don’t know how to get started, read the step-by-step guide below.

STEP 1: Know Your Budget And Marketing Objectives

It may seem obvious that your marketing goal is to get your brand more popular and win more customers. But you want to be specific. Be specific about numbers and reaches and set realistic goals. Put it all into writing. Here’s an example; “I am spending $100 to generate 50 loyal customers from New York and 80 clients from Los Angeles, with each of them paying $30 per haircut”. This picture prevents the wastage of money and efforts. It also guides in the “choosing an influencer” stage explained below.

STEP 2: Find An Influencer

There are dozens of influencers out there: it’s like picking saloon furniture from IKEA. I digressed! The first step is to choose a “good” influencer: someone who posts high-quality content, has previous experience, is on target with your market/industry, and has worked with brands like you. With this in mind, head over to popular social media to create a list of 5-7 potential influencers that fit into your category. Hashtags like #sponsored and #ads will make your search easier on Instagram. Next, verify that the followers of your potential influencers are real. Often than not, when the followers on an influencer’s page are mostly commenting “very good”, “nice post” and similar short feel-good comments, those are likely bot-generated followers. Finally, make sure that your influencer has a large active following and engagement.

STEP 3: Reach Out To Them

At the end of step 2, you’ll probably wind up with a shorter list. Reach out to each influencer via messages, emails, websites, or through any medium that they’ve made available. Keep your first message short and don’t talk about money just yet. Ultimately, you want to find out if they’ve worked with a brand similar to you and disclose your interest in working with them.

STEP 4: Go Into The Details

After receiving a reply from them, it’s time to discuss how the relationship will go and how you want your campaign to work. The best platform to do this is via a video call but it’s not really a thing. Now, over the meeting, some important questions you should ask are how many videos and photos they will take for the campaign and if you’ll have copyrights to those materials for future advertisements. You should also talk about your marketing goals, what you’re offering them in return, your preferred timeline for the campaign, and any other important bit.

FINAL STEP: Launch, Study Results, And Learn

You both ought to have decided on a tracking system for the tracking of your ads’ performance. Though when using social media like Facebook and Instagram, they have a tracking system that shows important metrics and data about your ads. With such a system, you get to know the demographics of your potential clients and figure out your best and worst-performing ads. These info bits will come in handy when running other campaigns in the future.

In Conclusion

Whether improving your ROI or launching a new brand, influencer marketing is one of the most effective methods to hit your targets. But your success rate depends on doing it right. That’s why we’ve created this easy guide for people who run barbershops. You can also check this post to discover how to make your influencer marketing campaign a success during the holidays.

Doing the work you have a passion for is not actual work, it’s a hobby. Earning your life from the hobby is one of the best things you can do with your life. If you are reading this you probably had an experience with “ the real job” and positively you are fed up with it and now time to turn your passion into a career.

First and foremost setback in this mighty process is what kind of hobby will possibly let you keep  having a quality of life when you are not working 9 to 5 business based work. Before making life changing decisions you need to have short and long term goals. Planning to monetize your passion is the most important part of the process.

There are millions of people out there who are pursuing their dreams and interests, eventually thriving them into a career. The hobby is something that you take pleasure doing in your spare time. This might be taking photos, cooking, gardening, performing, gaming, caring for animals, writing etc. the list can go on and on but the crucial point is how to spend less time working and more time enjoying your passion and earning your life.

What Does Your Heart Desire?

At this point of our blog we are going to talk about influencing. You may think, wait I was planning to do my hobby and earn money how come I need to know about influencing. The thing is the society we live in demands us to put something on the table if we want to make money . In your case it’s making people trust you.  Here is why random people rely on your personal decisions. 

You may not realize but being an influencer is quite a ruthless process. You can put all the effort but people may not be interested in, this time you either change your mind or give your everything to your audience.

Influencing is a vitally important leadership skill which you have a control over others choices, opinions and behaviours. In order to be in charge of others, you need to make them trust you. And believe it or not, the reward of your efforts will yield a profit after deepening the trust between you and the people who follow your steps. 

Find Your Niche

Once you get enough people to follow you, the number  doesn’t need to be immerse, because well-read brands are not essentially focusing on a huge audience, they are in the search of people who have an ability to encourage others and to act on their recommendations. 

If  you have a quick look on Instagram, you will see millions of fitness influencers, on Youtube gamers, travellers ruling over people’s interests. So how will you make yourself stand out from the crowd? You need to specialize your content. 

Let me give you a little personal example; there is a boy on Youtube called Milad Mirg. As a person who loves to watch food making videos I accidentally came across a video. I saw a person making subway sandwiches (seemed yummy), while sharing short stories. Now he answers the questions from the comment section while making appealing foods. Videos are either a few seconds or 1-2 minutes long. He has more than 1.21 Million subscribers. 

All I want to tell you is you don’t necessarily need to stand out to be a successful social media influencer. Just be authentic and engaging with your audience, inspire them while enjoying yourself. Only then will your niche be as plain as nose on your face.

Monetize Your Influence

After finding the best match to your interests, the thing which gives you tremendous satisfaction, another vital part arises from here which is to make money out of it. Nowadays the majority of people claim that influencing is not an actual career, yet the same mass of people want to be one of them. So when you determine about starting your career as an influencer, never let those people discourage you. Major part of the influencers getting paid for promoting brands’ products and services. Sponsorship is the great way to make a big chunk of money. 

In one of our previous blogs we explained why content is the king of influencer marketing. Thereof your content will decide your further partnership for you. The better content, the better partnership algorithm works most of the time. Your relevance as an influencer, reach and engagement rate highlights your distinguished features, but brands possibly will scroll down your social media accounts to make sure the quality of the content you created to make sure your influence is worth to pay.

No matter how detailed you have been taught, the only essential step to achievement comes from experience. Before getting solid results you might wait months or even years, patience and commitments will honour your satisfying outcome. Creating authentic, appealing content and putting consistent effort on your work will drive brands to collaborate with you undoubtedly.  One blog couldn’t be enough to explain the whole concept, so maybe we will meet the other one again.  

Before taking off an influencer marketing campaign, it can be beneficial to know this statistical information – every investment in food influencer marketing generated 12 times its value in earned media. Unlike the owned media which is brand’s social media accounts and website and paid media like bought advertising, earned media is the visibility received by a brand with third-party means (blogs, social media and so on). 

Nowadays a word-of-mouth technique is the most effective way to sell, the extent to which social media has taken up space in our lives means it’s now possible to use social media on a full scale by mobilizing the right influencers.

Influencers are people that have achieved a large following on social media by posting videos or photos that take the interest of a certain demographic and by remaining authentic to their audience over time. 

Traditional influencer marketing was about leveraging the top industry influencers and celebrities as brand ambassadors and running ads on TV and radio. It is not only expensive but also irrelevant for food brands which are not in the top of the industry with several outlets in different geographies. Micro influencer marketing is definitely the way to go for a small food brand. 

These micro influencers have a niche following that is usually specific to a particular region. For instance, food bloggers of Istanbul would have the majority of their followers from Istanbul. If you collaborate with such food influencers, they would talk about your product, post pictures, videos, and put up reviews on social media and the product review sites. This, in turn, will help you increase your visibility, and garner credibility for your product and brand.

It is more effective when food brands equip their consumers and influencers with a challenge or event they can participate in using a set hashtag. This engages the influencer’s network and creates a community and camaraderie for everyone participating or following the challenge.

“Activia”s campaign for Ramadan 

“Activia” is a yogurt brand of “Danone” company and launched under the “Bio” brand name. It is classified as a functional food, designed to improve digestive health. Emphasizing this feature, the company started a campaign during Ramadan, a month of fasting in the Muslim countries. 

The Ramadan campaign targeted people who were fasting for the whole month. The idea behind the campaign was to focus more on the functional benefit and more on the product. Throughout the campaign, influencers showcased Activia yogurts in their iftar tables and shared their experiences how the yogurt helps them to feel relieved after a heavy meal. The campaign involved 12 influencers, however, received over 50.000 engagement during the first six days. The campaign lasted the whole Ramadan and reached nearly 300.000 audiences across Instagram and Facebook.

“Hello Fresh”s approach

“Hello Fresh” is a company that sends weekly menus to families and busy people who don’t have time for cooking. They work with a variety of influencer from vegan food bloggers to multitasking mothers. 

The foremost goal of the campaigns was to demonstrate the advantage of the service for busy people, especially those who take care of their health. Through these influencer marketing campaigns, Hello Fresh wanted to reach broader audiences and raise awareness around its brand. The company provided many of the influencers with the discounts by special promo codes and even apron with a personal touch, creative gifts and so on. As a core part of their lead generation strategy, the company invested mainly in influencer marketing. 

Besides providing them with promo codes, influencers were asked to share branded hashtags like #hellofreshpics and #freshfriends. They also encouraged their audience to do so. 

By demonstrating how the product solved influencers’ problems,  the company achieved raising awareness of its delivery boxes in an authentic way. 

“Youfoodz”s strategy

This is an Australian food brand, which wanted to promote its newly launched winter menu with the help of influencer marketing. They leveraged a range of influencers with the niches related to food, fitness, and health. The brand runs an influencer marketing campaign with 81 influencers which resulted.

During the campaign influencers managed to create more than 162 Instagram stories and in total 167 pieces of content. As a result, the campaign saw 507.909 impressions from the content, 70.000 engagements and reached 1.5 million audiences on Instagram and Facebook. 

How to nail your influencer campaign

These are all excellent ways to demonstrate how to leverage influencers to have the desired brand impact. But the key to success behind each of them is finding the right influencers to work with. With that in mind, here are a few things you should remember when looking for influencers:

• Alignment – Will your campaign content look good coming from them, given their respective niches? Do they align with your industry and brand values?
• Popularity – Are they someone your target audience can relate to? How popular are they amongst your target audience?
• Reach – Is the influencer capable of engaging your target audience? 
• Demographic – Is their fan base similar to the buyer personas you’ve built for your company?

Here are strategies how food brands capitalize on influencer marketing trends and stand out in cluttered digital environments.

Show the origin of food

It is more common for food brands to experience rumors about where their food products come from. Showcasing the origins of products with the help of influencers have helped many food brands to save their reputations. They may monitor the factory where their products are produced or fields where ingredients were gathered from and share their experiences on social media accounts. 

Promote in-person events

Of course, it’s ideal when brand representatives can interact in-person but plenty of brands work with influencers to be ambassadors and host events for a brand.

What’s fantastic about working with influencers to host a party or event is all of the sharable content that results. Think about the posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and blogs that get created with any party.

Be part of a greater brand

Millennial consumers especially demand that a brand fulfills its responsibility to do good for the world, not just making money.

There is no reason that food brands should be sharing a really cool story with their advocates and influencers they partner with. 

Seasonal influencer planning

Working with influencers more than once, on an ongoing basis, creates more authentic and trusted earned media. Thought behind it is that consumers trust an influencer when they talk about a brand at least three times.

Having a plan in place to work with the same network of influencers for an entire year is key. Food brands do this exceptionally well by planning their marketing partnerships according to the seasons. Think autumn pumpkin spice lattes and summer peach deserts.

Influencers love to be in the loop and in the know when it comes to a new flavor and product launches so use this to work with them to help your brand announce new products throughout the year.

Conclusion

Even though influencer marketing can bring you a huge success, it has a dark side too. 

Let’s say you newly opened restaurant mainly focused on vegan food. You heavily invested in influencer marketing and suddenly hundreds of people are posting about your restaurant and also recommend their friends. You will definitely get noticed but as you are new in the industry, the skill set of all your restaurant staff might not be trained or experienced enough to handle such a huge crowd.

And consequently, in a hurry to manage the huge crowd, your food and service might get compromised with. And compromising with these basic things for which your customers visit your restaurant at such an early stage, will not leave a very good impression on your customers. Thus, it is essential to not venture into this until you are absolutely ready.