The Barbershop Influencer Marketing Guide

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.

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Turn Your Hobby Into a Career: Easy Steps to Start Your Career as an Influencer

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.  

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Why Keepface Influencer Store is Beneficial for Brands?

Keepface is a SaaS tool for brands to run influencer marketing, employee & customer advocacy campaigns through a single platform for maximizing marketing ROI since 2016. From 2016 till now we assist brands in their influencer marketing campaigns. Brands use our platform to identify, recruit, and negotiate with influencers by spending less time. 

Now we are proud to announce our new project, Influencer store under the slogan ‘Social Proof Creates Trust and Trust Sells’.

influencer store by Keepface

In our Influencer Store project, we create online stores for influencers to turn them into e-commerce owners. Influencers only need to create authentic content and promote products on social channels. The influencers who will participate in this project will have the opportunity to decorate their e-commerce stores with the products of their favorite brands and share their lifestyles with their audience.

Basically, we create an online store for influencers, they add their favorite items which they tested, loved, and endorsed, and in the online store influencers sell the products without investing in those products. Influencers only need to promote themselves and their products on their social media through engaging content.

influencer store by Keepface

This is how the system works in influencer stores: 

 

  1. Influencers create engaging and branded content by their favorite products.
  2. encourage their audience to purchase them. 
  3. Consumers are directed to the websites of the brands from the influencer stores because of the influencer endorsement.
  4. Brands get conversions and quality traffic.

Influencer store’s interface

Influencer stores have a quite simple interface so it facilitates the process of adopting by users. As you know a good User Interface is substantial because it can turn potential visitors into buyers as it makes easier interactions between the user and your website.

There are some important features which I would like to bring to your attention about the interface.

When you enter the influencer store you will see five sections at the top; home page, products, brands, apps, and story. 

  • The home page section will direct you to the landing page of the influencer’s store. 
  • With the product button, consumers can see the products which the influencer uses and recommend. Consumers can filter the products by their tag as well. 
  • In the brand’s section, we can see the influencer’s favorite brands that influencers use.
  • In the story part, you can see the products that the influencer shares with his/her daily life pictures and give information about products like where he/she bought a product, etc. You can click the Read more button for finding more information about products.

Why is Keepface Influencer Store beneficial for brands?

influencer store

In general, influencer store projects are a combination of three concepts; affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, and social selling. It means that when brands join the influencer store, they can take advantage of all three of them together. To be more precise, businesses combine affiliate marketing and influencer marketing to reach social media-driven audiences and sell their products. It is a great strategy to invest in to build long-term relationships with customers.

 

  • First of all, influencer stores can help brands increase brand awareness while it is one of the main reasons why marketers use influencer marketing. As you know, influencer recommendations are noticed and taken into consideration by their followers so easily. By influencer stores, brands stand out and attract new followers for themselves, giving them increased visibility and the opportunity to gain more traction.

 

  •  You can also reach your target audience and sell your products much easier than any marketing strategy.  By the Influencer store, your products are more likely to be seen by your target audience or who might engage with you – which is the ultimate goal of the influencer store.

 

  • Influencer store projects increase your brand credibility and trust by partnering with influencers. Consumers tend to trust recommendations from influencers which is the biggest power of influencers. So when they add items to the influencer store it will be seen as a genuine testimonial and will help you build a trustful connection.

 

  • Influencer stores can also be beneficial to your search engine rankings as it helps to boost your reach. As you know, influencer marketing and affiliate marketing are both good for SEO. This means that you can improve your search engine ranking with influencer stores. Influencer stores  is a great opportunity to create better and the most important natural inbound links for your website.

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The New Era of Online Shopping: Keepface Influencer Store

Modern days technological advances are pushing the envelope on a daily basis trying to improve and magnify our life experiences. As a matter of fact the abundance of these innovations make it hard to even keep track of them. However the information I am going to share with you will make your jaw drop. If you are an influencer or you have an intention to be, read more attentively, because the latest news from influencer marketing will bliss you out.

 

You may think that what is all this fuss about? It is about a groundbreaking announcement of Keepface Influencer Store. Still not excited? Wait for the thrilling news then. In Keepface Influencer Store, we turn social media influencers into entrepreneurs by creating their own online store.

 

Well, is there anyone who doesn’t love shopping? Maybe just a handful of people, but except those people we feel deep affection for shopping. Precisely, in the times like these. If we look at the bright-side of the situation, days when we had to visit the mall or shopping plaza and spend our whole time checking that there any brand store has got any deal or discount only just for a couple of dresses or accessories were gone with the wind.

 

However now we are living in the E-commerce era. Almost everything is just a click away from us. Just a little tap on our smartphones or tablets, then this thing miraculously will appear beside you. Have any clothes, accessories, cosmetics, or even household items seem appealing to you? Well we have Keepface Influencer Store for anything and everything.

Keepface is the Man Behind the Curtain

keepface influencer store

 

Before breaking our Influencer Store’s traits into pieces, I need to put Keepface in the picture and emphasise that the great mind behind this great Influencer Store project is Keepface

 

Now we need to spotlight this striking project, Influencer Store. Influencers are ordinary people, like the ones we pass everyday on the street, yet something makes them special that we can’t keep ourselves away from them. Yes, I might be talking about YOU! Influencers give inspiration, show what looks like the right decisions. This could be as small as an accessory you choose to wear or something big, like travelling the countries you have never been.

 

We, as a company , highly appreciate our influencers’ efforts. Maybe that’s why we lend them our hands to have online stores. Authentic content they created, the products they promoted through social media and most importantly the trust they built with their audience make them new generation entrepreneurs.

How does the Keepface Influencer Store work?

Keepface Influencer Store is just like any other store, but with more specific features. We have  already created the  Influencer Store for influencers and all you have to do is add your favorite clothes, shoes, household items, anything you gave a try, loved and endorsed.

 

 Here influencers need to urge their audience to take a look at the store with appealing and engaging content. These contents may be photo, video or story, doesn’t matter, anything you like. However when customers go to the store and purchase the items which the influencer promoted then this committed influencer got paid. 

 

Moreover my story part of the project is explicitly compelling, because here influencers may add their own pictures. So the audience can see the real product on the gorgeous influencers not on the zero size, super skinny model.

 

How does the Keepface Influencer Store work.

 

 

The Things You will Get From the Project

 

Let’s have a look at the things that you will get if you become the part of the Keepface Influencer Store:

  • Stable and increasing income;
  • Long-term cooperation with the top local and international brands;
  • Less time spent for negotiations;
  • Fully monetizing the audience;
  • Free e-commerce shop

 

Keepface-Influencer-store

 

Although the Keepface Influencer Store was newly established but it managed to create a common ground for influencers to engage with consumers and build authentic, emotional connections that are critical for business. With various astonishing  products, Influencer Store put itself in for being one of the top online platforms for clothes, bags, shoes, watches, jewellery, electronics, and  more with amazing deals from top brands.

 

Keepface’s monetization mechanism with high ROI will open the new income doors to your face. So more money you get, more products you promote and later on you will find yourself in the middle of a pleasant infinite loop. Keepface Influencer Store’s convenient features hundreds of well-known brands and millions of eye catching brands are on the tips of your fingers. 

 

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Top Influencer Marketing Trends for 2021

Although the fact 2020 wasn’t the best year we will remember joyfully, but clearly it taught us some things. Other than devastating oven-ready cunning plans and desolating our “normal” lives. However it taught us patience, self-restraint, and the importance of having high social activity. You may think, what does that have to do with anything? Well my friends, I am saying so after learning the newest influencer marketing trends for 2021 we all will mind what we are going to plan to do and actually do. Above all, the future is unpredictable.

 

Now, forget about 2020, we are over and done with it. Let’s focus on our brand new year, 2021. First thing you need to know is that influencer marketing is going to be bigger than ever, it’ll become a $15 billion dollar industry by the next year, and as we already see it’s continuing to grow into being a hot topic on social media. #sponsored posts are swarming our feed in a speed of light. I wouldn’t say I’m complaining about the situation, yet it’s what it’s. So, enough about chit chat, let’s get to work and find out what 2021 is cooking for us.

 

The More Variety, The Better Society

The-more-variety-the-better-society
As Andres Tapia once said “ Diversity is the mix. Inclusion is making the mix work”. Hopefully 2021 will be the year that influencer marketing will be more focused on diversity and inclusion.

 

Unfortunately, we all have witnessed that Black influencers faced inequality and discrimination over the course of 2020’s social activism.  From symbolic effort to unfair pay, several brands hold responsible for their biased actions. 

 

Owing to the fact that representation can shift predetermined opinions, it is very vital in Influencer marketing as well as other creative industries. Just to create a better society, brands also need to do fulfil their duties and add building diversity and inclusion on campaigns to their new year resolutions.

 

Who will Run the World? TikTok.

Who-will-run-the-world-TikTok.
TikTok was officially launched in 2016 and after four years it surpassed over 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide, I dare to say that app became an inseparable part of millions of young people’s lives. When a brand decides to start a campaign the first thing they need to do is to focus on the people who will influence your target customers. When you intend to work on a more youthful demographic, stop beating around the bush, give it a second thought to work with TikTok influencers.

 

The importance of user-generated content is far beyond noticeable. Moreover, it’s no secret that customers tend to trust user-generated content more than brand-sponsored posts. Just so you know, UGC is a TikTok marketing trend that brands shouldn’t ignore. Even Donald Trump lost a battle with it, therefore if anyone claims TikTok is going to lead Influencer Marketing, we wouldn’t be surprised at all.

 

Ultimate Secret of Art: Being Natural

Ultimate-Secret-of-Art-Being-Natural
No way!, you may think, but no, it’s really happening. Authenticity on social media is going to have its fluorescence turn in the incoming year. We all want to show flawless and perfect parts of ourselves on social media, yet revolution is around the corner.

 

Many influencers already start to share their post with #nofilter or #inthemoment taglines and most probably it is going to be huge trend in 2021. Although Instagram could be the platform which pays attention  to the visual attractiveness, if influencers want to stand out with their aesthetic posts they need to  pinpoint engaging captions more than ever.

 

The Rise of Micro Influencers

rise-of-micro-influencers
If you are interested in Influencer marketing you have already heard about them. The amount of these influencers’ followers is not as big as macro influencers or celebrities. More specifically, if you have less than 10,000 followers you will fall into the micro influencers category. In the past brands didn’t pay enough attention to them, but currently the situation is changing.

 

It’s the known fact that micro influencers are more affordable to work with and most of the time it is no trouble to find a micro influencer with a niche audience. So it is expected that renowned brands will open their eyes and start to collaborate with micro influencers who come with fewer demands and don’t make any fuss like bigger names.

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How food brands can nail their influencer marketing campaigns?

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.

food-bloggers-influencer-marketing

“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. 

food-vloggers-taking-photo-dish

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. 

influencer-marketing-in-food-industry

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.

taking-photos-of-food-influencer-marketing

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.

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