Posted by You have a brand offering products or services that people find helpful, and now you want to reach out to a larger audience. So, you need to target your potential customers on social media, where millions of them are busy interacting with the world. However, you get stuck at a point where you can’t decide if you should pick an influencer with a large fan following or a content creator who knows how to create high-quality content to impress your target audience.
And the choice is not easy to make. Many brands get overwhelmed by the number of influencers. Each promising to deliver you the results. You are naturally tempted to hire influencers due to their massive followers, but a wrong choice of influencer will be a waste of time and money.
On the other side, if you prefer content creators over influencers for quality of content, you may miss those influencers’ millions of followers.
Well, it all boils down to understanding the pros and cons of content creators and influencers and then knowing which one of them is best suited to promote your brand on social media. Or, it may be that using a combination of the two is a wiser move.
But there is no doubt that influencers and content creators have brought a subtle change in how marketing is seen today. Now, in the social media marketing scenario, brands do not force themselves on consumers and instead keep a low profile by not being in the face of consumers all the time. They use influencers and content creators to get a message across a broad spectrum of consumers.
The power of choosing, engaging, and following the content is with consumers now. And so they will get your brand message when they want to. As a business owner, you do not have to force it on them.
All you should do is present your brand impressively. Your brand logo must be a unique design. If yours is a small business with a tiny budget, use logo creator software to customize your logo all by yourself. Have a social media account and website for your brand.
Once you have an excellent social media presence with an impressive logo and have a fantastic website, etc., promote your brand using content creators or influencers.
CONTENT CREATORS
Who are content creators?
Content creators are creative people who specialize in doing unique content all the time. They are the professionals who have raised the quality bar higher and ensured attention-grabbing text or visual content.
So, they may be photographers, artists, videographers, or writers who blog to provide information to a target audience. They are the professionals who know how to stand out with a piece of visual or text-based content.
They intend to create engaging and unique content without building a community of millions of followers. Of course, it is another thing that uniquely made visuals tend to develop tons of followers, but that is never a requirement to be a great content creator.
There are, however, many content creators who have a massive fan following, just like influencers have. Brands look for people who create outstanding photographs and other visual content and have a huge fan following. If their audience is large, they are influencers as well.
What can content creators do for you?
You should be looking for content creators when you need to impress your visitors with a high quality of content. Content creators also are known for their multifaceted talents. For instance, a photographer knows how to click impressive photos and edit pictures. Then add some unique graphic design elements for added effects.
A professional content creator will mean a lot in terms of saving your valuable time that you do not have to waste on training someone else to do the job. Instead, you can devote that time to something else to run your business. So, partnering with an experienced content creator will help churn out professionally made social media ad phots, videos, Instagram stories, magazine covers, etc.
However, content creators do not typically have a mass following. So, they are not of much help in community building and engagement.
They are not a good option when looking for promotional opportunities. For this purpose, you need to contact influencers.
INFLUENCERS
Who are influencers?
Influencers are professionals whose intention is to engage people and build community. Therefore, they typically have a massive fan following. So, they may have millions of followers who trust the recommendations the influencer makes.
They build communities to help followers, which can influence purchasing decisions. As per some studies, 74% of people trust influencers’ social networks.
Most YouTubers and reviewers are influencers. Those having no more followers than micro-influencers with 100,000 followers can influence buying decisions. What matters is that these smaller influencers have close-knit communities.
While influencers’ content quality is not as high-end as content creators’, their content is usually exciting and engaging. So we can say that influencers are also a kind of content creators, but content quality is typically low.
Why are influencers important?
A significant advantage of having influencers when considering taking your social media strategy to the next level is that they have many followers, often millions. Therefore, partnering with them implies that you readily access such massive followers.
With millions of influencers’ followers at your disposal, building trust amongst your target audience for your brand becomes a lot easier. So, you build trust for your brand out of the influencer’s trust. You do not have to take the long route to convince your potential buyers for more conversions.
Also, partnering with influencers helps you boost your web traffic, which is a remedy to building your social media following. If you pick an influencer from your industry, you can target potential customers of your niche.
But do not expect influencers to have content skills as they are supposed to build community and have an ever-increasing number of followers. You cannot depend on them to do the content as well.
In the pre-influencer marketing and social media era, brands had to thrust their products or services down the throat of potential customers through commercials, billboards, print ads, and all sorts of ads. Now, the emphasis is more on engaging the audience. The most successful brands use storytelling to engage people and encourage them to inquire about the products. They want to add value to people’s everyday lives.
So, today’s brands use influencers to recommend products, which means people do not have to search and waste their time looking for that product. Since an influencer has talked about the product on an Instagram account, it becomes a sort of guarantee of quality. A restaurant recommendation from an influencer is often enough for people to visit that eating place.
When do you need influencers?
You should think of hiring an influencer to generate brand awareness. When an influencer talks about your brand, hundreds of thousands of people come to know about what you make and sell. So, we can say that influencers are valuable more when you are still at the early stage of funnel marketing.
You can take your brand message to more targeted people by hiring an influencer. They are your potential leads as well.
If your social media marketing campaign goal is to make people buy, hire influencers. They help you take your story to the masses.
But some influencers create great content as well. Find them out in your niche and hire them if you can. They are the people who have the mass following and know how to create unique content such as imagery of your brand.
How to find quality content creators and influencers?
Since not every influencer or content creator can deliver you the desired results in generating awareness.
Or, creating quality content, you need to research them for your niche thoroughly.
Google them extensively and go to their website to learn more about their activities. Compare their writing and analyze how they can be helpful to promote your brand. If in doubt, you can ask them about their demographic breakdown of the audience.
When you visit an influencer’s Instagram page and do not find much engagement there with very few comments, suspecting fake likes and followers, avoid hiring such an influencer. They simply do not have the reach, so comments are fake and shallow.
Wrapping Up
A social media strategy should use content creators or influencers or a combination of both to engage people with a brand. Content creators such as photographers and other visual creators should be preferred when generating awareness for a brand with excellent quality content pieces. But influencers are most valuable due to their massive number of followers whom a brand can reach out to quickly. But many influential content creators can create quality content and have an impressive number of followers.