Maisie Lloyd
I'm passionate about recording the world, but most of all driven by creativity and collaborative environments. My experience revolves around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
Marketing strategies can be enriched through brand and influencer collaborations, especially when forging those collaborations within local communities. Utilising these partnerships to increase visibility, transfer authority from creator to brand, as well as create opportunities for growth.
What is local influencer marketing?
Local influencer marketing is when a business/brand collaborates with an influencer within their local community. This differs from the traditional form of influencer marketing, because it looks to target a specific community or area.
However these smaller influencers don’t have as large of a following as the national or international influencers do. They have a reach within their community that allows them to influence the search and buying habits of their audience.
Interestingly a report by Influencer Marketing Hub unveiled that 44% of marketers prefer working with nano businesses, whilst 26% prefer to with micro-influencers. Compared to 17% preferring macro influencers, and 13% with celebrities. This highlights the necessity for brands to collaborate with affordable yet influential figures.
Why is working with a local influencer more beneficial than one outside of the community?
There are many benefits to working with local influencers, they help raise brand awareness and create opportunities for leads and acquisitions to be made. In doing so, it also invites the community to provide natural feedback and understand the collective response through their engagement.
Reduced spend
Reduced costs with nano-influencers can be particularly appealing to businesses which want a cost-effective marketing strategy. These partnerships can be low-cost and high pay-off with the content that is produced.
It can also be particularly useful when a budget is small, instead, the business might offer the product or service to the influencer, rather than paying a fee. This also increases the likelihood that there’s a return on investment.
Reaching a new audience
Increasing reach and raising brand awareness is one of the many benefits of brands partnering with influencers. More specifically, when targeting an area or community, the business has the potential to be positioned to these audiences across search engines and social platforms.
For example, when a creator produces a blog about a product they used, they build links to the business’s site, which transfers authority. This transfer of authority demonstrates to Google that the business offering has a benefit to the local community. Therefore, increasing the chances of being positioned to local audiences across platforms.
Influencers using tools like hashtags, adding notes on Instagram Reels and tagging locations or the brand is an effective method for generating conversation, which in turn can lead to more acquisitions.
Building an audience
Collaborations like these allow for natural and authentic relationships to be established between an audience and a brand. This is because the relationship between the audience and the influencer has already been created. They have the ability to communicate and understand what their audience is receptive to, which in turn allows them to deliver tailored promotional content.
What’s particularly beneficial about these partnerships, is the ability to build on them. For instance, utilising the partnership across campaigns, to promote events and to enact as a mouthpiece for the business within the community.
Knowing who to collaborate with
Selecting the right influencer to partner with is vital to the process. It ensures the brand is being displayed to the right audience, that no resources are wasted, and that the brand is aligned with the influencer’s branding.
There are techniques that can be used to assess how successful the partnership could potentially be:
- One of the most important stages of a collaborative process is a business setting goals, ahead of a partnership being made.
- Understanding who the target audience is, so that the influencers who have audiences containing those demographics, psychographics or geographics can be approached for collaboration.
- Assessing prospect influencers’ metrics across platforms prior to collaboration means a partnership can be approached with a realistic brief, containing realistic goals. This could also include surveying existing customers to gauge their knowledge of the influencer, to test the relevance.
- Using social listening tools to find community influencers, and to also get a sense of how active they may be.
- Assessing how aligned the brand is with the influencer is vital. The influencer’s style, reputation or approach to content production, need to make sense with the brand in order for it to be a valuable collaboration.
How a business approaches an influencer partnership is entirely tailored to its unique approach to communicating and collaborating. However, every business should approach collaborations with a clear idea about a campaign or forging a relationship to create a campaign together. Being approachable, clear, passionate and motivated is the best way to start a collaborative business relationship.
You can reach out to us at info@intelligencygroup.com if your business is looking to enhance performance by applying data-driven changes to your marketing strategy.
