Social media’s initial purpose was to help people connect to each other. Whether we talk about tweets, Facebook posts, or Youtube videos, their main purpose was to share your experiences with your friends. That’s also where influencer marketing comes in.
Without even realizing, social media has turned into a real industry. Numbers don’t lie. Over a period of two years, social media advertising budgets skyrocketed, from $16 billion in 2014 to $31 billion in 2016. Our ordinary recreation place has turned into a possible advertising place for every business out there.
Ok, there are $31 billion spent in 2016 alone, but who are the winners of this big pot?
Well, obviously, the social media networks get the biggest share. Apart from them, there are other, very popular, people on these networks that get a small share of these profits. They are generically called influencers.
Why? Because everything they do will influence their follower base. If they play a new game, their followers will try those games at least once.
What Influencers Do?
A good example of an influencer’s impact would be the Fortafy’s game called Color Switch. Fortafy did the great majority of the marketing campaign using its 13 million followers Facebook page and it gained lots of traction. It generated more than 180 million downloads.
Another good example would be PewDiePie. He is the YouTube starlet with the biggest fan base out there: roughly 57 million.
Yes, you’ve heard me: million!
His videos generate at least 1.2-1.4 million views in a very short period of time. The It’s All Over video reached 2.4M views in 13 hours. That’s 51 views a second! Next time you breathe, keep in mind that, while you are doing it, his counter spins 51 times.
All these videos are creating a lot of buzz and they engage their audience. That’s what this influencer’s main purpose is: to engage and entertain an audience.
Focus On Something You Like
Let’s get some facts clear! You might start laughing when you hear it but, being a YouTube guru is a full-time job. You need to brainstorm ideas, edit videos, engage your audience, and all these things will take a lot of your time.
As with any other job, you need to love what you do. Here, we are focusing on two aspects.
First, you need to dream, talk about, and breathe videos. If you don’t like filming yourself or others around you, this is not the place for you.
Whether we talk live streaming while you play the latest PC games or you share a movie of yourself doing bungee jumping, your life will spin around videos.
Let’s say you love videos. You love to capture everything on camera, and you are a top-notch video editor.
Even so, the second aspect we’ll talk about is your videos’ topics. You can’t just say, “Many influencers make lots of money by creating game reviews. I will try my luck, as well!”
Remember, it’s a full-time job. Don’t torture yourself into doing something you don’t really like.
Here’s a quote that should be a guideline for your YouTube Influencer career:
“I just want to entertain; that is my main objective and what comes before everything else.”
This is what PewDiePie told Swedish magazine Icon during an interview.
Video Ideas For Youtube: Find Your Niche
For you to become a Youtube influencer, you need to think about the things you like and research them.
We’ll continue with our PewDiePie example for a better understanding of this concept. Here’s what he said, “I knew people were big at other types of videos, but there was no one big in gaming, and I didn’t know you could make money out of it.” His influencer career started out of passion for gaming.
He knew what he liked and, before starting his Youtube Vlog, he has done some digging. Figured out that he would be the first one doing this and created this niche: video reviews of popular games.
It seems like it worked for him.
Create Case Studies Or Experiments
The internet is full of “content”. 95% of the content out there has a very appealing headline but often offers little to no relevant information.
It barely scratches the surface and it doesn’t offer a solution for the certain problem it focuses on. The internet is full of useless “Tips to…” articles that talk a lot but say nothing.
Let’s pretend you want to become a Youtube Influencer and you focus on the car niche. Popular cars, their main problems, and how you can avoid them.
Do some digging, search through the petrol heads’ forums and blogs. This way, you will find out which cars are the most popular and what problems they have.
Take those problems and make videos of you fixing them, get under the bonnet, and get your hands dirty. This is what your followers will appreciate — a hands on approach, rather than a passive one.
You might not be the best at creating a guideline of your videos. But according to Greg Miller, AussieWritings.com’s Lead Copywriter “Writing down the main subjects of your video and creating a bulleted list of the main aspects you should cover will do, at first. Once things evolve and viewers get pickier, you should ask for the services of a professional writer.”
Market Your Content
Apart from creating outstanding content, you need to have a top-notch marketing campaign for it. This way, your audience will get bigger and bigger and you will appear on the radars of companies eventually.
Here are some aspects you should keep in mind in order to get some traction for your content and get noticed:
Post Your Content When Your Audience Is Most Active
Post a few videos, then use Youtube Analytics to research your audience and identify their activity timeline. Posting your videos when your audience is offline will mean that your videos will get lost in the ocean of videos posted every day.
Post Content Regularly
You need to tell your audience when they should be online to see your next video. The easiest way to do that is by having a regular posting schedule.
Here’s an example. You post three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at 5 PM. These videos are a must. Other, extra, videos can be posted whenever you like. But those three must respect the schedule.
Use Trends In Your Industry To Gain Traction For Your Videos
We’ve been talking about a car and motorsport vlog. Make a post about your favorite driver or biker. Everyone loves videos of Hamilton or Valentino Rossi, aka The Doctor, doing what they do best.
Free Giveaways
This will imply some costs but, you need to invest in resources in order to be successful. Buy a Valentino Rossi, VR46, t-shirt and add some finishing touches to it, add your logo or one of your quotes and create a competition.
Example: “The first one who’ll change his bike’s oil filter faster than me will get this VR46 t-shirt.”
Tag Your Friends
Offer three tickets to one of these must-see movies for any biker out there.
Example: Announce your giveaway like this, “Tag 2 friends who you’d love to take to one of these movies. Tickets on me!”
Ask Lots Of Questions
It’s important to make your audience feel they are being listened to.
The best way to do that is to ask them lots of questions:
- what they like,
- what they don’t,
- their opinions on a certain subject, etc.
Apart from making them feel involved in your vlog, you will end up with lots of user generated content. That’s what every marketer aims for!
Use Influencer Marketing
This is something quite new, but it’s very effective. You can leverage a motorsport personality’s image by having him or her in your vlogs.
Do some online interviews with one of these personalities. It that’s not possible, send them an email with some questions and make a video with the answers you get and review their answers.
Monetize Your Follower Base
There are many ways of monetizing your audience but, right now, we’ll highlight the most basic ways of doing it.
That’s because, at first, you need to start with the basic ones and work your way up once your audience gets bigger and bigger.
Youtube’s Paid Advertising
This is the most obvious way of making money out of your vlogs. Whether we talk about the views your videos generate, the clicks or the impressions they generate for publishers, this type of advertising will be your constant flow of income.
Product Reviews
Once you establish yourself as an important voice in your niche, companies will start asking for your services. They will offer their products or services for you to review them and highlight their pros and cons. This is something you won’t be doing pro bono.
Merchandising
Unlike paid advertising and product reviews, this monetization method offers more freedom. That’s because you can come up with virtually anything and put them on sale.
Using the motorsport example from before: You can make a t-shirt with you behind a steering wheel, a spark plug shaped coffee cup or a gear shifter handle for umbrellas.
What you want to create, it’s up to you.
Influencer Marketing — In Conclusion
Social media is on an ascending trend and has become a real industry, especially video blogs, or vlogs. Find something you like and start making videos of you doing that thing. Create engaging and informative content for your audience, case studies, experiments, and so on. This will make them come back over and over again.
Also, you should focus on marketing your content to increase your follower base on a regular basis. This way, you will be able to reach a certain point where this activity you enjoy will generate enough revenue to be able to focus solely on it.
Has this article on influencer marketing been helpful for you?
Do you already consider yourself an expert on influencer marketing? Let us know in the comments below.
Olivia Ryan is a journalist who always tries to see the bright side of things. She likes to inspire people in her writings and to enjoy a mysterious beauty of twilight. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.
Way cool! Some extremely valid points! I appreciate you penning this
post plus the rest of the website is also really good.
P
Thanks for the comment, Polly.