What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing means working with someone who has credibility, their own dedicated audience and the ability to deliver mentions and endorsements of your brand.
Influencers vary greatly and there are options to suit most objectives and budgets. Typically, most influencer activity is focused on social media channels. However, it can also include live in-person appearances, webinars, podcasts and video content, or on-going ambassador programmes.
Furthermore, there is a widely held misconception that influencers are mainly people that have appeared on popular reality shows like Love Island. Such influencers can be powerful brand ambassadors and attract large fees. However, the good news is there are a wide variety of influencers across multiple sectors. Our team is experienced in identifying influencers who are appropriate for our clients, on budget and prepared to collaborate and many do not command a fee to post compelling content online to their audience.
Why use influencer marketing?
Influencers carry authority, have a loyal audience and will often add their own creative flair to their content to help tell your story to their followers.
Engaging with influencers can help improve a brand’s third-party verification, brand awareness, understanding, reputation, reach, engagement, enquiries and sales.Tactics can vary from one-off marketing campaigns, or endorsements, through to long-standing brand ambassador relationships.
Influencer marketing can deliver authentic enforcements for your brand. We work closely with carefully selected influencers to ensure that our clients’ brand values are communicated sensibly. It is about finding a middle ground and often this will require allowing influencers to post content using their own personality to remain authentic.
What does our influencer marketing service include?
We provide influencer engagement and management services and work with clients to identify, pitch, negotiate, engage and manage appropriate influencers to help enhance reach and engagement.
Initially this will involve establishing some marketing objectives. For existing clients where we deliver integrated campaigns influencer engagement will typically form one part of our activity.
However, we can provide proactive influencer management services as a stand-alone service. We would commence engagement with a creative ideas workshop to define marketing goals and campaigns.
We would then research and produce a list of recommended influencers for agreement and then commence outreach. Our team is experienced in negotiating with influencers and ambassadors to agree a clear set of deliverables and managing the relationship to achieve strong outcomes. This could range from an influencer led social media campaign, through to signing a brand ambassador to be a public face of your business.
We have successfully worked with Instagram influencers, respected bloggers and celebrities on behalf of clients including Gusto Italian and Mercure Oxford Hawkwell House Hotel to secure high-quality third-party verification and engagement. Outputs have ranged from Instagram focused content, editorial, webinars and blogs to full marketing activations.
Whether your business is a boutique hotel, city-centre bar or restaurant, an e‑commence product-based business, or a sports club or leisure offering, through to a major brand, influencer marketing can help develop your awareness, reach and engagement.
Get in touch
If you would like to have a chat about how we can help your business, please contact our team here.
What our clients have to sayFortitude Communications are energetic, on-point and deliver above and beyond. They are an integral part of our team and have made an invaluable contribution to our business success in the UK.
David Kenny, UK Country Manager TicketCo