Kristy Sammis - Influencer Marketing For Dummies

Influencer Marketing For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955445

ISBN 978-1-119-11409-3 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-11392-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-11405-5 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

If you work in marketing, or have a product or service to sell, youve probably realized by now that you need to establish an online presence in some shape or form. You also need to keep your online audience engaged in order to establish brand awareness and grow your business.

But the world of social media is vast, and there are so many platforms to choose from when it comes to publicizing your brand. New tools pop up everyday, and the social media landscape can easily become overwhelming! Youve probably heard about the benefits of word-of-mouth marketing and perhaps even heard the term influencer marketing bandied about as a strategy to consider. Maybe youre just curious to learn more about word-of-mouth marketing, what makes someone influential online, and whether working with influencers can help your business grow. If so, youre in the right place!

We wrote this book with the goal of demystifying influencer marketing and all the various components that make it successful.

This book is a reference. That means you dont need to read it in order from front to back. Instead, feel free to skip to the sections that are most relevant to your brand and interesting to you. For information on a specific topic, check the table of contents or refer to the index.

Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If youre reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as its noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesnt exist. If youre reading this as an e-book, youve got it easy just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

As we wrote this book, we made certain assumptions about you:

• You already have an established web presence (a website and/or brand-owned social channels).
• Youre interested in learning more about how to work with online influencers and identifying who they are.
• You have established clear business and marketing/PR goals, which may or may not yet include social media activations.
• Youre trying to decide whether using influencer marketing will help you meet your business goals.
• You have a passion for social media, or youre at least open to learning more about how it can elevate your brand marketing campaigns.

To make your reading experience easier, we use various icons in the margins to identify special categories of information:

Anything marked with the Tip icon may help streamline your marketing efforts. Weve learned through trial and error so you dont have to!

Material marked with the Remember icon serves as a quick reminder of information, including best practices that weve shared elsewhere in the book. Review it to refresh your memory on content thats already been covered previously.

When we throw up a Warning icon, its our way of steering you away from tactics that may derail your influencer marketing plans. We urge you to consider these bits of information carefully to avoid being blindsided by poor outcomes.

In addition to the content contained within this book, we have curated additional companion digital content thats available to you online. These include the following:

• Cheat Sheet ( www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/influencermarketing): Here you can find information like how much influencers make, what influencer marketing cant do, influencer marketing tactics thatll get you in trouble, and more.
• Web Extras ( www.dummies.com/extras/influencermarketing): Each parts page contains a link to Dummies.com and articles that extend the content covered in the book. Here, we offer free articles on everything from tips on sending products to influencers, a years worth of themes for engaging social content, how to get influencers to advocate for your brand, and more.

We hope that this book proves to be an invaluable tool as you start or continue your influencer marketing journey. The road can be long at times, but youll start to get the hang of it soon. Start small, conquering one social platform at a time while building up your key influencer relationships. To be sure, there are always new platforms sprouting up, so your skillset will continue to evolve.