Business 2022, Influencer Marketing
Tracy Thomas:
Hey, welcome everyone. This is Tracy Thomas and Greg Moody here at Rev Talks Podcast, and we’re really super, super excited about our business planning for 2022 and what we’re going to be reaching out to everyone today with. You guys are going to be in for really a good, I don’t want to say a surprise, but the influencer marketing, it’s arrived and it’s here to stay. When I say it’s here to stay, in 2022, if you’re not on board with this, you’re just going to be well behind in 2023 and 2024. So, let’s just listen in guys and hope you really enjoy.
Greg, anything you want to add onto that with regards to what we’re going to be doing?
Greg Moody:
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of different ideas about what influencer marketing is, and probably everybody on the podcast here has heard about influencers. We’re going to really get into what that means and how you can use it for your business, and how you can be an influencer or use other people as influencers. So, it’s really critical that you know this. You really can’t avoid understanding influencer marketing for growth in 2022 and beyond right now. It’s really critical for your business.
Tracy Thomas:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, maybe we start off with a couple of these… Like what is the influencer marketing? This question comes up a lot of times, people ask us, “What is an influencer marketing?”
Influencer marketing, there’s quite a few things that it does and what it is, but basically you’ll see it a lot with, people will reach out to other people to get somebody that could influence their business. That could be everyone from a blog, that could be from a podcast, somebody outside your organization. It could be a movie star. It could be a singer, but really what we’re seeing now with success and all the data we’re seeing last year and how it’s become a niche, influencing marketing is really more about people in their local communities using local people or themselves.
What we saw, and Greg and I are going to talk a lot about today is, how we’ve really grown in the last two years or helped our companies grow that we’re working with the clientele with as far as the influencers as an author or someone who has a white paper on their website. They’re their own podcast, their own blogs on their own website whereas… Greg, you can add in a little bit here in a second here.
I think, Greg, what we see commonly is, we see a lot of people they’re podcasting. They’re podcasting on this podcast platform, which is really awesome. You’ve got all these people subscribing and everything else, and you might even make some money off Google with people clicking on your podcast and whatnot or YouTube video. But the podcast on your website is about generating traffic.
So, if you’re a plumber or you’re a doctor or you’re a lawyer and you have a podcast on your website, and you’re the influencer and people are going there to see you, that’s what makes the huge difference, increased traffic. That’s what an influencer really is all about, increasing the sales in your business.
Greg Moody:
Yeah. It’s really important to keep… There’s a couple things you said there, Tracy. One thing that’s really critical is to keep in mind what your objective is. So, the first thing that you started talking about is, what is an influencer and what that means. In the olden days, an influencer would’ve been, you hired a movie star or you hired a sports personality to be the spokesperson for your business. You hired William Refrigerator Perry, who used to be the guy that people would hire.
Tracy Thomas:
Yeah.
Greg Moody:
Or they’d hire Charles Barkley to be the person to pitch something on your business-
Tracy Thomas:
Spokesperson, yeah.
Greg Moody:
Yeah. Right, but what happens on the internet because there’s so much breadth and scope of what happens right now online is, you can be the influencer. Well, how do you get to be an influencer? By being an expert in a lot of different ways, but what’s critical about being an influencer is, you have the objective in mind for your business.
So, what people get confused about is, if you can now be a celebrity or an internet celebrity, or in your niche and be well known as a plumber, a lawyer, a doctor, martial artist, chiropractor, whatever you are, what’s the purpose of that? So, the purpose is to drive traffic to your business so that you get more new clients or new members or sales of product or whatever the objective is for your business.
It’s the same way if we write a book, if we help our clients write a book… We published tons and tons of books this last year, it’s been really booming for us to help our clients publish books, we’re writing the book with the objective of getting more clients or getting more sales or getting more things happening in your business. So, we’re influencing people so that it makes you more of an expert in your business, but with an objective for the right type of traffic that you want in your business. That’s what everybody needs to have in mind, both of these pieces.
So, an influencer can be somebody that’s famous for an external reason. That’s okay and that’s the way it used to be, but now it can be somebody that’s more well known for have an authority and being an expert. Preferably that’s you, but you can also use other people that bring expertise to you and combine those two types of ideas so that people recognize you in your business as somewhere that they’d want to go, somewhere that brings traffic to them.
Tracy Thomas:
Yeah, and when you said that, Greg, one of the things I’m about touch base on what you said was really important, that we want them to be the influencer. Greg, we hear this a lot, everybody in our company hears this all the time, that they don’t believe they can be an influencer because they don’t have that brand or they don’t have that name.
Well, everybody has to start somewhere, but remember, having something simple as having a book on your website as an author or a white paper or a blog or a podcast that people are coming and seeing on your website, that just does I mean extremely well. You’d be really amazed at what percentage of increased traffic would go to your site because you are seen as an influencer. You’re seen as someone big and powerful within that industry or within that niche, whatever that is.
Like Greg was mentioning objectives, whether it’s plumbing, chiropractor, martial arts, whatever that is. If you’re a martial artist and you have a book of you doing a kick or a book of you doing women’s self defense and the book’s on there and you’re talking about women’s self defense and you’re an author, you are going to be seen in a different… Remember, we’re looking at the personas of how people shop so you’re going to be seeing quite different from the visitor going to your website that goes to your website with your book on it, versus somebody that has a website that may even be a better website necessarily.
I doubt that it’s going to be if it’s ours, but it might even be a better website. What it’s not going to have is that author, that influencer marketing, which is you being an author. We’re typically seeing about 24 to 30% increase on traffic with downloadable books and white papers.
Greg Moody:
Yeah, and we want to be able to understand that, you mentioned an author, which is just one of the channels that you can use to be an influencer but if somebody really high status, influencer would also… Another way you could say that would be having high status. It’s not that you need to be egotistical to have high status, but let’s face it, you’re marketing your business.
So, what you want to do is, show up better than other people or show up in more places than other people. Have your customers look at you in a better light than the other competitors out there, or the other options that they have. I mean, if you’re selling one Italian food, they have other options of types of food, not just Italian food. So, we want to make sure that you look like the most important food option that they have available.
So, we want to make sure that your status is higher than everybody else. If you think about status in American society or world society, like having a PhD, for example is about one in 1,000 people, about 0.1% of the population has a PhD, but only about 0.02% of the population has written a book. So, just by writing a book, it puts you in a new status level.
The other thing that people don’t realize I think when they think, “Well, I can’t be famous,” or, “I can’t be looked at as an expert because I look around and there’s other people that might be more of an expert than me,” well, yeah. But most of the time, those people that you look around and think are more of an expert than you are not writing books, but they’re also not reaching out in all the different channels that they can reach out.
They don’t have as much social proof of testimonials. They don’t have social media out in as many channels and in many ways is that what we help our clients do. They don’t have blogs out. They don’t have podcasts out that you mentioned before, or their podcasts are on a different platform that’s not connected to their website. They’re not in other digital media. They’re not doing print media properly. They’re not in many, many other places.
So, it’s really relatively easy to show up better than your competitors or the other people in similar niches. It’s really not that hard if you do it correctly, if you’re focusing on the right things and that’s what we help people do. So, to be an influencer is showing up as more of an expert, more of an authority than anybody else and it’s relatively easy.
I mean, we need to go on to the next topic here, I guess because I think we’ve pretty much thoroughly covered that.
Tracy Thomas:
Definitely. Definitely.
Greg Moody:
Let’s look at influencer marketing stats and this is really amazing when you think about… Maybe you haven’t been convinced that you need to be an influencer, but the stats on this are pretty amazing.
Tracy Thomas:
Yeah, and do you want to pull some of those up or should we talk about it a little bit?
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