Influencer Marketing: Staying Close to your Audience

How do you, personally, stay close to your audience?

For me, it’s all about engaging with them, on social media, mostly. I’m on Instagram all the time. I reply to every comment people leave me; I’m engaging with other people’s content. I’m participating in events, I do a lot of public speaking and lecturing, so a lot of people will attend the events or classes I’m teaching. But it’s a lot of time and I think that’s one thing that influencers realize early on. If you want to have that relationship with your audience, you have to put the time in to do it.

Just in terms of when brands approach you, do they understand that? Do you they look to understand your audience or do they just leave you to it? Technically, that’s their audience, as well, right?

Exactly. Most of the brands I work with, respect that I have a relationship with my audience and they don’t want to try and take that over or get involved in the dialogue, where it’s not necessarily the place for them to do that. I think that that usually works pretty well. For example, if I’m doing a sponsored post on Instagram for a tourism board and people leave comments saying they’d love to visit there someday, most tourism boards wouldn’t go in and say, oh yes, please come visit us, because then it just looks a little bit too salesy and a little bit too much. They leave that to me, where I can say, yeah, that would be great, it’s a great place.

Again, that’s the trust element?

Yes.

You’re, basically, selling trust, in a way.

Yes, definitely. Again, that’s why it’s so important for me, as an influencer, to maintain that trust, to be careful about the types of partnerships I do and the brands that I work with. All of my business, basically, revolves around maintaining the trust of my audience.