To small businesses, influencers are one of their keys to opening a door full of marketing opportunities. There’s a concrete reason why influencers are named as such, and mainly it’s because influencers serve as businesses’ means of reaching far beyond that what they are currently capable of targeting. As most of us probably believe, influencers usually come from outside the business, but except for some uncommon cases where influencers themselves come from within the industry. Becoming an influencer while you’re taking the role of a business owner has several benefits to boosting not just your company brand, but also your brand. Below are a few things that you can do to turn yourself into an influencer.
Build a community
How much power influencers have depends on their city because community represents their domain of influence, which is what exactly you will be looking for when selecting someone to represent your small business. That is also what you need to become an influencer yourself. Creating a community entails finding people that have the same interests in your industry. If you have already established yourself, then organically doing this is not needed, however, if that is not the case, then you need to exert more efforts. Find people and follow them every day until your following becomes big enough to produce organic growth.
Share your people’s posts
Once you have gathered people for your community, the next thing you have to do is to keep them, together with by involving them in something that has value. The good thing here is that you don’t need to create something out of scratch. You can share great videos or articles to remind your followers that you are still there, thus, leaving an impression on them that you are providing them value. One easy way to express your appreciation and at the same time, gain their loyalty is to share their posts.
Create your content and share it
While it’s great to share other people’s works, nothing beats building your authority and following by generating original content. You can start small by creating your blog and posting original works. As you improve yourself, you can also slowly begin producing videos and podcasts in accordance with your content. Whatever form you want to take on, make sure that it does not go outside your brand because it may weaken your image, resulting from decreasing in followers.
Keep the people within your community engaged
There’s no use in having a community if you can’t keep your people involved because they are bound to leave sooner or later when there’s nothing of value to make them stay. To successfully keep them engaged would make you a real influencer and earn you even more loyal followers from your community. If they have questions for you, reply to them. In return, you can also keep the community going by asking them questions as well and responding to their posts even if you’re not the primary audience. To put it, strike conversations with them. Be part of discussions and forums, and they will pay you back with their loyalty.
