Partner up: How to learn influencer marketing

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If you want to learn influencer marketing as part of your marketing career, it’s first worth considering which part of influencer marketing is for you.

The options basically are:

• As a creator – building your own brand
• On the brand side working with influencers

Jacob Hiller, associate marketing professor at Ohio University who teaches influencer marketing, said on “The Business Storytelling Show” that the mix of students interested in each area is about 50-50.

To start as a creator, he said, you need:

• Passion for the content
• Perseverance

To stream when nobody is watching – at the beginning – is hard, said Jacob. But it’s the start for many creators.

To learn influencer marketing as a creator

On the creator side, it comes back to understanding your niche. Where will you build your brand to build community and audience?

What’s unique about you and where can you stand out.

Learning influencer marketing as a creator includes learning how to:

• Market yourself
• Interact with your audience
• Knowing what brands you might want to partner with and how work with them
• Determining what content channels and types are best for you

Building an influencer business as a creator is partially about content creation, marketing and business decisions.

You’ll also have to learn about keeping track of finances – including brand payments, expenses and taxes.

“Content creators today are so popular they have a level of authenticity and relatability,” said Jacob.

Also, Jacob mentioned to think about:

• collaborations with other creators
• do you want to create and sell merch?
• and other expansion ideas

To learn influencer marketing on the brand side

What’s influencer marketing without brands that partner with creators? Traditional social media, I suppose. Influencer marketing certainly has a piece that includes creators sharing product recommendations.

So somebody has to come up with those programs, develop them and implement them on the brand side.

That could include several aspects:

• Running an on-site influencer program or an influencer marketplace. Think Amazon.
• Identifying and recruiting influencers that would make sense
• Coming up with creative briefs, timelines and management
• Success reporting and analysis

How influencer marketing is taught

Jacob said it’s important to learn the basics and then also use the right tools.

For example, selling T-shirts used to be way harder and more time-consuming than it is today. Identifying what you need to do and what tools will help you will make that process easy and more efficient.

“Leverage all the tools to make it easy and don’t overextend yourself,” said Jacob.

Read next: How to find influencers for your brand

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Certainly influencer marketing is about implementation but as things get more and more complex, it’s also good to think about what needs to be learned before entering or extending in this area of a marketing career.

And are there jobs in influencer marketing? Of course, you can start your own community as a creator, but also according to LinkedIn there are close to 72,000 jobs posted that mention influencer marketing.

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