If you work in marketing, or have a product or service to sell, you’ve 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! You’ve 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 you’re 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, you’re in the right place!

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

About This Book

This book is a reference. That means you don’t 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 you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

Foolish Assumptions

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).
• You’re 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.
• You’re trying to decide whether using influencer marketing will help you meet your business goals.
• You have a passion for social media, or you’re at least open to learning more about how it can elevate your brand marketing campaigns.

Icons Used in This Book

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. We’ve learned through trial and error so you don’t have to!

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

When we throw up a Warning icon, it’s 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.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the content contained within this book, we have curated additional companion digital content that’s 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 can’t do, influencer marketing tactics that’ll 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 year’s worth of themes for engaging social content, how to get influencers to advocate for your brand, and more.

Where to Go from Here

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 you’ll 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.

If you’re brand new to the concept of influencer marketing, we highly recommend starting with Chapters 1 and 2 to get the lay of the land. If you’re already somewhat familiar with influencer marketing tactics, you might want to jump to Chapter 4 or review the different social platforms methodically (Part III).

No matter where you start, we wish you much success in your influencer marketing endeavors! If you have comments and feedback to share, please feel free to email us at [email protected].