Influencer marketing strategies are no longer just for the social media savvy techie but are required for all cigar business owners looking to stay ahead of the curve. Influencers are called what they are because they greatly impact all markets and are sales growth difference-makers for online and brick-and-mortar shops.Â
So, leveraging the power of cigar influencers is crucial to developing a winning marketing strategy that gets the results you want. Cigarketing’s influencer experts have compiled this collection of advanced marketing strategies to show how to get the most out of influencer collaborations and boost your bottom line. Influencers Gone Wild, Part Deux begins now!
Beyond Sex Appeal: Building Authentic Relationships
As we covered in part one of our Influencers Gone Wild series, influencers add another layer to cigar store marketing that other channels can’t provide. Top influencers engage with their followers, building trust and authenticity through consistent interaction. Influencers cultivate lasting bonds with their followers, greatly affecting buying trends and shopping habits.Â
However, partnering with influencers is more than just contracting a celebrity or pretty face to tell others about your shop, products, or services. Cultivating genuine relationships with influencers is an advanced strategy that delivers more authenticity, longer-term advocacy, and consistent sales growth. Including influencers in marketing strategy development and implementation helps maintain a transparent, more organic partnership.
Empowering influencers with trust, honesty, and a genuine spirit of collaboration lets them do what they do best: Using their attentive, highly engaged audience to generate exposure and relevance for your brand. The result is more robust awareness, traffic, and sales for your cigar shop. So, build strong influencer relationships and watch your long-term growth run wild!
Niche Influencers Do It Better: Tapping into Specialized Audiences
Your cigar business doesn’t need a celebrity influencer with millions of followers to succeed. Niche influencers can have more of an impact on awareness and sales than mega influencers. Niche influencers focus on smaller portions of the cigar market, catering to the specific needs of a more specialized audience, giving brands a voice that the mega conglomerates would otherwise drown out with market saturation and limitless marketing budgets.
From boutique cigar brands to small production accessories, niche influencers can generate intense interest through their loyal followers, generating the buzz that fuels higher sales. This helps bring under-the-radar brands or products that might never have seen the light of day into the spotlight, boosting opportunities that can deliver a great return on your investment.Â
Niche influencers also provide great long-term possibilities for cigar shop owners. Building a trusting, highly collaborative relationship with niche influencers can spawn a long-term partnership. This can result in an intensely loyal audience consistently willing to buy from your cigar business. So, by targeting a specific cigar market sector or niche, niche influencers can help your brand stand out, spark greater engagement with consumers, and boost conversions.
Content Diversification: Exploring New Platforms and Formats
Wildly successful influencers are powerful allies that can put your social media marketing strategy above the top. However, there is more to influencer collaborations beyond social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Advanced strategies for influencer partnerships call for a more diversified approach that can ensure next-level exposure and a higher return on your investment.Â
You can broaden your influencer collaboration scope to include a wide variety of social media platform alternatives, such as:
- Podcasts
- Blogs
- Livestreams
- Vlogs
- Online Forums
- Live Events
Podcasts, Vlogs, Livestreams, and other interactive channels add another layer to influencing strategies. Like traditional radio and television hosts, influencers inject their personality and presence into the mix, building trust and loyalty with their captive audience. For example, unboxing videos, show-and-tell presentations, and other brand or product showcases featured on YouTube and other video platforms add to the power of influencers to sway their listeners or watchers to buy into your brand completely.Â
Getting the most out of multi-level influencer campaigns relies on the collaborative connection between you and the cigar influencer. Building a strong, positive partnership from the start can save headaches and deliver huge payoffs. So, finding an influencer who can share your brand’s image and values while effectively engaging with their audience is imperative. It requires a little research to find the right fit, yet Cigarketing’s marketing all-stars can help you locate the best influencers to suit your marketing goals.Â
From live streams to in-person live events, influencing outside normal social media platforms is becoming ever more critical to marketing success. So, working with influencers to develop multi-platform campaigns is an advanced strategy that creates a more authentic, relatable experience for target audiences, further elevating conversion rates and return on investment. This strategy ensures a consistent voice across all channels that gets your cigar business where it needs to be.
Measuring Influencer Marketing ROI: Advanced Analytics and Performance Metrics
Cigar influencer collaboration can deliver exceptional results, yet costs can run high if you are not careful. Influencer contracting, advertising, content creation, production, subscriptions, and other fees add up quickly. So, tracking the benefits and the costs is key to managing a winning marketing strategy and high ROI. There are many ways to measure performance, yet a few stand out as the most effective in measuring ROI for your cigar business marketing strategy.
Attribution modeling is an advanced analytical tool that charts the various stages of a customer’s shopping experience by tracking clicks, impressions, return on ad spend, in-app or online purchases, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). Attribution modeling shows the influencer’s level of impact on your marketing campaigns, providing insight into how you might change your strategy to fit your goals best.
Lifetime value analysis is another valuable tool that estimates the revenue your average customer will bring in during the lifespan of the customer’s relationship with your business. Influencers build trust and authenticity for your brand, which helps build a loyal, longer-lasting relationship with your customers. So, customer lifetime value (CLV) analysis is especially helpful when examining how influencer marketing strategies affect your long-term sales.Â
Sentiment analysis is yet another way to examine the effectiveness of your cigar business’s influencer marketing campaigns. Sentiment analysis measures how the audience perceives content, whether positive, negative, or neutral, and how that sentiment translates to marketing, customer engagement, and sales. It is a valuable tool for auditing an influencer’s performance to determine if the influencer fits your marketing needs.
Combining attribution modeling, CLV, and sentiment analysis with click-through rates, website traffic, conversion rates, brand mentions, and other KPIs, you get a clear picture of the costs and value of your influencer marketing campaigns. Cigarketing can help you identify the best measurables to optimize your ROI.
Unleash Cigar Influencer Power Today
Influencer marketing is a potent marketing tool that is now more than ever necessary for achieving success. Harnessing the power of influencers lets you reach a specialized audience that can deliver increased awareness, prestige, conversions, and long-term sales growth for your cigar business.
Don’t miss out on the ever-changing realm of influencer marketing. Put advanced influencer collaboration strategies into action and savor the thrill and rewards of a victorious marketing plan. So, elevate your cigar sales to new heights and let the influencers go wild! Call us to get your influencer party started today!