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How to become an influencer in Nigeria? This day, Influencer marketing is a high-sought after marketing strategy for businesses and a sweet-looking career path for soft-life ghen’s.

Every industry has influencers and businesses are taking advantage of this, there is me and you wondering how to become an influencer in Nigeria and enjoy its lucrative benefits. Well, you are on the right page to learn about influencer marketing and how to earn from it.

What is an Influencer?

An influencer is a person of authority in a particular niche or industry, who has audiences that are loyal to them and make impact directly or indirectly to their audience. In essence, an influencer make people or his/her followers make a purchase for or from them.

An influencer home is any of the social media platform and shares valuable content either to promote, entertain or educate. Now, you know there are content creators as well? What are content creators job then, content creators can also be business owners promoting their brands in a B2B or B2C form and not accepting money or product from anywhere as compensation.

How many followers do you need to become an influencer?

There are different categories for influencer marketing, but the end story is no matter the number of audience, if you know how to influence people in taking an action then start up properly please! Any number of followers with the right audience and value shared makes you an influencer.

Categories of influencer marketing;

• Nano Influencers: 0-10K
• Micro Influencer: 11-100K
• Micro Influencers: 101-500K
• Macro Influencers: 501-1M
• Mega Macro Influencers: 1M +

What are the benefits of becoming an Influencer?

• High-profile in the society
• Free products
• Free photo/video shoots
• More social visibility
• Brand credibility
• Loyal follower base
• Events invitations
• Free turn-up for your events

Disadvantages of being an Influencer

There is always an exception to everything. Becoming an influencer is good and has lots of benefits, but we wouldn’t discard the fact that it has its awful sides such as;

• Personal life intrusion
• Public harassments
• Family insecurity
• Paparazzi all around
• Burden roles
• Entitlement from people

What makes influencer marketing interesting is that you must not leave the comfort of your home or go to a physical location to work as an influencer. It’s quite flexible!

How to Become an Influencer in Nigeria

• Choose Your Niche:

Find something you can freely share knowledge in and display with ease. A niche is a part you feel comfortable and passionate about. It could be fashion, food, sports, health, entertainment, etc.

If you are not sure of your niche or interest, you can make research on businesses that your kind of person can sustain. It can be a product or service business, but the keynote is to treat your “influencing” career as a business. That leads us to the next point.

• Know Your Audience:

Research on your niche audience, who will find your content helpful, entertaining, or educative. Know your audience demographics such as age, location, what social platform they use more often, and their pain-points in your chosen niche.  With these information, you will have a goal and a target for your influencer marketing career.

• Learn Marketing and Branding:

After knowing your niche and audience, because it’s a business too, you will need you have an in-depth knowledge about marketing and branding. Register for courses on influencer marketing, digital marketing, affiliate marketing, etc. This will help you understand how the social media metrics works and how to navigate the digital space. You can learn from windave, coursera, Learn the different techniques in business, and how to set your brand apart from others in your niche.

• Choose a Social Platform:

All social media platform has its using type, Instagram has different features to TikTok, so are others. Pick a social platform that suits your audience optimize your online presence. You can either convert your previous social platform account or create a new account for your influencing career. Optimization looks like this;

1. Choose a good looking photo
2. Update your bio with your specialty
3. Include targeted keywords (local SEO and public SEO)
4. Update your portfolio
5. Add a Call-To-Action (CTA)

Some social media platforms and their Influencing ranks

• Instagram
• TikTok
• X (Twitter)
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Pinterest

• Create a Content Strategy:

After creating social media accounts, it’s time to create a content strategy for your influencing career. It can be overwhelming sometimes, because you are not sure of your audience preference but not to worry. It’s okay to use what industry leaders or influencers in your niche do but now in your style. Create content calendar on how your posts will go, what type of content you will be sharing, who will you collaborate with, deadlines, etc. make the content strategy informative, feasible, and wide.

• Create Relevant Content:

Using your gadgets, create content that are valuable to your audience. Even a GRWM video is entertaining or behind-the-scene. A research stated that consumers find influencers who are more human relatable. There is a 5-3-2 content marketing type for influencers, 5 out of your content should be industry facts and tips from other leaders, 3 self-made content relating to any problem and 2 personal life content.

If you don’t create content, nobody will see you and your value.  Learn the time to make a post on a topic and your audience availability. Ensure your content has a hook, CTA, and serves a purpose.

• Engage with your audience:

Once you have a significant following, and an engaging audience. Do not ignore comments ore reviews from your audience. If you get tagged, reach out, react, or collaborate with them. Reply comments and ask questions on what type of content will your audience want from you.

Note: not all comment will be friendly, but learn to reply professionally or delete comment if it hurts badly.

• Collaborate and join communities:

Join communities of fellow influencers and learn from within. Collaborate with businesses, influencers, etc. to reach a wider audience and grow strategically. Grow your community by interacting with friends, colleagues, followers, etc. Genuine connections help foster more genuine and consistent engagement, and in the absence of such connections, your channel will damage your brands credibility and personal likability.

• Stay Consistent and Diversify:

Create content every day, every-week, every month. Show up for your audience and put in the work by exploring your content strategy. You can batch create content and schedule using scheduling apps, or employ a team of social media managers, content managers, editors, etc. to make your work easier.

You don’t want to start with all attention and suddenly go into exile, you might lose some audience and have low engagements. Diversify your content to all social platforms (cross-promotion) and repurpose when necessary.

• Reach out to brands you want to work with:

Partner with small, medium, and big businesses in your niche. Educate them of your importance and come to an agreement on how to be beneficial to each other. They pay for every gig, or you get a free product. There are brands that work with influencers of every category, pitch to them directly, send emails, or make a review on their product or service.

You can create content regarding a brand product or service and share it to them for free. Of course a good-looking one and if they find it interesting, it’s an easy way to partnership.

Here is a case study of a Nigerian Influencer.