It’s almost impossible to go anywhere on social media without seeing at least one form of influencer marketing. Whether they’re showing off their newest outfit, drink order, or gym membership, it seems that everywhere you look there’s something new being promoted. If you want your social media marketing to be effective, strongly consider working with an influencer.
While it may be easy to dismiss as just a fad, influencer marketing is expected to grow to become a $84.89 billion industry within the next five years. As such, it’s no surprise that one of the key parts of a marketing department’s arsenal is the use of influencers to spread the influence and authority of a brand and its products.
What Is an Influencer?
Strictly speaking, influencers are people and organizations who have demonstrated an expert level of knowledge or social influence within their field, but we like to think of them as cheerleaders for your brand who help represent your company’s culture to the public. They use their significant number of followers to market various products and services of their brand partners. Influencer marketing is an easy way for brands to promote themselves through endorsements, recommendations, or ads by content creators, social media stars, bloggers, and streamers.
An influencer marketing program can either be a temporary partnership or an ongoing relationship. You should establish a win-win relationship between your brand and your influencers, where both parties are offering equal value to each other. The beauty of influencer marketing is that the audience is already there, you just need to utilize it.
The Benefits
When you utilize influencer marketing, you’re putting your brand’s message into the hands of an influencer with a specific goal in mind. It might be to raise your sales, increase your brand’s recognition, or improve your reputation. Even if you don’t have a specific goal, influencer marketing can be beneficial in a multitude of ways.
Increased Brand Awareness
The first thing you’ll notice upon implementing an influencer marketing program is an increase in brand awareness. As your ambassador promotes your products, their audience (your target audience) will get to know your brand, your story, and the product offerings you have.
With a greater number of people who know who you are, make sure you’re also producing valuable content to enhance your own social media presence, as well as your influencer’s. Having an equal exchange of value on both sides maximizes the influencer strategy and shows your audience that you care.
Protected Reputation
If you get into a sticky PR predicament, your brand influencers can help to use social media to calm the situation down. As an unaffiliated voice, their opinions and positive experiences with your brand can help defend you against any defaming news or opinions.
Building Trust
Influencers have the power to impact their audience through their already established trust and credibility. Their fans have a strong relationship with them and respect their recommendations and choices. With a certain degree of authority on the products they support, their audience knows that every product they promote is quality. Your brand benefits from that pre-established trust.
Reach Your Target Audience
When choosing an influencer for your brand, make sure to take a close look at their followers. You want your product to be placed in front of users who are interested in your niche, so be sure to choose an influencer whose audience fits the criteria. For example, you probably shouldn’t choose a makeup guru to promote your sports drink company as their interests don’t line up with each other.
Choosing an influencer relevant to your brand gives you an easy way to get a hold of your target market. The influencer already has access to those in your market, so there’s no need to spend excess money trying to find them.
Spread Positive Word of Mouth
People will often seek out second opinions before settling on a product to purchase. That means they’ll go somewhere other than just your brand’s traditional social media channels to seek out information. An influencer can use their power to form a personal connection with the buyer and drive them toward the brand’s product. This is so effective that 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations, with 40% buying something after simply seeing it on YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram.
Enrich Your Content Strategy
It’s not easy to continuously produce new and engaging content that converts. When you run out of ideas, your influencer can help with the content development process. Through collaboration an influencer can help produce high quality content that is beneficial for your audience. Plus, resharing influencer content can help to fill the gaps in your own content schedule.
Generate Leads
Leads are essential to any business. An influencer can help generate leads for your brand with their audience. By creating content that encourages follow-up action, like opting into a newsletter or downloading an eBook, the influencer can help move potential customers through the sales cycle and towards purchase.
With more opportunities to interact with people, influencers can easily inspire consumers to purchase your product. Their audience outreach enables them to contact people who your brand would not have been previously engaged with. Influencers are also able to read the market and tell you how your customers perceive you.
Humanize Your Brand
People prefer to buy from other people rather than faceless brands. Influencers help to give life and personality to your brand, making your consumers more comfortable with their purchases. Creating a powerful influencer program enables you to have a marketing and sales team that can effectively reach your customers.
Increase Website Traffic
An influencer will already have a popular blog, social platform, or website that they run on their own. They can easily backlink or tag your company on any of their posts, driving traffic to your website or social platforms. This is a great way to increase your inbound traffic as well as reach potential customers that are currently outside of your reach.
Thoroughly convinced that your company needs an influencer team? Social Eyes can help! Just give us a call whenever you’re ready to take your first step into influencer marketing.
