Curious about the benefits of influencer marketing?
If you want to hear one of the worst-kept secrets, it is that influencer marketing is tremendously powerful and effective in marketing.
Let me rephrase that. Influencer marketing was a really well-kept secret when it was in its early stages, but today, there’s not a lot of people who know what influencer marketing is, and that it works extremely well.
In fact, that’s what happens with all marketing tactics.
Some marketers start doing something new and see great results and high ROI from it, they start pouring more money into it, and shortly thereafter, it becomes a marketing commodity which all brands, which can execute and adapt quickly, embrace.
Now, fortunately, there’s no need to argue whether or not influencer marketing actually works, because the influencer marketing statistics speak very clearly about its powers.
But the interesting part is not when you ask whether or not something works, but rather in which ways it can be leveraged.
Everyone knows that influencer marketing can drive sales, but if you think that’s all there is to it, continue reading.
Apart from just being able to drive sales, the number of benefits of influencer marketing is considerably higher than that.
The fact is that there are plenty of benefits of influencer marketing, and if you only look what’s right in front of you, that’s the only thing you see, and this also means that you will never be able to understand its true power, and most importantly, get the most out of it.
In this post, we’re looking at the benefits of influencer marketing and what they mean for companies.
Top Benefits of influencer marketing
1. Grow your audience
Influencer marketing has a huge power when it comes to helping brands grow their audience on social media.
Influencer marketing is, as you know, to a large extent rooted in social media, and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you know that it is on social media that people’s attention is, and where they spend their time.
Today, the vast majority of brands have understood the power as well as the importance of using social media to reach, impact, and engage their target audience. What’s more, they’ve also realized what an incredible tool it is for directly reaching their target audience.
But the truth is that while social media has proven to be tremendously effective in marketing, a tool is only useful if you use it correctly. And in order to succeed in marketing as a whole, you need to grow your audience, and even more importantly, actually have an audience.
While we all wish that you could just hop on social media, and then all of a sudden have 10K followers, that’s unfortunately not how it works. Except if your name is Justin Bieber.
Everyone wants to grow their audience on social media in order to reach more people, which ultimately can turn into cash, but before you can do this, you need to build your audience, and that is often easier said than done. The best part is that influencers can help brands do just that.
Most brands partner up with influencers that have a larger following than themselves in order to reach more people and get better results. This is why a benefit of influencer marketing is not just that you’ll get more exposure through influencer marketing campaigns, but furthermore, a lot of people become aware of your brand’s existence thus resulting in more people following you on social media.
With the fact that influencer marketing is so targeted, there’s a big chance that many people will find your brand interesting and therefore, as long as you partner with relevant influencers, you will be able to grow your social media audience quite quickly through your influencer marketing campaigns.
2. Attract quality leads
Influencer marketing is all about generating high-quality leads, and this is also one of the most important benefits of influencer marketing, as most marketers are focusing on the short term, which is ”how can we drive sales now?”. And while this is, according to me, and many other, the wrong approach to selling and building a brand, that’s what many strive for, and that’s what influencer marketing can give them.
Influencer marketing has proven to be able to attract quality leads, which have a high chance of being converted into customers. In fact, Influencer marketing content delivers 11X higher ROI than traditional forms of digital marketing and Influencer marketing campaigns generate $6.5 in earned media value for every $1.00 invested. Furthermore, 13 percent of brands generate $20 in revenue for every dollar invested in influencer marketing.
If numbers and statistics speak clearly, they’ve never spoken as clear as now.
There are obviously a number of different factors that allows influencer marketing to generate these results, but the most important factor is that it allows for extremely targeted marketing campaigns. Furthermore, another factor is that people trust recommendations from their peers, but they don’t trust a banner ad or other ineffective marketing methods.
When brands are partnering up with influencers, the brand is the one that chooses which influencer they are going to work with. In case you’re new to influencer marketing, the influencer you partner with is of greatest importance, because obviously, this will have a huge impact on the people you’ll be able to reach with your influencer campaign, and whether these individuals are actually relevant to your brand and are part of your target audience.
The good news is that brands often identify and select the influencers they are going to partner with based on criteria such as niche, age, gender, niche and much more. All of this ensures that they only partner with influencers that have an audience which will also be interest in the brand.
With the ability to choose influencers based on all these criteria, it opens up a completely new way of marketing that is more targeted than most marketing sources for brands, while, at the same time, having someone who people actually trust and look up to spread your message for you.
As opposed to TV advertising, for example, there’s no chance for brands to decide who should see their ads. This inevitably means that the leads that are generated are not very effective, and the majority of the people the ad reaches just aren’t relevant, yet still, they’re paying to reach those people.
3. Improve credibility
Social media influencers are working hard to grow their audience and relationship with their followers. Most influencers engage and interact with their audience often and regularly, and as a result, they build a loyal following of people who almost work as a community of highly engaged people. Influencers are dependent on their followers to succeed. Without their fans, they have nothing, and influencers realize this and therefore focus a lot on building and improving their relationship with their audience.
The good news about this is that influencers tend to have a greatly engaged and loyal following, for the reasons I just mentioned.
Why does this matter?
It matters because, through that consistent interacting and relationship-building, the influencers have established themselves as trusted individuals, who their audience trust greatly.
In other words, by having the influencer promote your brand, it will have a much bigger effect than any other marketing method would be able to have.
This is yet another of the many influencer marketing benefits, and thanks to the strong relationships they’ve built, your brand can benefit from when partnering with them.
Most influencers have built a strong reputation on social media, and by letting them market your products to their loyal fans by having them showcase the products in front of their audience, your brand will earn trust instantly as well.
4. Improves SEO
There are plenty of influencer marketing benefits, but this one is almost always neglected, and I think it’s a shame, because, at the same time, influencer marketing offers incredible opportunities for you to work with, and improve your SEO.
It is one of the influencer marketing benefits that aren’t discussed very widely, yet still, is very valuable to brands.
Blogging influencers who have their own website are very common. If you’re looking at approaches you can take to improve your SEO, and at the same time want to get other influencer marketing benefits, such as sales, brand awareness, etc. this is the tactic you want to go for.
By having high-authority influencers with established websites market your own site and products, you’ll get a number of influencer marketing benefits, not just in SEO.
For SEO though, the most important benefits that you will get quality backlinks from websites that are trusted by Google (and other search engines) and often have a high DA, based on how old and established they are.
These links to your sites can often contain an anchor text for keywords you want to rank for, and also help you gain lots of direct traffic and even sales.
These valuable backlinks can help you rank higher in search engine results, meaning more website visitors and in the long run more sales.
When you partner with influencers that have their own site, it is important that you don’t neglect the SEO benefits of a partnership. It’s easy to get discouraged if you partner with a blogger and have them promote your site, only to find that no-one purchased anything, and thereby draw the conclusion that influencer marketing sucks, but at the same time, you gained a backlink, which might have helped you rank better in Google, which in turn might have attracted a prospect, who, in turn, purchased from you.
This is the reason why I emphasize the importance of knowing all the benefits of influencer marketing because otherwise, you won’t be able to see its true power and how beneficial it actually is.
Most often when talking about the benefits of influencer marketing, we tend to often discuss sales and traffic, but the fact is that influencer marketing can have positive effects on search engines, which can mean long-term benefits for your brand.
Not only can influencer marketing give benefits of backlinks from the influencer’s own website, but with the increased brand-awareness as a result of the partnership, other people might also decide to link out to your brand.
5. It’s cheap
Of course, this depends on how you count, because the fact of the matter is that there are influencers of all price ranges you can partner with.
But then again, if you’ve seen that Selena Gomez charges an estimated $550,000 per sponsored Instagram post, you might wonder what the heck I am talking about, but let me explain.
Firstly, what does ”cheap” refer to in influencer marketing?
Well, first of all, and most importantly, cheap refers to the ROI. Influencer marketing has, as already discussed, proven itself to be able to drive amazing marketing results, and so in that way, influencer marketing is cheap, because after all, the goal of your influencer marketing campaign is to get a positive ROI.
It doesn’t matter if the campaign only cost 100 dollars if it only generated 2 dollars in return. I would call that expensive.
But here’s the other thing that cheap refers to in influencer marketing:
Cheap refers to the huge accessibility of influencer marketing. The fact of the matter is that essentially all brands, no matter their budget can afford to run influencer marketing campaigns.
The reason is that there are plenty of different types of campaigns, and at the same time, there are lots of influencers you can partner with.
Normally, influencers base their price on their follower count, and in general, the more followers they have, the more followers they have, the more they’ll charge to promote your message.
The best part is that there are plenty of influencers of all sizes and within all types of niches. Influencers with a smaller following are normally referred to as micro-influencers, and these are individuals with a smaller yet more engaged following, and so this means that despite them having smaller following, they can still generate great marketing results.
The price of influencer marketing varies a lot as mentioned, but you can run influencer marketing campaigns by only giving away a product sample to an influencer to promote your brand, and on the other side of the spectrum, you can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a promotion.
- 40% of people say they’ve purchased an item online after seeing it used by an influencer on Instagram, Twitter, Vine, or YouTube.
- Ninety-four percent of those who used influencer marketing believe the tactic to be effective.
As a matter of fact, because influencer marketing has shown to be so effective in terms of generating a high ROI, marketers said in 2016 that they spend between $25,000 and $50,000 per influencer marketing program.
The survey respondents reported those figures will double to $50,000 to $100,000 per program next year because of its effectiveness.
The punchline is that influencer marketing is not only cheap in the sense that it generates tremendous ROIs, but it is also cheap in the sense that it is accessible for all brands, no matter budget.
6. Saves time
Even if it might not seem like it, influencer marketing actually saves time compared to other marketing methods.
How?
They save time in the sense that influencers and influencer marketing campaigns basically run themselves, or more correctly, are run by the influencers.
The only thing you as a marketer need to do when running an influencer campaign is find the influencers, build a relationship with the influencer, send products to them/pay (or both, depending on the deal ) and lastly, confirm the content that the influencers are going to post so it aligns with your brands values.
It might seem like a lot of work, but compared to classic display ads where you often have to spend thousands of dollars just to create the content to advertise with, it really isn’t.
So before you say that influencer marketing is expensive, remember that the influencer is not only promoting your brand, but they’re also spending a ton of time creating content, engaging with their audience, writing about your brand, and so on. Doing this actually demands a lot of time.
7. Benefits of influencer marketing: A targeted way of marketing
I’ve already spoiled one of the most important benefits of influencer marketing and the reason it is able to generate such high ROI, and that is because it is a targeted way of marketing which allows marketers to only reach the people who truly matter to their brands – their target audience.
Running a successful marketing campaign is all about marketing your brand to the right audience.
Of course, in marketing, you’re always striving to reach more and more people, but what many tends to forget is that it’s not about how many people you reach, but instead, it is about who you reach.
As such, it’s obvious when you reach the right people – and a lot of people when you have a winning concept.
The best part is that, through the right strategies, influencer marketing helps you do just that.
For example instead of paying for display ads to reach 100K people, paying for each person who sees your ad, and only 800 of those are genuinely interested in what your brand has to offer, it’s a lot more beneficial to market with the help of influencer to let’s say, 50K people, where 45K of those are interested in what you have to offer.
It’s obvious which of these approaches will generate the best results.
8. People tend to trust influencers more than brands
You’re probably no stranger to the fact that trust is incredibly important in marketing.
Obviously, you can tell people how amazing you are time after time, but if people don’t trust you, it won’t matter how many times you say it.
The problem that brands are facing in marketing is that people don’t actually trust them.
I mean, how many times have we heard brands say something like ”we’re the best in the industry”, ”we have the highest-quality products”, ”our products are amazing” etc, and just shook our heads?
The truth is that we don’t trust brands and what they are saying for the simple reason that we know their only goal and their agenda:
they want to sell more.
As consumers, we know that the only reason brands are doing and saying something is to sell more, and this makes us more skeptical about what they are saying and thus makes us trust them less.
The good news is that one of the benefits of influencer marketing is that influencers carry an immense amount of trust from their audience, and can thus be leveraged to spread your brand message for you.
By doing this, you can thereby share the same message, but now, by having a trusted individual say it, it will have a much greater effect and actually be listened to.
Believe it or not, but influencers spend most of their time building relationships and engaging with their audience. This, of course, leads to trust.
There’s a reason that influencers are called influencers and that is because they influence people’s decisions, thoughts, opinions and what they buy.
This is one of the reasons why influencer marketing is so effective.
Since influencers are more trusted than brands, they can impact people in a completely different way. This obviously also includes convincing people to buy something. Something that brands, when telling people to buy something, have a hard time to do to a similar extent.
Therefore, brands can team up with influencers and in that way gain trust and more sales.
Also, it’s not only the message which the influencer shares that get trusted, but when a trusted influence recommends a brand, it means that some of the trust that the influencer has is transferred to you.
9. Measure results
Another of the many influencer marketing benefits is that it gives you the opportunity of measuring the results of your influencer marketing campaign.
Almost all social media platforms are offering some sort of analytics which helps you see what results you’re generating on social media. This means that influencers also have analytics for the posts that they upload on social media.
Marketers love to measure the ROI and see how well something performed, and a crucial part of this is obviously seeing the results that something generated.
The good news is that influencer marketing, since mainly taking place on social media, offers a number of different ways with which the results can be measured.
If an influencer has run a marketing campaign and you want to see the results, simply ask the influencer to send the statistics of the posts where they have promoted your product and brand.
“Brands saw an average ROI of $6.85 for every dollar invested in influencer marketing”
The thing is that far from all marketing methods and sources allow for detailed information about the results. The problem with this is that you’ll never be able to know how well your ad performed, and thus not be able to know if it is beneficial for you, and you will not either be able to know whether or not you need to improve or optimize the ad in order to get more bang for your buck.
Take a billboard for example. You might have an estimate of how many people pass that road every single month, but do you know how many actually look at the billboard? Do you know how many people carefully looked at your billboard and got enticed to learn more? The answer is obviously no, but for influencer marketing, the opportunities for measuring results are completely different.
This can also help you learn more about what works well and what works less well so you can improve your influencer marketing campaigns in the future.
10. Improves Brand Awareness
One of the most important benefits of influencer marketing is that it improves brand awareness.
Influencer marketing is, as mentioned earlier, a tremendous marketing method to build your audience and post your reach. But the truth is that when you’re doing something out of marketing purpose, it is seldom that it helps drive results within just one metric.
For example, if you work to increase sales, you obviously need to get people’s attention to get there, and getting people’s attention means increasing brand awareness, which also means that you’re increasing people’s trust in you, and so on, and so on…
While improving brand awareness might not be the number one metric that marketers focus the most on, it is almost always a by-product of working towards other marketing metrics.
11. Improves and enhances your content strategy
Normally, if you do it correctly when you partner with influencers and run an influencer marketing campaign, the influencer creates content for the campaign and promotion. They might create a video where they review your product, they might write their thoughts about it, or they might take some amazing photos of your product.
Either way, together with a properly set up influencer marketing campaign comes influencer-generated content – content that has been created about your brand, and by themselves.
Now, creating high-quality content is both demanding and time-consuming, and chances are, you’ve found yourself standing there without any content to share with your audience.
The best part is that when you partner with influencers, they create content which you later can use!
Want to know something even better?
The content that influencers create carries a lot more convincing power than any other professionally created content.
In fact, 85 percent of respondents in a study said that they find user-generated content (including influencer-generated content) more appealing and influential than brand-generated content. Furthermore, 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations over advertising – even if they don’t know them. This is great news, because not only is one of the benefits of influencer marketing that you get access to high-quality amazing content to fill the gap of your very own content strategy but at the same time, that content is far more influential and impactful than the content you’d create yourself.
12. A marketing tactic that actually brings value
For a long time, the vast majority of marketing has been focused on getting as much value from it as possible.
But now, more and more marketers have realized that the way you win is not by trying to steal people’s time and money as much as possible, but instead, ask the question how they can bring their audience value, and then leverage the reciprocity of humans to convince them to purchase.
A huge benefit of influencer marketing is, therefore, that it gives you the opportunity to provide value to people, rather than just asking them to by or running ads which provide no value and do nothing else than steal people’s time.
How does influencer marketing do this?
Well, the foundation of an influencer marketing campaign is the influencer and the content they create and share with their audience. People aren’t on social media because they are eager to have ads shoved in their face, but instead, they are on social media because they want to learn something, get inspired, have a good laugh, or just engage and interact with people.
Either way, in order to grow an audience on social media, like influencers have done, you need to have a value proposition, and that value proposition is the content which the influencer creates. The good news is that by partnering with influencers, you can have them create content that provides value to people, while, at the same time, promotes your brand.
13. Unaffected By Ad Blocker
Display advertising has steadily been decreasing in efficiency over the last couple of years. Not only have studies found that people have started to develop so-called ”banner blindness” where they can’t recall a banner ad they saw just seconds ago, but what’s more, more and more people are using adblocker technologies to prevent the ads from reaching them.
In fact, PageFair reports that over 615 million devices have been installed with some sort of ad-blocking technology. The ad blocking technology is also growing quickly.
In fact, in 2016 alone, it had a 30% growth rate. This means that it is getting harder to reach people through banner ads.
With the decreased effectiveness of display ads, marketers need to find new ways to reach their customers, and influencer marketing remains unaffected by ad blocking technologies.
14. Influencer marketing works for all businesses and industries
The good news is that influencer marketing has found to be effective no matter what company you are, and no matter which industry you’re in.
Today, there are influencers in virtually any niche and industry, who have established themselves as industry leaders, and this means that people in your industry are turning to that person for advice and inspiration.
As a result, this gives brands the opportunity to partner with influencers to reach their target audience and prospects, no matter what brand they are.
This is one of the most important benefits of influencer marketing since it contributes to the huge growth of the industry, with so many brands being able to, and are leveraging influencer marketing in their strategy.
15. Highly Targeted Traffic
If you’re striving to drive traffic to your site, influencer marketing is a great way to do so.
What’s more, even if you’re not necessarily focusing on driving traffic to your site, getting traffic still remains a precondition for sales online, as, inevitably, if you have an online shop on your site, people need to actually get there in order to buy.
While many brands strive to get more people to their website, what’s even more important is who visits your website.
It’s important to have in mind that you want people to visit your website to ultimately get marketing benefits from it – most often sales.
Website traffic in itself is just a vanity metric, but it is what getting website traffic leads to that is interesting from a marketing standpoint.
The good news is that influencer marketing helps drive targeted traffic to your site. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you get if the people you drive to your site aren’t relevant, because they won’t buy from you anyway.
But that’s not all, if you get lots of untargeted traffic to your site, people will come to your site, not find it appealing, and then quickly leave. This will lead to high bounce rates on your site, and this is something that affects your site negatively in search engine rankings.
With influencer marketing, you gain traffic from the influencer who leverages their marketing channels. Their messages reach their audience, and if you partner with an individual within your target audience, that means you’ll be reaching people who are relevant to your brand. and thus translates to targeted traffic.
16. Influencer marketing is not as pushy as other methods
This has a lot to do with the fact that influencer marketing actually provides value, as mentioned earlier – something that many other marketing methods do.
Influencer marketing is still focused on providing people with value, for example, by providing them with tips, inspiration, advice, or anything else, and at the same time promoting your brand.
Since the posts from the influencer also provide value, the ad itself doesn’t come off as pushy and thus tends to drive better results.
17. Influencer marketing actually drives sales
This is definitely one of the most important influencer marketing benefits, considering the fact that the number one thing that brands want to achieve with most of their marketing efforts is more sales.
A study found that brands are making $7.65 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing on an average. This obviously means that in terms of driving conversions, influencer marketing works, and it works tremendously well. Furthermore, the study also tells us that 81 percent of consumers frequently make purchases of products shared on social media.
More and more people turn to social media for advice and inspiration on their purchase decisions, and many times, they turn to industry experts – influencers for advice.
The bottom line is that if you want to use marking that proves itself able to actually drive sales, influencer marketing is a great way.
Conclusion
As you can see, the benefits of influencer marketing are many.
Normally, when talking about influencer marketing and the benefits of it, we tend to only hear that it is a great tool for driving sales, but the thing is that it can do so much more than that, but if you aren’t aware of what it can do, not only will you underestimate it, but you’ll also most likely neglect it in marketing, and maybe most importantly, not measure results from your influencer marketing campaigns within all metrics, but instead only focus on a few.
Which of these influencer marketing benefits were most surprising to you? Did you know of them all?
Let us know in the comment section below!
