Influencer marketing has almost appeared like a star on the sky at the speed of light. In just a few years, it went from something that most people didn’t even know about, to playing an important role in their marketing strategy.
Marketing with the help of social media influencers is getting more and more popular and according to a study by Emarketer, 86 percent of marketers that used influencer marketing in the last year are looking to double their investment the next year.
Brands wouldn’t use influencer marketing if it didn’t prove to be effective, but it clearly does. And if you’re not convinced, you can look at the statistics of influencer marketing.
The marketing landscape is changing. Going through a digital revolution, some might call it. More and more businesses are abandoning traditional marketing such as TV, print, and radio, and moving their marketing budgets to more targeted and effective marketing methods such as influencer marketing, which gives a better band for the buck.
There’s a reason why the ad spend on traditional media is decreasing for every year that passes by, and it is because of the simple reason that it doesn’t prove to be effective.
Sure, there are still businesses which are holding on to the old, and are still pouring millions and millions of dollars into traditional marketing – and thus throwing plenty of the money in the trash, but when they realize what they are doing, as new businesses are able to do more with smaller marketing budgets, and things start to get shaky for the established bureaucratic businesses, things will change.
By now, influencer marketing shouldn’t have gone unnoticed to anyone. It started with social media, and businesses understanding that if you want to stay relevant in the 21st century, and reach the target audience where they spend their time, and eventually, businesses started understanding that they could leverage people with large audiences who are trusted individuals and which people look up to, to spread awareness about the business for them.
More businesses are aware of the benefits of social media marketing and are therefore putting more time and energy into creating a good social media marketing strategy.
There are countless benefits of influencer marketing, and thus reasons you should be using it, but in this article, we’ll dig into the top benefits of influencer marketing and what it helps you do.
1. Their opinion is trusted
The number one reason that influencer marketing is effective is that the words and opinions of influencers are trusted. What does this mean?
Well, the term influencer derives from something, and that is that they influence people. And they do so because influencers spend most of their time building relationships and trust with their followers. The big power of influencer marketing is that influencers have more trust that brands, they can affect their followers to buy something in a way that brands have a very hard time to do.
Influencers have trust, are considered go-to leaders, and are experts in their industry, and as a result, people turn to them and trust their words and opinions. Not all people influence us equally much, and it is especially the people that we look up to who tend to influence us the most. Which is exactly why influencers have such great influence on people. And as a result, they can influence people’s decisions, thoughts, opinions and what they buy.
And if you can connect the dots, brands can leverage this trust and influence that they can only dream of having themselves, by teaming up with influencers and in that way gain trust and more sales.
Most influencers only choose to work with brands that they truly believe in and like, and when this is the case, the marketing will be transparent and genuine and this is something that is noticed by the influencer’s followers.
2. They can create unique content
This is maybe not the top benefit of influencer marketing, but it is definitely something that you shouldn’t neglect.
Not all influencers create their own content when it comes to brand collaborations but a lot of influencers do.
If you are struggling to come up with new ideas of content to post, influencer marketing is a great way to get new, unique and fresh content of your products. If you’re a marketer who creates the content, you know that constantly creating high-quality and appealing content is hard. Plus, if you’re constantly creating the content, there’s a great risk that your content will become one-sided and boring after a while.
Not only does an influencer share a piece of content on their social media when they endorse and promote your brand, but you will also get new and fresh pieces of content that you can take advantage of in your own content marketing. Creating content is both time-consuming and hard, and so teaming up with influences to create new and unique content is a great way to blow life in the content you share on social media and that you use in your own marketing.
Also, if you partnered up with a well-known influencer, for example, had them model your clothes, people will see that the content has been created about them or of them, and when you then use that piece of content in your own marketing, there’s a big chance that your audience will be impacted more by that particular piece of content compared to the rest.
So to sum it up- often, influencers’ content generate better results and can have a greater impact than that of a business.
3. They reach your target audience
This is a major benefit of influencer marketing and a reason why it drives such incredible results. Influencer marketing is extremely targeted, and when a marketing method is targeted, it means that businesses only reach (and pay to reach) the people who are truly relevant to them.
Previously, TV marketing was a very popular way of marketing but as the number of people watching it has decreased, brands have to take new approaches to reach their audience and allocate more of their budget to digital marketing. Plus, as businesses started realizing that because of the limited targeting on TV, the ROI is very low compared to other marketing methods, it just doesn’t make sense to continue using it.
With influencer marketing, the power is in your hands. You choose which influencer you work with, and, therefore, you choose how you target your audience with the campaign.
When it comes to advertising on TV, your ad is very poorly targeting your right audience. The price of the ad is based on the number of views but the fact is that only a small portion of the total amount of people who are seeing it is genuinely interested in your brand and would actually buy your products.
This is where influencer marketing has an enormous leverage. With the possibility of doing extremely targeted marketing, the ROI is often very high compared to other marketing methods, which also means that the money you invest often result in a higher return. This together with the fact that people actually trust the recommendations that influencers give results in good results for businesses.
With influencer marketing, statistics have found that for every $1 businesses invest, they get $6.5 back. I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty good return on investment.
4. Their followers look up to them
This is a bit similar to point number one but not quite. The difference between “their opinion is trusted” and “their followers look up to them” is existent.
When an influencer is trusted, it means that people listen to them. When their audience looks up to them, it means that they want to be like them in one way or another. And both of these things are very effective things in influencer marketing.
An influencer is not only a thought leader which people listen to and trust because they are seen as an expert.
When people look up to an influencer, it means that they want to be like them to some extent. Meaning that they take inspiration in what they wear and what products they use.
When an influencer shares a post when they are using a product and giving it good reviews, their followers will also want it because their “idol” recommends it.
In most cases, influencers only want to market brands with products that they really believe in and would actually buy even if they wouldn’t get paid to do it.
The reason for this is that if an influencer would market a product that they don’t really believe in, to their loyal fans, their credibility would decrease and it would harm their reputation.
In short, influencer marketing can be a more affordable option of fan-based marketing compared to asking celebrities.
Social media influencers are a bit like celebrities. Often, a lot of their followers are looking up to them.
Because the followers of the influencers are looking up to them, they also want to be like them, dress like them etc. This means that if an influencer is making a post when they are endorsing your brand and using your products, it will leave a big impact on the followers and most importantly- the followers who are looking up to the influencer.
5. You can measure results
Don’t underestimate the power of measuring results from your marketing campaigns.
Influencer marketing gives you the opportunity of measuring the results of your campaigns. With some marketing methods, there’s little to no way of measuring the results that the campaign generated, and this is, of course, something you want to take advantage of.
Almost all social media platforms are offering some sort of insight statistics service to see the results from a post. When you’ve completed a campaign, just ask the influencer to send the statistics after they’ve marketed your product and note the results.
This can also help you learn more about what works well and what works better so you can improve your influencer marketing campaigns in the future accordingly.
You can’t do this every time everywhere but often (if you ask for it), you can get access to the results of the promotion campaign to see how it did.
Long story short, compared to the more classic ways of marketing such as TV or billboards, you now have a completely different way of seeing the statistics of your marketing campaign and what results are generated. But whatever you do, don’t stare yourself blind at vanity metrics such as the number of likes. Instead, focus on more important metrics that are actually relevant for the campaign itself. Go down on a micro level and look at the reach and every comment that people have left. Were they impacted by the campaign? What did they think?
6. Improve Your Search Ranking
Influencer marketing can actually be used to improve your search engine ranking, and this is great news if you’re working with just that.
It’s easy to believe that the only influencers that exist right now are Instagram influencers, however, blogging influencers are very common as well and these are people that you should focus on targeting if you’re looking to improve the SEO of your website.
By letting high-authority influencers promote your website and products on their blog, you will get quality backlinks from websites that are trusted by Google and other search engines.
These valuable backlinks will help you rank higher in search engine results, meaning more website visitors and in the long run more sales.
This can only be done with the help of bloggers who have their own website since links from social media platforms have no-follow links.
The way influencer marketing on blogs can improve your search ranking on Google is that backlinks from high-authority websites are favored by Google in the form of better ranking. When one website links to another, Google sees this link as a recommendation. And if a trusted and authority person recommends someone, it weights heavier than if an unknown person does it.
By getting links from high-authority website, you will not only get direct traffic from the links themselves but you will also slowly but surely crawl higher and higher in Google’s ranking- meaning that your website visitors will increase, and the results from a campaign like this will continue to be generated long after the campaign has ended.
An example of a company that has leveraged this is eSports betting apps, leveraging influencers to build tons of backlinks. As a result, their search rankings have skyrocketed.
7. Grow your own audience
Far too many people see things in the short term. In other words, they run a campaign, then it’s over. But as a marketer, you also want to look at the results that are generated and can be generated a little more long-term.
In fact, influencer marketing has a huge power when it comes to helping brands grow their audience on social media.
Everyone wants to grow their audience these days in order to increase their reach, impact and ultimately increase sales thanks to a big following. But with the competitive landscape on social media, this is getting increasingly difficult.
The good news is that influencers are helping brands achieve this. Most brands partner up with influencers that have a larger following than themselves in order to reach more people and get better results. This means that with the help of influencer marketing, not only will you get an increased awareness, but many will start to follow you as well.
With the fact that influencer marketing is so targeted, there’s a big chance that many people will find your brand interesting. The best part about this is that through these followers, you can enjoy the results from the campaign long after the campaign has ended, by reaching them time and time over with your posts.
8. Saves time
Even if it might not seem like it, influencer marketing actually saves time compared to other forms of marketing.
This is because influencer marketing campaigns basically run themselves. The only thing you as a marketer needs to do is find the influencers, build a relationship with them, send them products/pay, and lastly, confirm the content that the influencers are going to post so it aligns with your brand’s values. In other words, the influencer does the majority of the work.
Most of the time, you don’t even create the content for an influencer marketing campaign! That’s a huge difference from television ads where you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to create the piece of content. And on top of that, you then need to pay to have it broadcasted.
9. It’s cheap
Social media influencer marketing is extremely cheap. Sure, when you hear that the top celebrities charge millions of dollars for a single post on Instagram, it may sound expensive – and it may be, but have in mind that “expensive” is relative, and what I mean here isn’t necessarily that it cost little money to run influencer marketing, but rather that you get a lot of results from your invested money. For example, if you would get countless new customers by setting up a small venue, it would be seen as a cheap investment, right?
The best part though is that influencer marketing can also be cheap monetary wise as well. And this is so great because it gives essentially all business the opportunity to use influencer marketing and leverage it to their advantage. While people like Kylie Jenner charge millions of dollars for a simple promotional post, micro-influencers with far fewer followers, yet people who are targeted, relevant, and extremely engaged, may satisfy with a product sample, and others may satisfy with a few hundred dollars.
The spectrum is very broad with influencer marketing, and that is great as it enables all businesses no matter their budget to leverage it.
Just read these statistics of influencer marketing and see how great of an ROI it generates:
- 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 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 the following year
10.Creates genuine reviews of your products
Humans are not stupid when it comes to detecting biased recommendations. Our bullshit detectors are more fine-tuned than ever because we have been so used to being attacked by different advertisements and promotions no matter where we go on the internet.
As I said earlier, an influencer is a trusted individual who people listen to, and the thing is that for influencers, their reputation and their trust is all they got. As a result, they are very reluctant to put their trust on the line, and therefore, most people will only say yes to a partnership if it truly resonates with them, and this is what makes the product reviews from influencers to genuine and authentic. Because they are.
The review is actually their real opinion rather than just some made-up story of how good your product is when the real truth is that they don’t even use it. People can often sense when this is the case and the review quickly becomes less trustworthy.
The genuine review is also an opportunity for you as a brand to improve your product and also use it as a testimonial on your website. If you have worked with a highly reputable influencer, that testimonial can have a huge impact even long after the partnership has ended. And this is, of course, something that you can use in your own marketing campaigns in the future.
11.Non-stop marketing
As a brand, you never want your marketing to stop. And ran correctly, it doesn’t have to.
Social media is never sleeping. There’s always someone, somewhere talking about your brand on the internet.
With the help of influencers, you can create a movement which your brand is part of.
Influencer marketing helps create that movement and makes your brand a natural discussion subject which in the long run also increases the word of mouth marketing. Furthermore, if you run campaign together with your influencer, such as a giveaway, that campaign will work even when you don’t.
Conclusion
It shouldn’t have gone unnoticed to anyone that influencer marketing is an incredibly effective marketing method that has the power to generate incredible results.
More people than ever are spending time on social media, while they’re abandoning traditional media channels. As a result, businesses need to be where their target audience is in order to remain relevant. But simply setting up a page and waiting for the results to roll in is difficult. As such, taking help from trusted and respected industry experts and thought leaders is a great way to spread awareness about your brand, gain traction, and get out there.
