Influencer marketing isn’t new, it’s been around for years, but lately, it’s packing a powerful punch with brands and consumers.
What is Influencer Marketing? It’s a collaboration between an influencer and a brand – where the brand engages the influencer to promote their products or services to the influencer’s audience. The brand’s intention is to grow awareness of the brand and increase sales.
When done correctly, influencer marketing can be a powerful marketing tool, and with 49% of consumers depending on recommendations from their favorite influencers – it’s kind of a no-brainer in our book.
With this being said, we wanted to take a deeper dive into why your company should use influencer marketing and the benefits that come along with it.
5 Reasons Why Your Company Should Use Influencer Marketing
To Create Engagement
If you’re looking to engage with a new audience through a trusted resource, influencer marketing is how you do it. Creating a campaign with an influencer to do a review or have an experience around your product or services – allows for them to create content which will spark engagement with their audience. Thus putting your brand in front of their followers with endorsing words. It’s a great way to create brand awareness and create conversation.
It’s worth noting here that brands shouldn’t be fooled by influencers with large followings. You should be looking at the number of likes and comments that their content receives. Do they have a strong engagement rate? Having your brand showcased to 300,000 Instagram followers is all well and good, but if it doesn’t generate a single sale – was it worth it?
Sometimes brands will see more success with micro-influencers (between 10,000 and 50,000 followers) and nano-influencers (under 10,000 followers). Before engaging with an influencer, be sure to look at their target audience and their engagement rates, and make your decision from there.
Increased Sales
At the end of the day, it all comes down to ROI. One of the main reasons to invest in influencer marketing is to boost your revenues. With 60% of consumers having been influenced by social media or a blog while shopping, influencer marketing can be a far more effective way of advertising than more traditional ad spends.
Create Content
It’s not all about selling products right now – it’s also about the long game with creating quality content that fits with your brand’s guidelines and narrative. Our CEO, Emma Loggins, has always said that great marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all, it tells a story. Creating a narrative around a product, service or brand gives birth to a more organic relationship between a brand and a consumer. This is how brand loyalty is born.
Influencers create content for your brand that helps tell this story – not only to their audience but also to your brand’s existing audience. Your brand is able to re-propose this content for social media (and even other forms of advertising), thus giving your social media department fresh content to work with that they know will have high levels of engagement.
Fun fact: 51% of marketers admit that influence-created content outperforms brand-created content.
SEO
Influencer marketing can also help to boost your SEO by generating natural backlinks to your site from influencers’ websites or blogs. Backlinks tell Google that the sites linking to you, deem you as an authority on the subject matter at hand – which can help increase your domain authority. All of these components go into Google’s algorithm – ultimately determining where your site ranks.
No Ad Blockers
Still running display ad campaigns or using Google Adwords? If these campaigns are working for you and producing the results you want, then that’s great! But the reality is that 26% of desktop users and 15% of mobile consumers use ad blockers to remove ads for their online experience. That’s a huge chunk of your audience that you’re not reaching.
It’s a huge problem for brands – and an even bigger problem for publishers who make their revenue off of these ads. A good way to work around this challenge is to engage with influencer marketing – you can directly reach your target demographic without extra hurdles.
Need a little help and guidance with how to best use influencer marketing for your brand? Reach out to us for a free consultation! We’d love to help!