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What Is Influencer Marketing and What Are Benefits of Influencer Marketing

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing. It includes affirmation and product/service advertisements by influencers, individuals, and organizations that have a perceived degree of awareness or social impact in their field.

Influencer marketing is marketing to, with, and through influencers to drive brand messages to your and their target audiences.

Influencer marketing is similar to word-of-mouth marketing, but it doesn’t rely solely on specific recommendations.

Influencers can come from a wide range of places. Any individual, group, brand, or place could potentially be an influencer.

Engaged audiences typically follow these content creators. Advertising to them across different social media platforms enables your company to extend the scope, improve brand awareness, and generate new leads for your sales funnel through buyer personas.

You can use influencer marketing as either a standalone tool or as a means to improve your other marketing campaigns.

We will dive further into what influencer marketing will bring to the company via its key benefits.

10 Influencer Marketing Benefits

  • Increase brand awareness and reach
  • Build credibility and trust
  • Enrich your content strategy
  • Win-win long-term partnerships
  • Boost SEO, ROI, and bottom line
  • Drive purchases decisions
  • Increase sales
  • Cost-effective & Saves Time
  • Unlimited Sharing Potential On Social Platforms
  • Suitable for any Business

Influencer Marketing Increases Brand Awareness & Reach

Most influencers in social networks have millions of viewers, including more than 2.5 billion followers of Instagram’s 50 most followed influencers. Based on that, influencer marketing, in which you partner with influencers whose niche suits your products or services, will bring an excellent opportunity for you to approach millions of potential consumers.

Heavy-handed promotions and sales campaigns are simply an outdated model for brands. It is becoming more sophisticated to advertise with influencers who can seamlessly combine brand campaigns into their style and expression.

Influencers make the advertising activities more engaging and genuine for a target audience, who are often overloaded with tons of commercial advertisements every day.

Influencer marketing helps you gain more visibility when such a person recommends your products or services or mentions your brands, which not only extend your scope but also increase your brand awareness.

Influencer marketing enables marketers to reach critical Millennials and Gen Z audiences, 85% of whom are highly open to information about specific products via social platforms.

In comparison to other social media marketing methods, influencer marketing offers brands a viable, unobtrusive way to communicate with customers regardless of the widespread adoption of ad blockers as well as a general distrust of overt ads.

Without the hindrance of AdBlock apps and extensions, social users can learn more about your brand story and what you are offering. It means that you need to create fresh-looking content and format design in delivering the message to grab people’s attention. And the key to maximizing this strategy is ensuring that your content is meaningful and brings value to both influencers and followers.

Enhance Credibility & Trust

Influencers are experts in their field, which is why their followers trust them and have influencers have considerable influence on them. They have built an inspiring and respectful relationship with their fans. Therefore, people believe their opinions and recommendations. These recommendations won’t make your influencer marketing campaign feel like advertising anymore, meaning that people are more open to your brand than usual.

Studies have shown that 75% of YouTube’s viewers appreciate YouTube’s featuring genuine, relatable, and reliable people, and the number of teenage subscribers who are likely to connect to the influencers, rather than traditional celebrities, is 70%. And 60% of users confirm that they prefer the reviews of their favorite YouTubers to mainstream TV and movie stars.

Enriched Content Strategy

It is not simple to continually produce fresh and entertaining content. Sometimes you are out of ideas and feeling stuck, and that is the time influencer marketing can help fill the gaps in your content schedule.

Influencers who are familiar with producing engaging and quality content to interact with their followers daily will bring significant benefits to you if you can sign an agreement of content co-creation deals.

Content distribution, an essential part of content marketing, must be understood thoroughly and considered carefully before working with influencers. Even if you have not come up with new ideas, you should prepare for a detailed content distribution strategy through which your company and influencers know what objectives your brand has.

There are plenty of real-life examples of brands collaborating with different types of influencers. The typical one is the case of a well-known lifestyle blogger of HBFIT named Hannah Bronfman, who writes about health, beauty, fitness, and partners with Face Gym, a local facial treatment center.

The brand provides Hannah with information about the studio, photos, trial services, and coupon codes so she can help people learn about them and their offerings. Meanwhile, the content, in this situation, is Hannah’s articles, is originated from Hannah, which means she is helping Face Gym to produce promoted content to deliver to the potential customer via her channel.

Win-Win Long-term Partnerships

Undeniably, it is all about choosing the right partner to build successful relationships. You should build partnerships that increase sales for you and your partners by selecting influencers based on their field and the audiences they can influence.

Launching an influencer marketing campaign is all about beginning and developing positive relationships. Brands can build durable and long-lasting partnerships that lead to long-term success through maintaining effective collaboration with influencers.

Brands no longer hire influencers for one-off campaigns but rather for long-term partnerships. According to a study, roughly 50% of advertisers work in six-month-or-more partnerships with influencers, therein, 37% claim that they collaborate with brands for a longer-term, compared with one-off campaigns.

A lasting influencer partnership between organizations and influencers saves time, resources, and money, and it also helps establish credibility and have a more substantial effect on the company’s audience.

Overall, this is a win-win collaboration as both sides have a stake in the result. As you partner with the correct influencer who appeals to the same market as yours, profit comes immediately from influencer marketing.

Benefits such as shares, reposts, and retweets multiply over time, providing long-lasting brand awareness for your campaigns, which reexposes your content repeatedly.

Influencer Marketing Boosts SEO, ROI, and Bottom Line

Influencer marketing help boost your SEO, ROI, and bottom line significantly.

SEO

Influencer marketing benefits, directly and indirectly, your search engine optimization.

There are 86% of advertisers using influencer marketing to empower their marketing campaigns, and 57% state its performance exceeds the other brand-created content. As influencers have a large number of loyal followers, the partnership with them will help you reach more audience rather than doing SEO activities only.

As links are one of Google’s most important search ranking criteria, there will be more chances for you to build backlinks as you hit a wider audience through influencer marketing activities. Although those links are flagged not to impact search ranking, there is still an indirect effect on your SEO as they help to build brand awareness and drive traffic.

According to an analysis from Quicksprout, it proved that social media interactions could, indirectly or directly, enhance SEO signals. As you engage with new social communities, there is an opportunity for you to get additional followers and interactions, which will lead to additional organic traffic, backlinks, and other metrics that progress SEO.

Generally, creating more and more content through influencer marketing will give you more chances to rank your brand higher in Google search results.

Learn more about search engine optimization.

ROI And Bottom Line

Influencer marketing allows big brands to attract more customers and enables small businesses to scale up by getting them more visibility, which provides higher ROI than other marketing channels.

According to a study carried out by Mediakix in 2019, approximately 50% of marketers state that influencer marketing’s ROI is higher than other marketing platforms’, and about 41% say returns are equivalent to other channels.

Branding or engagements-focused influencer marketing activities produce eight times more ROI than other campaigns. Proved from actual business results, the influencer marketing’s profit surpasses its costs, which is why it delivers a very high ROI and bottom line ultimately.

A study from Burst Media pointed out that an average of $6.85 earned for every $1 spent on media for an influencer marketing plan.

Drive Purchase Decisions

Influencers drive the customer’s purchase decision-making process. People respect and trust their favorite influencers, which leads them to have a more positive reception to brands.

Numerous studies point out that influencers can affect a customer’s purchase decision-making at all levels. According to DMI Blog statistics, 49% of respondents reported that they had made purchase decisions based on influencers’ referrals.

For teenagers, it is 70%. After seeing products/services on Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram, about 40% surveyed people purchased it.

Six out of ten Youtube users will make purchase decisions based on their favorite content creator’s suggestions, said Think With Google.

Influencer Marketing Increases Sales

One of the top three overall goals that marketers aim for in influencer marketing is generating sales and conversions, said 64% of surveyed people in 2019 study conducted by Mediakix.

According to researches, for every $1 they spend on sending a message to the customer via influencers, companies earn about $18. And this number can be higher for many other brands.

As mentioned above, influencers have a significant impact on the purchase decision-making process of consumers. Roughly 40% of survey respondents reported that they made a purchase shortly after seeing their favorite influencer use a product or service.

The impact of influencers is why it is exceptionally viable for businesses to create, manage, and create messages to be delivered to the audience via influencer to generate a massive uptick in sales.

Cost-effective

Businesses find it harder to promote products or services as paid ad costs keep rising, in which influencer marketing can help keep the costs down.

In comparison with other forms of advertising, doing advertising through influencers is relatively reasonable. The cost of an influencer largely depends on the size of the audience, and the niche in question.

Influencer marketing opens up a whole new opportunity for brands to compete with a more efficient and optimized strategy on social media sites such as Youtube and Instagram.

As mentioned above, influencer marketing’s benefits outweighing the cost spent on it, which will help you earn huge ROI’s, boost sales and save more money.

A common way lowering the cost with influencer marketing is by negotiating proper affiliate deals in which the influencer gets performance-based commissions.

Influencer Marketing Saves Time

You can shorten the process of building your fan base since you collaborate with existing players in the industry.

To create an advertising campaign, it takes you considerable time to produce the images, duplicate them, and schedule the ads across platforms. The partnership with influencers will, indeed, help you outsource everything and save you lots of time.

Influencer marketing will get your brand promoted daily on different channels by popular people. Especially in a moment of market stagnation, influencer-created content is becoming increasingly prevailing.

Many influencers produce content from their homes or their studios, which, in turn, an influencer marketing partnership, will help brands to keep making fresh content remotely at all times.

Moreover, branded content that is created by influencers may also be reposted or repurposed by companies for their marketing campaigns. This ability might save you a considerable amount of time and money. New reports indicate that, through involving creators, 41% of advertisers have saved budget on content production.

In addition to this, you can use the feedback received from audiences to design campaigns to retarget a specific segment or group of customers.

Unlimited Sharing Potential On Social Platforms

As influencers interact with their fans nearly every day, they are proficient in engaging with your, as well as their target audience, on the content they share about your brand and products or services.

The easier it is for an influencer to use the content on their blogs, Facebook fan pages, and other platforms, the easier it is to share said content widely.

There are many ways influencers can help brands to spread the messages, for example, a post on Facebook, inspiring storylines on Instagram, a review video on Youtube, promotion codes, store’s links, and more.

Influencers’ audience will be loyal and trust them and are active on most of the social channels the influencer uses. Multi-channel audiences lead to a rapidly spreading of the influencers’ content, which conveys the brand’s stories and messages.

As mentioned above, the more shares or any other interactions brands have on social networks, the higher ranking you get in Google search results.

Therefore, the viral potential of collaboration with well-known people all over popular sites will expand the brand’s message to even wider audiences. Shareable content will quickly raise your brand recognition, maximize ROI, and continuously attract attention.

Influencer Marketing Is Suitable for any Business

Influencers are typically experts in their fields, for example, health, fitness, traveling, cuisine, beauty, business, technology, science, etc.

No matter how big you are and what industry you are in, there is always room for everyone, as long as you identify the influencers who are most suited to your needs.

Businesses might use different influencer marketing strategies to communicate and collaborate with influencers effectively.

For example, an optimized, low-cost strategy is more suitable for small businesses. At the same time, a comprehensive plan which requires higher investment to work with celebrities or other authorized brands will be a wiser choice for larger companies.

For instance, Hugo Boss (BOSS) – a German luxury fashion house, chooses to partner with Chris Hemsworth, a celebrity with 42.5 million followers on Instagram. Through partnering with Chris and having him as a brand ambassador for years, BOSS has been able to advertise its broad range of products, from clothing and accessories to footwear and fragrances.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

When Chris shares photos of himself wearing BOSS suits, it implants in his followers and potential customers’ minds that if they want to be a gentleman like Chris Hemsworth, they have to use BOSS products.

Conclusion

With the rapid development of social media and word-of-mouth marketing, influencer marketing has become more and more popular for brands. Through understanding deeply what influencer marketing is, how it works, and what it brings back, you will have a comprehensive view of one of the most popular marketing methods for the future.

Influencers offer you an ideal way to meet new customers, raise brand recognition, and boost conversions via their daily-engaged content and unlimited sharing potentials from their fans.

By choosing the most suitable influencers and developing an effective influencer marketing strategy, you will be able to leverage your social media marketing campaigns to a different level, especially startup brands who have been struggling to gain traction.

Understanding how fast influencer marketing can achieve your online goals and then applying it to your other campaigns will get more results.

Influencer marketing returns more than it costs you, as long as you can see its potential and collaborate with the right influencers in an effective digital marketing strategy.