Influencer Marketing 101: 7 Benefits for Your Business
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is fast becoming an important part of the digital marketing mix. It is when businesses or brands work with influential people in their industry to produce content marketing that ultimately has a wider reach. An influencer is really anyone who can assist your business in getting more clients.
With the rise of social media, consumers now look at fellow consumers to inform their purchasing decisions. Rather than looking at brands, they look at each other and at their favourite personalities as influencers, who amass colossal followings on YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and other platforms.
92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.
Benefits to Working With Influencers
Connecting with industry influencers can have so many benefits for your business/brand.
1. Increase brand awareness
Gain exposure for your brand with an established audience that is already engaged and waiting for content related to your industry.
2. Expand your reach and build trust
Consumers trust the opinion of influencers they follow on social. Collaborating with influencers gives you access to their follower base and an easier path to building credibility with a much larger audience.
3. Easily measure the effectiveness of campaigns
Influencer marketing and brand ambassador programs outweigh any other media type for metrics that count, like engagements, trial, and purchase.
4. Negate adblocking
With 47% of consumers now using adblocking, native advertising, like product placement in videos and collaboration with social media influencers, skirts around this issue.
5. Good bang for your buck
Advertisers earn an average of $6.85 for every $1 they spend on campaigns, even higher in the food and travel industries. Influencer marketing definitely pays off.
6. Improve SEO
Working with influencers offers opportunites for link-building and helps to improve search rankings.
7. Stay out of the limelight
Thankfully, influencers take an up-front role with social media. They can teach consumers about your products, counteract negative feedback with positive feedback and help with user-generated content. Rather than being scrutinized under the public microscope, you can quietly focus on your business in the background.
How To Make a Successful Connection
Here’s a quick tip to help you starting out:
Make it personal. Do your research. Check out their social pages, visit their blogs so when you make contact you can make a comment on one of their most recent posts.
Don’t be one of the many people hounding an influencer to work with them, like a page, join their cause, without getting to know them and what they’re about. If you invest some time in them, it is more likely they will invest in you in return.
Agencies like The Shelf, use data to match you with the influencers who will deliver the best results.
Infographic
To be sure you’re getting the most out of your influencer marketing, check out the infographic below.
Source: The Shelf
This article was originally published on Miss Nicolina’s blog.
