Influencer marketing taps into the power of writers and vloggers who are already well-known by your audience and uses their influence to spread the word about your business. These days, it’s not enough to have a cool digital marketing campaign. What’s important now is the growing significance of influencer marketing and how it’s helping marketers reach target audiences in a more powerful, dependable, and at low cost.
Let’s dig deep into what influencer marketing really is and how it may transform your brand.
WHAT IS INFLUENCER MARKETING?
Influencer marketing covers several steps to create branded user-generated content that supports your digital marketing goals. These include identifying key individuals that echo with your target audiences, marketing your brand to those influencers, activating those influencers to spread your brand’s message through their own networks, and finally, turning those influencers into loyal brand advocates.
FIVE REASONS YOU SHOULD GET STARTED WITH INFLUENCER MARKETING
1. Builds Consumer Trust
92% of people trust personal recommendations over brands – even if they don’t know the individual making the recommendation.
81% of people are influenced by their friends’ social media posts.
71% of customers report having an improved perception of a brand when they read positive reviews on social media.
The key to achieving this is building authentic relationships, creating high-quality content, and having a focused strategy.
2. Circumvents Ad Blockers
The average American is exposed to 5,000 ads per day! How annoying is that. This leads to a lower recall of marketing messages. In 2015, 47% of online customers used ad block technology, in response to dissatisfaction with digital advertising. What does this mean for your brand? Influencer marketing circumvents these frustrations by delivering a highly-visible and relevant message from a trusted source.
3. Meets Marketing Goals Effectively and Affordably
Major challenges affecting marketers include questions of attribution, high prices, and market saturation. Influencer marketing can easily be evaluated using web tracking and focusing on deeper engagements, such as engagement rates, comments, and sentiment, as well as clicks and conversions. It also generates more than twice the sales than that of display advertising, and those customers have a 37% higher retention rate than other acquisition channels. Plus, email and influencer marketing provide the most cost-effective channels for brands, however those prices are rising as popularity increases. If you’re not activating influencer marketing for your brand, you’re missing out on the fastest growing channel for customer acquisition, surpassing email, organic search, paid search, and display.
4. Targets Audiences Accurately
51% of marketers report that they gain better customers through influencer marketing than other channels and reach varied and diverse audiences. Beyond just B2C marketing, 84% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with a referral.
A well-crafted influencer identification strategy will yield the strongest return. Different product categories have different influencers, usually with an overlap of less than 15%, so it’s important to select influencers accurately and appropriately.
5. Boosts SEO
Beyond meeting immediate marketing goals, an influencer marketing strategy can significantly boost your brand’s search rankings. Customers who seek information on social media will also use search engines during their decision making process.
According to The Social Media Revolution, user generated social posts account for 25 percent of search results for the world’s top 20 brands. The more people mention your brand on social media, the more popular and relevant you will be on Google and other search engines.
Precog Media 