Much like the traditional practice of having famous celebrities be brand ambassadors, or asking celebrities to promote a brand, influencer marketing works on the same core principle. It uses an influencer’s passionate social media following to endorse a particular product or service from a brand.
Considering how integrated social media has become in everyone’s lives, the role that influencer marketing has to play in a brand’s social media marketing strategy has drastically risen. People regularly see posts of their favourite influencers, and thus they develop a form of trust and emotional attachment towards them. As a result, they’re willing to try out a particular product or service from an unknown brand if an influencer recommends them.
Influencer marketing has one of the biggest return on investment of any marketing channels. Additionally, it is also extremely cost-effective. Around 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations for their purchases, with 40% of those consumers following through on the purchase.
Let’s look at a few reasons why your brand should develop an influencer marketing strategy to maximise your social media potential and not miss out on its brilliant benefits.
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Increases Brand Awareness and Brand Value
Source: Growwire
The largest benefit of influencer marketing is the exposure that it provides by legitimising your brand in the eyes of an influencer’s audience. Influencer marketing excels at bringing a large amount of brand awareness to your brand since influencers can showcase you to their huge following.
But exposure is one thing, you could use influencer marketing to bring value to your consumers. You can make your products/services look more enticing by creating exclusive offers for an influencer’s audience. Your brand’s influencer could also review a product or service that you have to offer.
If you happen to have the resources you could collaborate with influencers on a few of your projects and promote them together. This will make it look unique and look less promotional, unlike the generic ads that influencers subject us to all the time.
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Extremely Cost-Effective and huge ROI
Source: DigitalMarketingInstitute
With around 22% of marketers calling influencer marketing their cheapest channel, it is the most cost-effective marketing channel tied only to email marketing. Apart from being cost-effective, it also has a huge return on investment with businesses generating around 6.50 dollars for every 1 dollar spent in influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing drives a large number of leads and sales among an influencer’s audience. Not only that but customers satisfied with your brand will recommend it to others, thereby generating organic growth and word of mouth. The influencer marketing industry is said to be worth $13.8 Billion in 2021. Moreover, around 62% of brands intend to increase the amount of money they spend on it. Therefore, brands need to be at the top of their game to not miss out on any untapped potential.
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Fastest Growing Customer Acquisition Method
Source: Agilecrm
Ensuring that your brand develops meaningful and long term relationships with influencers and brings value to their audience is the key to influencer marketing. Since influencers already have your brand’s target audience, the customer acquisition numbers surrounding influencer marketing are also pretty high.
However, It is important to note that consumers prefer campaign-based promotions as they come off as more genuine rather than head-on advertisements. Collaborating with your influencer to create an exclusive campaign can be highly beneficial in driving huge amounts of leads/sales towards your brand.
Even though awareness and engagement surrounding your brand remain to be the biggest upsides of influencer marketing, pushing consumers down the purchasing funnel is also a common objective.
A few words of caution
You need to find the right influencers and see that your brand values align with theirs. Learn a bit about them before collaborating, as you don’t want someone whose views will draw a negative connotation on your brand.
If an influencer’s audience has brought in positive results for your brand, ensure that you collaborate with them in the future instead of finding new influencers each time. If you are fickle or constantly changing the influencers you collaborate with, it’ll take time for people to trust your brand.
Customers are extremely wary of fraud, so brands should ensure that influencers aren’t abusing their relationship. It could lead to a loss of potential customers. It may also ingrain a negative perception of your brand in people’s minds.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is one of the hottest things in the digital marketing space with almost every brand capitalising on it. If you happen to be a brand that’s unsure about it, you can start small and see where that leads you. And once you get the desired results, you can choose to invest more resources as influencer marketing is easily scalable.
