Influencer marketing is relationship building. It’s most easily seen when a company partners with an individual to leverage the individual’s audience to grow the company’s audience. Today, it’s common to come across influencers on social media platforms, marketing brands to their followers.Here are 5 key reasons brands are betting on influencer marketing:
1. Credibility
Today, consumers hardly trust in brands blindly. According to eMarketer.com 47 percent of Americans don’t trust traditional advertising, while Insightpool reports that 92 percent of us trust recommendations from real people. Credibility can be hard to earn, even for established brands. A great way to kick-start the process of building your brand’s profile is to persuade an influencer to promote or share her (hopefully positive) personal experience using your product with her audience.
2. Cost-effectiveness
Influencer marketing is the real deal when it comes to saving you marketing money. Traditional media—TV and radio—is still a great way to reach an audience, but it can be expensive and difficult to target with much precision. Online influencers have audiences that run from a couple of thousand to hundreds of thousands. A recommendation from either of them could drive hundreds of visits to your site.
If it leads to conversions, one recommendation could be as valuable as hundreds of dollars in paid search marketing. A few years ago it was commonplace for influencers to partner with brands for free, but increasingly those same influencers are aware of the value they bring to the brands they work with and may request compensation of some kind.
3. Brand awareness
Getting a marketing influencer to talk about your product on their social channels is a great way to increase your brand’s exposure to a new audience. It is a quick and easy way for potential consumers to learn about your brand. It is also an easy way to expand your reach by accessing a larger audience that’s already engaged with brands like yours. A study published by McKinsey found that “marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising.”
4. Easy to implement
Influencer marketing tactics aren’t complicated, and you’re probably already doing it as part of your content or social strategies. There are a few simple ways to do it, but the end goal is always to use the access you’ve been granted to the influencer’s audience to develop a relationship with them
• Guest blogging on their site to show off your thought-leadership
• Interview or get a quote from them for your own content they’ll share with their audience
• Ask the influencer to talk about your product in their content or during a webinar
• Ask for a testimonial or endorsement
5. Get around ad blockers
Whether it’s on Facebook or in the latest release of iOS, ad-blocking software is everywhere. It’s getting more and more difficult for advertisers to get their ads in front of their audiences, and that’s where influencer marketing provides an advantage for brands that use it. Brands partnering with influencers can side-step ad blockers to get their content in front of engaged audiences, and it can be done at a lower cost than developing software to beat the ad blockers.
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