For more than a decade, brands (including major corporations and small startups alike) have tapped into the power of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing has been heralded as an incredibly cost-efficient strategy for promoting your brand and building trust.
But what is it about this strategy that makes it work so well?
The Basics of Influencer Marketing
In case you aren’t familiar, influencer marketing is a set of strategies designed to capitalize on the social capital and visibility of influential people on social media. There are many ways you can approach this, such as asking an influencer to review your product, giving free samples of your products to influencers, or even engaging with influencers directly in the form of interviews. You can pay them via commission, advertise with them, or set up a longer-term arrangement; it all depends on who you’re working with and what your goals are.
Unfortunately, influencer marketing is such a broad, open strategy that many people struggle to formulate an approach that works for them. With the help of an influencer marketing agency, you can better identify your most critical opportunities, plan a set of strategies within your existing budget, and ultimately get the best results for each marketing dollar you spend.
The Advantages of Influencer Marketing
These are some of the greatest advantages of influencer marketing:
1. Brand Awareness Through Influencer Marketing
Some people love the brand awareness potential of influencer marketing. If you engage with an influencer who has 500,000 followers, you can rest assured that hundreds of thousands of people will see your product in use. If they start using your product regularly, you’ll get even more exposure, as many influencers have visibility beyond their localized followings.
2. Flexibility in Influencer Marketing Campaigns
There are practically unlimited ways that you can approach influencer marketing. You can focus on individual relationships with huge influencers, a network of relationships with smaller influencers, or something in between. You can showcase your products and services in a variety of different ways, and you can negotiate unique contractual relationships with each influencer in your network. Because it’s so flexible, almost every brand can find an approach that works for them.
3. Audience Targeting with Influencers
Some brands appreciate how specifically they can target an audience with the help of marketing. Most influencers are extremely focused on a specific niche; they appeal to a specific demographic and for a specific reason. This artificially limits the number of influencers that are relevant to your brand, but greatly increases your ability to appeal to and persuade demographic groups within your own target audience. All you have to do is choose the right influencers.
4. Social trust
For most brands, trust is essential for success. If people don’t trust you, they aren’t going to buy from you, and they certainly aren’t going to recommend you to friends or family members. But once people see your products in the hands of one of their favorite influencers, they’ll feel compelled to trust you from the outset. It’s one of the most reliable ways to build initial trust.
5. Compatibility with other strategies
Marketing is also compatible with most other marketing and advertising strategies, and actually has synergistic potential with most of them. For example, if you already have a thriving social media strategy, you can use influencer marketing to bolster it and benefit from it simultaneously.
6. Inexpensiveness
Finally, we can recognize the effectiveness of influencer marketing in part because of its inexpensiveness. Compared to the benefits you can get from a successful partnership, influencer marketing is downright cheap, especially if you know how to tinker with the variables.
Caveats
However, there are some caveats to keep in mind:
1. Overall strategy
Your ability to derive benefits from influencer marketing depends heavily on what kind of strategy you implement. Who is your target audience and how are you going to appeal to them?
2. Influencer selection
Along similar lines, you need to be able to choose the right influencers for your target audience. Simply having someone famous tout your product isn’t going to help you unless they have a special connection to the people you’re trying to reach.
3. Budget
You’re also going to be somewhat constrained by your budget. If you had unlimited money, you could work with unlimited people, but because you’ve probably got an upper limit, you’ll need to be careful about how you spend.
4. Creativity
There are lots of brands pursuing influencer marketing as part of their visibility strategy so if you want to stand out, you’ll need a way to distinguish yourself.
Overall, marketing works because it has practically unlimited potential, yet is still affordable and accessible enough that most brands can consider it. You aren’t guaranteed to see good results just by practicing influencer marketing, but with the help of a good influencer marketing agency, you should see an impressive return on your investment.
