Influence marketing is more of a contemporary digital marketing strategy that has witnessed exponential growth over the last few years. Instagram, one of the most popular social media platforms, is set to reach $10 billion in worth in influencer marketing by the end of 2020, according to Adweek.
So, why are businesses investing in this marketing strategy, and more importantly, should you be investing in it too?
In this article, we'll discuss what influence marketing is and how it can help your business stand out from the crowd.
What Is Influence Marketing?
Influence marketing is a marketing strategy that brands use for promoting their products and services to the audience of a famous blogger or influencer. These bloggers or influencers have a loyal and engaged following that trusts the opinion of their blogger or influencer. When the influencer promotes a brand's services and products, the audience listens, and may even be willing to try out the recommended products.
Influence marketing makes use of the already-established audience of an influencer that may be the target audience of a brand. By tapping into this already-established, loyal, and dedicated following, brands can build their credibility and drive sales.
Therefore, with influence marketing, you can:
- Reach a greater audience
- Build credibility for your brand
- Increase traffic for your site
- Grow your social media following
- Get greater leads
- Drive sales
This marketing strategy has become famous over the years for a reason: brands can easily tap into an established audience and make use of the fact that the audience listens to their influencer. When famous influencers start using products or services of a particular brand, their followers are likely to follow suit.
Let's see how you can use influence marketing to leverage your brand.
Stand Out With Influence Marketing
Influencers are your everyday people who have fostered a great following on a social platform. The reason why their advertising works is that the consumer wants to see how a product or service can be of use to the regular person, not some celebrity endorsing it, or a brand promoting itself.
With this marketing strategy, you can:
Get Exposure To Your Target Audience
For a business that has just begun, it may be difficult for you to build a consumer following. However, when you collaborate with an influencer who has the same target audience as you, it gets easier to build a following. After all, the influencer's audience is already warmed up for receiving your products and services, so why not utilize this opportunity?
Build Trust In Your Target Audience
As per the Nielsen survey, 92% of consumers trusted word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family as compared to other types of advertising. Influence marketing is a form of word-of-mouth advertisement and can go a long way in building trust for your brand.
Today's internet is more crowded than ever before. In such circumstances, a trustworthy voice promoting your brand can provide you long-term success in building trust among the target audience.
Boost Your SEO
One way of boosting your SEO is by getting credible backlinks. This is when other sites mention you and link back to your website. A search engine sees this as a vote of confidence from other sites and ranks your website higher in SERP.
Now, when you collaborate with an influencer, you have a chance to get mentioned at various places: the influencer's blog posts, social media posts, YouTube videos, etc. The more you are mentioned, the more exposure you get, and the more chance you have of boosting your SEO.
Grow And Retain Your Following
Marketing is not easy. Even when you get customers, your work isn't done-you need to keep them. You need to make sure they keep coming back and stay loyal to your brand.
Here's where influence marketing comes in! The retention rate for this marketing strategy is 37% higher than other marketing tactics. Therefore, you won't just be exposed to an audience; you will potentially turn them into customers and keep them!
Have Creative Content Production
With so many social media platforms, one of the most important factors to thrive in the digital world is through creative content.
You can, of course, create content that resonates with your brand's message and leverage your brand. However, you can also collaborate with an influencer and make use of their creative content production abilities!
You may also repost this content in the future, deploy and share it, in order to keep your brand voice alive for longer. Moreover, an influencer may use your brand's voice and present it in their way that would be attractive to their audience.
Have A Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy
Generally, when you receive an exceptional ROI with a marketing strategy, the cost won't necessarily be the first thing you would consider. With influence marketing, you get both an excellent ROI as well as an inexpensive way to set it up.
The real ROI of influence marketing can be seen from the number of your sales and the trust, credibility, and following you build for the price you pay the influencer for promoting your products or services, such as payment in cash or your products for free.
As a result of this marketing strategy, you can get long-term customers, better reach, boost in SEO, and improved social media presence. If you compare this to other marketing strategies, let's take PPC, for instance, you pay thousands each month in management fees, as well as the cost of the clicks.
Wrapping Up
Influence marketing is a marketing strategy that brands use to promote their products and services with the help of famous bloggers or influencers.
This article explained what influence marketing is and how a brand can stand out from other brands with the help of this strategy. Influence marketing helps brands stand out by building trust in their audience, reaching out to new audiences, boosting their SEO, growing and retaining their audience, creating creative content, and getting a great ROI with the marketing strategy.