Social media can be a great platform for brands to promote their offerings; however, brands’ reach may not extend beyond their own followers if all they do is promote their products or services themselves. Managing to generate sales from the same set of people is a good sign, as it indicates that you are able to retain your existing customers. However, it is also important to expand your reach by reaching out to individuals who are not aware of your brand.
Influencer marketing allows brands to reach a wider audience by exposing their products or services to a host of new individuals. Influencer marketing has been on the rise in recent years, and its growth can be attributed to the massive popularity of short videos on Instagram, TikTok, and other popular social media platforms.
Social media influencers play a crucial role in improving a brand’s visibility, SEO, and more. Their feedback can also improve the website traffic, domain authority, and reputation of a brand. Leading content creators can help brands drive good engagement and boost visibility by leveraging their vast reach.
First, let’s try to understand what influencer marketing is. When a brand collaborates with an online influencer to promote its product or service, it is referred to as influencer marketing. Online influencers are often referred to as social media celebrities because of their fan-follower base, which can potentially be massive.
Influencer marketing is a strategy in which an influencer who is considered an opinion leader explains why a specific product of a brand should be bought.
Here are five ways influencer marketing can help your brand grow.
Many influencers have hundreds of thousands of followers if not more, and when you collaborate with one of them whose area of expertise suits your brand, you can literally reach out to thousands of highly engaged potential consumers.
The sheer number of followers indicates that influencers are absolutely in tune with the pulse of their audience. They have a great understanding of what will click with their audience and what won’t. They can flawlessly combine brand campaigns into their videos or programs in their own style and make your ads more engaging and genuine for their target audience, who are bombarded with dozens of commercial ads every day.
When influential people such as social media influencers promote your product or service or even make a mention of your brand, it will increase your reach and improve your brand awareness comprehensively.
As we mentioned earlier, influencers are considered opinion leaders in their field and a reliable source of information, which is why they have a trusted audience. They have a considerable influence on their followers and have built a strong relationship with them. When such influencers recommend your product or service, your influencer marketing campaign wouldn’t feel like advertising and it would end up garnering the attention of many potential customers to your brand.
Remember, customers, in all likelihood, will trust brand-related content created by influential people instead of the brands themselves. When an influencer speaks highly of your product or service, it will create a much bigger impact than if your brand itself highlights the superior features of your offering. Trust and credibility can lead to customer loyalty.
The content that influencers create for your brand can get you mentioned in online spaces, which could include a link back to your official website. And we all know what quality backlinks can do: They are one of Google’s most important search ranking criteria.
Quality backlinks can improve your search engine rankings and bring more organic visitors by helping your website perform better in organic search. Through influencer marketing campaigns, you get more chances to build backlinks as you hit a wider audience.
Influencer marketing helps you engage with new social communities, resulting in additional followers and interactions which can lead to additional backlinks and organic traffic that can progress search engine optimization.
Creating ad campaigns can be a time-consuming process, as it requires you to cover many areas including content writing, researching and including relevant keywords, adding relevant images or videos, optimizing title and subheadings to produce better results, and finally scheduling ads across different platforms.
When you collaborate with an influencer, you outsource everything and save time. By saving time, you get the opportunity to focus more on your core business tasks.
Influencer marketing is relatively reasonable and cost-effective compared to paid ads. Influencer marketing strategy helps brands keep the costs down. Popular influencers may charge a hefty fee; however, working with the right influencers helps you boost sales and vastly improve your ROI, so the benefits of adopting the influencer marketing strategy outweigh the cost spent on it.
You can also try to strike a deal with the influencers according to which you don’t need to pay them a fee, instead, you can send them free samples of your products. This is a win-win situation for both as they get access to your products (free of cost) that could be useful to them, and you, on the other hand, get to save more money.
Influencer marketing strategy has unlimited sharing potential on social media platforms as influencers interact with their followers almost on a daily basis. Most influencers are active on multiple social media platforms, so it becomes easier for them to share the content they have created for your brand on their blogs, Facebook fan pages, Instagram, and more, thereby helping your content get a wider reach.
There are several ways influencers can help brands spread their message. It can be a review video on YouTube, a story on Instagram, a post on Facebook, or a review post on their blog.
Since influencers have a massive number of followers, the content that they have created for your brand could get a large number of shares, likes, and comments, thereby helping your brand get more interactions on social networks that could lead to a higher ranking in Google search results. Remember, when your content is shared widely, it can raise your brand recognition and maximize ROI in a short period of time.
Influencer marketing can be a powerful tool for marketers to promote their products; however, marketers need to choose the right influencer in order to achieve their desired results. While the right influencer can increase your word-of-mouth marketing, the wrong influencer can damage the reputation of your brand.
There are many influencers out there. So, finding the right and reliable influencer can be a time-consuming process. You need to conduct in-depth research to find influencers who suit your niche and can work according to your business needs.
Finding the right influencer and designing an influencer strategy can be a challenging task; however, if you’re up for the challenge, your brand can reap several benefits through this strategy, including boosting sales as well as improving brand recognition, brand awareness, and brand authority.
