Why Influencer Marketing is an Essential Marketing Channel
Influencer marketing has taken the social media marketing world by storm, and its growth isn’t set to slow any time soon. Working with an influencer marketing agency can ensure you are working with influencers who are aligned with your brand values and messaging to guarantee the best possible results. This brand of marketing can be incredibly beneficial when you are working with the right influencers for your brand, but it can also be very costly if not properly considered.
So, why do you need influencer marketing within your overall marketing strategy?
Influencer Marketing Boosts Brand Awareness and Builds Trust
When you build a relationship online with an influencer, you are tapping into their follower base (which can be massive depending on the influencer). While working with an influencer, you can broadcast your message to this audience. Influencer audiences have a pre-established level of trust built with an influencer as a direct result of consistent posting and engaging. Influencers have invested time into connecting with their followers and understanding the types of content and brands they enjoy viewing. Therefore, audiences feel more inclined to purchase any products recommended by their favorite influencers.
Influencer Marketing Provides Authentic and Trend-Driven Content
Consumers have become wary of advertisements directly from brands, but a product endorsement from an influencer doesn’t look like an ad, but an honest recommendation. Influencers are trusted by their audiences to provide content based on their genuine experiences.
Influencers are also popular because they have built a reputation on keeping up with the latest trends within their niches. They know the content topics and trends to focus on and how to incorporate trends into branded content to trigger their audience’s interest.
Influencer Marketing Generates a Positive ROI
One of the most appealing reasons to use influencer marketing is that it generates a positive Return on Investment. Influencer campaigns give brands the chance to engage a wide audience through social media and generate fresh leads and sales. When activating an influencer marketing campaign, brands have immediate access to a huge audience of potential customers at a far cheaper cost than they would if they were to opt for a paid advertising campaign.
Influencer Marketing Improves SEO
When an influencer creates content about your brand, you can receive high-quality backlinks to your online store; this helps you rank higher in search results. The more people know about your business, the more backlinks you can build.
One of the biggest SEO benefits of using influencer marketing is the increase in brand searches. If a customer has seen an influencer promote your brand, they often conduct their own searches for your brand name, product or services. An increase in brand searches can improve your search rankings for the keywords you are targeting.
Influencer Marketing Helps Target Specific Audiences
Sometimes niche audiences can be hard to reach through traditional social media marketing methods. Working with influencers, including micro and nano, that operate within a specific niche can grant you access to these audiences.
You can use an influencer agency to find and vet influencers within niches to ensure their followings contain your target audience. In addition, influencer marketing agencies can help brief influencers to guarantee the content they create and publish is in line with all brand guidelines, values and campaign messaging, and is of an incredibly high quality. Influencer agencies can also manage all communications and rounds of approval to save you time and money, allowing you to continue focusing on other business operations.