Many of us have once in our life purchased a product or service because a well-known person we admire used it. This happens because our decisions are influenced by our adulation of the person. Such influencers can help brands reach their target audience and boost conversions– and it’s evolving.
With customers ignoring and stopping ad views, businesses are unable to reach a certain section of the audience but in the end, brand promotion is essential. Companies will need to discover new and more organic ways to attract customers’ attention. Influencer marketing is the answer! Unlike commercials with celebrities or famous personalities, this marketing method involves notable personalities that communicate with their followers about something relevant.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is also known as word-of-mouth marketing. This is one of the types of the social media marketing that includes endorsements and product placements from influencers/ content creators who have a huge audience base on social media platforms. This is a collaboration between creators and brands that enables businesses to increase their customer reach across their buyer personas. The idea is to target a niche audience rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers. Brands employ such famous or rather niche content creators to enhance their brand awareness, reach their target audiences and increase traffic.
Examples of influencer marketing channels consist of social media, columns, blogs, digital and print ads, and television. Influencer marketing is gaining popularity over traditional advertising as over the years it has become less effective in attracting customers and generating leads.
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The biggest plus point in influencer marketing is that it creates an alternative method or process to other marketing limitations.
- Content Marketing: More often than not, businesses lose out on customer retention and the number of visits, in spite of having some of the amazing content. There can be multiple reasons for this, ineffective brand strategy, incorrect channel or medium and so on. This is where influencers can come into the picture to help improve your content marketing as they have a strong and regular readership. Collaborating with such influencers can guarantee your content is quickly accepted by your target audience and the number of visits increases significantly.
- Digital Ads: As we know paid ads have always proven to be the revenue-generating method but what if your customers don’t see your ads. Your customers are getting introduced to smart tools that are readily available at their fingertips. One of them is ad-blockers that prevent your audience from ever seeing your ads, this means you are losing out on the opportunity of your message getting in front of your customers. But with influencer marketing, you can share your native content through an influencer who your target audience chose to follow and are inspired by. By doing this you are ensuring that your ads and brand messages reach your target audience successfully.
- Controlled content: When a business collaborates with an influencer or a publisher, they get the benefit of having a strong level of control when it comes to how the brand’s message is to be packaged and delivered. While doing so, they also get the add-on of diversifying their content and messaging as each influencer is different and so are their ways of communicating with their followers.
- Element of authenticity: Marketing involves the requirement to create confidence in customers regarding the brand. While influencers help expand your brand reach on social media platforms, they also add in the essence of originality within your message. This helps instill confidence and trust within your target audiences as they have always been skeptical about brands creating content or ads that are authentic and not some mere gimmicks. Due to this, the content and messaging created by influencers are not under strong scrutiny, rather it is accepted as more organic and relatable content. Often its considered even when they see an ‘ad’ or ‘sponsored’ tag within the influencer’s posts.
- It increases engagement: Collaborating and partnering with the right influencer can help you fetch huge ROIs and can cover your dividends for your marketing metrics as well. You will need a strong strategy for your influencer marketing campaign as it will result in increased brand awareness amongst your customers, leading them to your website and starting customer engagement. To add in, influencer marketing gives you the opportunity to measure how your audience feels and perceives the brand through the feedback received in the form of users’ likes, share, and comments. This further gives you the insight needed to improve service, marketing, sales, and product development or even your next marketing strategy.
Meet the 3 main types of influencers!
- Micro-influencers (less than 10K followers)
- Macro-influencers (10K-1M followers)
- Mega-influencers (more than 1M followers)
Other than that there are other categories of influencers such as Celebrity Influencers, Blog Influencers, Social Media Influencers, and Key Opinion Leaders.
Businesses need to identify their target audience to decide which type of influencer will be the right fit as a partner for their brand as picking the right influencer is essential to the marketing strategy. Not just that! Defining the scope of the success requirements such as conversions, engagement, traffic, or brand awareness right from the beginning can help both influencers and the brand set up the expectations. This helps build campaign goals and the ability to measure the success of the influencer marketing campaign.
Conclusion: Influencer Marketing is the new and booming face of the digital marketing space and it intends to capture a wide section of the customer base. 2022 will see a steep rise of 85% of marketing professionals launching an influencer marketing campaign to help businesses meet their marketing KPIs and objectives.
This sounds great right but are you stuck on where to start?
Let Info Hub Digital help you with our wide spectrum of digital marketing services and industry-led expertise so that you can make the best of influencer marketing and grow your business with increased customer conversions.
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