C-suite executives need more from influencer marketing than simply high engagement. They anticipate increased growth contributions, a favorable return on investment (ROI), and strategic alignment. Although there is no denying that influencers have a significant effect on customer behavior, the benefits of influencer marketing are that securing the funding you want for your influencer program will convert this impact into advantages that appeal to upper management.
Social media is full of influential people. These are individuals with a range from a thousand to a million or more followers. They are most likely someone you often see on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
These people’s level of influence is determined by the number of followers they have, the manner in which they interact with their audience, and the reputation they have established. Influencer marketing is collaborating with these individuals to sell your goods, increase brand recognition, and connect with new markets.
How Influencer Marketing Can Be Beneficial For Your Business
1. Raises Awareness Of A Brand
Increasing brand awareness is one of the benefits of influencer marketing. The first step in the decision-making process for consumers is brand awareness. Everything else follows from it, including curiosity, deliberation, and ultimately the choice to buy.
Brand awareness is increased when an influencer with a similar audience as your target market promotes your business to unexplored client groups. In addition to drawing attention to the brand’s content, goods, and services, this genuine advertising may also enhance direct traffic and conversion rates.
For example, Masterclass positions itself as a pioneer in creative education and skill development by collaborating with Basmah Masood, an influencer who specializes in material linked to art and photography.
2. Expand Your Reach
It’s crucial to identify influencers in your market or sector. After all, you want your brand message to be seen by the “right” people. A B2B brand may do this to some degree with trade magazines or expositions, but not all industry members subscribe to them or attend.
Similar to B2C companies, there is a limit to how far you can reach your target demographic and see a boost in sales by using standard paid media advertising or placing a sample person at the shop. You may promote your products to all of the people who follow influencers. These individuals may be firmly positioned inside or just somewhat outside of an industry.
Although followers in similar industries may not be active participants in the forums where you would typically pay for advertising, on occasion they may need to make a purchase from a company in your industry and may look to an influencer or other “industry expert” for recommendations on a reliable supplier.
A similar tendency is at work with consumer items. Perhaps they like an influencer’s home décor, so they follow a lifestyle blog or something similar. However, at some point, they could be curious about the hair product she used to get the amazing hairstyle she wore to the party. Usually, this follower wouldn’t be drawn to beauty influencers, but in this particular case, the lifestyle influencer might be of assistance.
By using influencer marketing, the corporation has increased its reach in the aforementioned consumer products and business cases. Because customers’ lives might overlap in various areas, niches can sometimes cross-pollinate. In some situations, influencers may assist with product selection. This is one of the biggest advantages of influencer marketing.
3. Obtain Trust and Credibility
Whatever work you are doing, competition exists. Furthermore, advancement just becomes more difficult with time. Naturally, one of the issues is that consumers don’t always know which companies to believe. Building your brand as one that everyone can rely on to deliver is crucial, whether you’re selling to consumers or corporations. Regretfully, developing trust takes time. This is one of the influencer marketing benefits.
Conversely, influencers already possess the confidence of their fan base. A crucial element of establishing credibility is promoting only products that the influencer has deemed worthy of being purchased and used. More significantly, the influencer invests time in producing content that highlights the benefits of a product or service.
In some cases, such as fashion, this is as simple as showcasing how amazing something looks on them. Extended usage trials are the best option in other situations. Influencers may accelerate the development of trust and dependability via content marketing in a matter of weeks or months when it would take years otherwise.
There is a ready market for influencers, regardless of the strategy they choose to test and promote a product. Because influencers are often individuals who resemble them, people tend to interact highly with their material.
Influencer marketing collaborations are an exciting and vital component of contemporary marketing since, even just having a shared interest, they foster relationships between individuals that are unmatched by the corporate marketing department.
4. Save Money
The ongoing cost of conventional advertising is one issue that companies deal with. For example, Google keyword search campaigns force you to compete with other companies in an effort to reach consumers. It is, in fact, an auction, and they are costly. Whether or not someone purchases anything, you usually have to pay each time they click on the advertisement. Budgets for influencer marketing may not be as extravagant.
You will often be charged a fixed price by an influencer for each post they generate. On occasion, it’s even possible to obtain anything posted for the price of a product or service. Who doesn’t like freebies? Affiliate links and promotional codes that generate direct income are more ways influencers might be paid.
Although there are many different methods to pay an influencer, they usually consist of either a predetermined amount of money or payment upon a real conversion. To put it another way, you usually don’t pay for every single visitor to your website. Moreover, social media postings that are shared might reach audiences and influencers outside of the influencer’s typical sphere of influence.
5. Increases Interaction with Customers
Enhancing customer engagement is one of the benefits of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing improves engagement with their prospects and customer base, which goes beyond top-of-funnel (TOF) objectives. This increases a brand’s awareness and fortifies its bond with consumers, improving brand loyalty.
Influencers assist brands in leveraging these real-life exchanges to create a devoted following. Through consistent interaction and trust, this turns into a potent asset that increases customer lifetime value (CLV) and encourages repeat purchases.
Influencer marketing for Amazon’s dog birthday items, such as Camper the Golden, turns shopping into an engaging experience that encourages users to like, share, and discuss.
6. Produce Real Sales and ROI
Whatever business you work in, competition exists. Collaborating with influencers may boost sales of your product or service, particularly because 69% of customers believe what influencers advocate.
In reality, based on sales and return on investment, influencer marketing is among the most successful marketing channels, according to the most recent data. Because influencer marketing is more successful and offers a higher return on investment, a lot of recently established e-commerce sites use it to market their goods.
When investing in influencer marketing to boost sales, remember to provide something of value in exchange. Offering a discount code is a crucial tactic in this case since it allows the influencer to inform their followers that by buying the goods, they may get a money-off coupon that is exclusive to them.
When doing influencer marketing campaigns, be sure to use unique tracking URLs and custom discount codes. This is because you will need to monitor and quantify the source of your purchases. One of the finest marketing ROIs available is influencer marketing, as was previously discussed.
7% of respondents to HubSpot’s State of Marketing survey said that influencer marketing, excluding short-form video, offers the best return on investment. If you’re still not convinced, consider this: according to a different report, companies profit $5.78 for every $1 they spend on influencer marketing.
Influencers have a higher level of trust than companies and other media outlets, and their audiences are devoted followers who follow their advice. Because of this, influencer marketing has a very high return on investment. Though influencer marketing is very successful and advantageous for companies, more than 60% of marketers state that, above all other considerations, figuring out the ROI of influencer marketing is the most difficult part of the process.
7. Inform Customers About Your Products
Educating buyers about your product is one of the influencer marketing benefits. Depending on what you offer, teaching prospective consumers how to utilize or style your goods is a non-sales approach to promoting them. You may enable influencers to produce compelling content that informs their target audience about your product by providing them with comprehensive product information.
This not only increases purchases but also motivates consumers to provide user-generated content that highlights your product. Consequently, this increases your visibility and builds brand recognition. Observe Supergoop’s TikTok influencer marketing campaign as an example. The sunscreen company collaborated with influencers in the beauty, fashion, and lifestyle domains to reach its target market.
Their influencers produced imaginative content that humorously and lightheartedly emphasized the benefits of Supergoop sunscreen. This informed the followers of the influencers about the value of using sunscreen, in addition to being consistent with the brand’s language. They also explained how Supergoop’s transparent SPF50 was different from the conventional sunscreen that most people are accustomed to. This is one of the best benefits of influencer marketing.
8. Improve Your SEO
Influencer marketing is an additional tool that you may use to enhance your SEO. If you don’t consider blogger outreach to be a kind of influencer marketing, you’re missing out on one of the advantages of influencer marketing.
For SEO, keywords are and always will be crucial. Consumers use them, after all, to search the internet for products. All websites need to put in a lot of effort to rank highly in searches, unless, of course, there are individuals who are particularly seeking them.
But when it comes to determining what appears on the first page of search results, search engines take into account more factors than just keywords and their positioning. Search engines instead check for a concept known as domain authority. In a nutshell, domain authority counts the number of backlinks pointing to a certain website.
Your company may get more backlinks to its website and social media accounts by collaborating with influencers. Some influencers, for example, maintain websites of their own. Frequently, they will provide links to items they support there. An affiliate link might be included in a social media post as an additional application for backlinks. Alternatively, followers’ third-party websites may be referenced in the hyperlinks. There are many options.
9. Gather Information To Comprehend Your Audience More Fully
The benefit of gathering audience data comes next on the list of advantages of influencer marketing. Working with influencers might help you acquire audience data, as it becomes more difficult to obtain audience data from external parties. It is easier to produce better and more audience-relevant marketing material with more data. Your influencer will possess demographic data about your audience.
That includes their location, age, and gender, divided according to the many social media networks they use. Additionally, they’ll be able to tell you how many impressions, reach, and interactions their postings get. This can help you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts and whether or not your target audience is responding to them.
Setting up tracking codes will allow you to observe who has clicked through to your website and into your checkouts, which is important for direct sales attribution. This must be given to your influencer before the campaign launches. Remember, however, that not every influencer is willing to share their audience data.
Developing enduring connections with influencers may often result in their providing you with access to their demographic information from social media sites and any other resources they use. You may then use this information to create data-driven, more informed choices. It is one of the wonderful benefits of influencer marketing.
Some Influencer Marketing Examples
There are several instances of different companies promoting their goods and services using social media influencers, rather than celebrities realizing the benefits of influencer marketing. Because of the influencers’ widespread following and large viewership, the choice proved to be quite effective. Here are some instances of influencer marketing:
Swiggy: This well-known meal delivery company selected YouTuber, influencer, and content producer Bhuvan Bam to help them promote their business on Instagram. In exchange, Bhuvan Bam produced amusing films highlighting Swiggy’s quick and easy delivery that entertained viewers, made them laugh, and—most importantly—left a lasting impression that encouraged people to utilize Swiggy for their meal orders.
Myntra: Komal Pandey and Kritika Khurana are two examples of the lifestyle and beauty influencers that this fashion brand picked. In their Instagram stories and reels, they were seen showing off and endorsing the clothing and accessories from this firm. They participated in the newest collection offered by Myntra, which helped the brand’s sales and achieve growth.
Amazon Prime Video: Influencer, YouTuber, and actor Prajakta Koli was chosen to represent this streaming service to promote their series “Four More Shots.” She produced material especially to promote the program and urged her followers to watch it; as a result, the show’s views, engagement, and streaming service watch time all rose.
Allen Solly: With the help of 22 influencers in 7 Indian locations, this company raised awareness of their chino line with the #ShootforSolly campaign, creating a buzz that catered to a variety of body shapes and styles.
Fashion Nova: A worldwide apparel company, used social media influencers as the foundation of its marketing approach. They collaborated with Kylie Jenner, a well-known influencer and celebrity who advertised their clothing on Instagram. To broaden the campaign’s audience, the company also shared the influencers’ posts and narratives.
FAQ
Q: What are influencer marketing’s advantages and disadvantages?
A: Influencer marketing offers several advantages, such as expanded audience reach, improved interaction with prospective clients, and high-caliber content that can be used in future marketing campaigns. However, there may be some drawbacks. Influencer marketing may be detrimental to your company if done improperly, as it can take a long time to develop genuine relationships—far longer than it does to buy ad space.
Q: What is the efficacy of influencer marketing?
A: Influencers have great authority in their communities because they have invested a great deal of time in building genuine connections with their followers, and people trust recommendations from friends and family. This is why influencer marketing works so well.
Q: How do consumers become drawn to influencers?
A: To put it simply, anybody with a sizable following or a voice that has influence might assist you in connecting with your target audience. Typically, an influencer gains a platform or following by creating and discussing material that speaks to their followers’ interests on certain subjects or in a particular way.
