Are you thinking of working with influencers but don’t know where to start? The world of social media influencers and YouTubers is expanding more and more every day. In fact, brands and companies of all sizes spend approximately $15 billion on influencer marketing each year.
No matter what industry you’re in, working with influencers can truly take your brand to the next level. They can expose your products to a huge audience with the potential to become future customers.
Ready to explore the many benefits of influencer marketing for your business? Read on to learn how to get started.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is one of the most popular and most affordable types of marketing today. Compared to traditional advertising, you get many benefits from influencer campaigns. These include a huge audience, lower marketing costs, building brand awareness, and the potential for long-term partnerships.
How Does Influencer Marketing Work?
Influencers are social media personalities with a big following – typically anywhere from 10,000 up to millions of followers. The influencing part comes when they recommend a product or a company to their subscribers and “influence” them to buy based on their recommendations.
Companies send over products to influencers either as PR packages or as a part of a marketing campaign. Influencers can then post on Instagram or Stories or make a video for YouTube. The brand gets exposure and new customers and the influencer gets paid for their work.
Depending on the number of followers, influencers cost anywhere from $100 per post for micro-influencers to $50,000 per post for mega-popular influencers. Some celebrities might charge up to $100,000 per post.
Not sure where to find the best influencers for your brand? This influencer marketing agency can help you sift through hundreds of choices so you can hire the best influencer in your industry.
Builds Brand Awareness
Influencer marketing is so successful because it helps build brand awareness in a natural and organic way. The influencer talks about a product or posts about it on social media and the audience decides to try it based on this recommendation.
For example, if an influencer has a million followers, that means a million people will potentially see your product. A good percentage will decide to buy it. These million people are customers you might not have at the moment, so this is a great way to market your product. You won’t spend thousands on paid advertising and billboards that you can’t track.
Also, building brand awareness builds trust as well. If you have a quality product and a strong partnership with an influencer, your product will be among their favorites. This means constantly generating sales that you can track to see the results from a specific campaign.
Reaches Your Target Audience
One of the best benefits of marketing using influencers is reaching a huge target audience. This is in addition to your existing customers. The influencer builds credibility and trust with their own audience and you as a brand get access to a huge number of people.
Most of these people can become new customers or even potential customers. Bear in mind that you can’t reach every single follower and make them your customer. But even reaching a third of an influencer’s audience can be a game-changer for your company.
Improves Your Brand’s Content Strategy
One of the biggest influencer marketing benefits is improving your brand’s content strategy. In other words, it’s always more affordable to hire an influencer for a marketing campaign than paying thousands for social media ads. These don’t guarantee any sales.
Depending on the influencer’s niche and target audience, you’ll need to come up with a creative way to get the audience interested and encourage them to buy. If the influencer is experienced, they’ll help you come up with ways to create buzz around your products and engage the audience to buy.
Builds Trust And Authority
An influencer is a great way to help your brand build authority and trust with your target market. This is a process that takes time, especially with an audience that might not have heard of your brand before. At the same time, the audience should also trust the influencer and their recommendations in order to be compelled to buy.
This is where you should make an effort to build trust with your potential customers and deliver on your promises. Otherwise, next time you do a campaign with your chosen influencer, the audience won’t trust either of you and the entire project might fail.
To prevent this from happening, always give the influencer a discount code to offer to their audience. Make it a special code that they can’t find anywhere else. Finally, make sure each new customer gets a great product and service. You can even throw in a small gift for free for all new customers that came from an influencer campaign.
Builds Long-Lasting Partnerships
If an influencer does a good job, the marketing campaign will bring you a lot of sales and exposure to a huge audience. These influencers have the potential to help your business in the future as well, so make sure you build strong partnerships with them.
Offer discount codes and incentives for all new customers. Offer the influencer a great commission so they work with your brand again. Influencers get a lot of offers from companies and your competitors so you need to find a way to keep them working with you.
These Benefits of Influencer Marketing Will Help You Grow Your Business Online
Whether you’re a new business looking to gain some exposure or an established brand looking to reach a wider audience, there are many benefits of influencer marketing for your company.
Not only do you get access to an audience you wouldn’t normally reach but you also build a strong relationship with the influencer for more successful collaborations in the future.
Interested in more business growth tips? Explore our other articles on this topic to find the best advice on launching a profitable venture and make it successful in no time.