By now you’ve heard of— and have probably seen firsthand— influencer marketing. It’s a market that grew from $1.7B in 2016 to $9.7B in 2020, and is expected to reach nearly $17B by the end of 2022. There’s no doubt that it’s a lucrative business, and more and more brands are starting to incorporate it into their marketing plans. In fact, some may argue that influencer marketing is taking over the marketing funnel and has a hand in each stage from brand awareness to conversion.
Still, there’s a lot of uncharted territory when it comes to influencer marketing. In this blog, we explain what influencers are and how adopting influencer marketing can impact your bottom line as a business.
What are influencers
Influencers are thought-leaders or experts in a certain field or niche category. They use their platform to inspire or “influence” their audience on things like buying decisions, tips and tricks, recipes, and beliefs. This is generally done through social media channels with a large following of engaged people. An influencer’s following will turn to them for product recommendations, reviews of an item, place, or service, or other relatable content. Their audiences trust them as experts in specific categories, which makes their platforms more favorable to brands trying to establish lasting customer relationships.
Influencers will work with brands to create mutually-beneficial content, review their product or service, or post and mention the brand on their social media. Many influencers are paid for their services based on their social media following and engagement, and have created careers out of it. In many cases, paying an influencer can be more cost effective— with a great return on investment (ROI)— than running a paid advertisement on Google or other webpages.
Regardless of the industry, many businesses have dabbled in influencer marketing. According to a recent study, 93% of marketers use influencer marketing in one way or another. Still not convinced? Here’s how influencer marketing can impact your business.
How can influencers impact your business?
Using influencers as a marketing tool can help create buzz about your brand and drive more traffic to your website. Here are five ways influencers can contribute to the health of your business.
Increase brand awareness
Like any public-facing marketing campaign, influencers can help you generate brand awareness by talking about your product or service. Where your own efforts might fall short, influencers increase the buzz about your business by sharing it with their engaged, like-minded audience. Consumers may stumble across your brand months later and recognize it from something they saw from their favorite influencer.
Expand your reach
Using an influencer to push your brand to their audience unlocks a whole new list of consumers that you may not have reached otherwise. Tapping into their following expands your reach and gets more eyeballs on your offering for a fraction of the price.
Unlock more accurate targeting
Sure, with other digital marketing methods you can customize your target demographic and audience— but it’s never 100% accurate. With influencer marketing, you can work with content creators with a very specific audience to fine-tune your target market and who you’re reaching.
Help to establish credibility and trust
An influencer’s audience follows them because they have grown to know and trust their content and recommendations. The relatability establishes more organic credibility between influencers and their followers, which means consumers will feel more confident in your brand than they would had they just seen it in a digital ad.
Give you relevant content to use on your own platforms
Not only do influencers promote your product or service to their followers, they will usually create some sort of content to accompany their recommendation. This can be in the form of blog articles, photography or stylized videos, or testimonials— all of which you can repurpose to use on your own platforms and in your future marketing campaigns without having to hire internal designers or creatives.
It is cost effective
While influencer marketing isn’t free, it’s generally more cost effective than other forms of advertising or pay-to-play marketing. It’s proven to have a higher ROI generating almost 11x the revenue of regular banner ads. You get more bang for your buck and in many cases can get away with a trade-for-post partnership with influencers, which means they’ll create content in exchange for free products or a subscription to your service.
Working with influencers
Ready to start working with influencers? First you need to narrow down your campaign goals, target audience, budget, and desired deliverables. There are many moving parts when it comes to managing influencers and external partners, so good communication and organization is key to keeping things on track. A well-structured presentation can help you keep things moving forward.
An influencer marketing proposal can help you and your team align on things like objectives, budget, and timelines. It allows you to execute your influencer marketing campaign while keeping key stakeholders and upper management informed. Our influencer marketing campaign presentation template is fully customizable and gives you the framework to make a better presentation, faster.
