When it comes to getting your brand noticed and heard, sometimes advertising just won’t cut it. Particularly if you’re a new and unknown brand. This is when it’s time to try out influencer marketing.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Essentially, influencer marketing is producing the process of ‘word of mouth’, but through those who have a more powerful voice.
Influencers can be anyone from vloggers, bloggers, social media sensations or anyone else in the spotlight. Influencers are also broken down into micro-influencers and macro-influencers.
A micro-influencer is someone who perhaps has a specialist subject as their choice of topic, or they may be particularly popular in a certain area, but not known elsewhere.
A macro-influencer is someone who is practically all over the Internet, potentially with millions of followers in total across their media platforms e.g. beauty and lifestyle vlogger, Zoella.
Reach Your Target Audience
If you’re working with the right influencer, their following will be your target audience. When selecting your influencer, make sure you’re looking for one with similar interests to your brand. Sometimes they will even let you know their social analytics, so what age group or location their followers are in. Not all will give this kind of information away, but there’s no harm in asking.
If you’re going to be pushing money behind this type of marketing, then you want to make sure you’ve selected the right person to do so.
Create Brand Awareness
Influencer marketing allows the general public to know that your brand exists. If your brand only exists on your own social channels and website but isn’t featured anywhere else, it’s not going to be the easiest for people to come across you. A simple blog post, Instagram selfie or YouTube video from an influencer can be enough to get your brands message out there.
Improve Your SEO
You will be able to get valuable backlinks off the back of influencers. It may be that your brand is struggling to improve its search rankings, and by having valuable backlinks, this should help to improve your trust flow and encourage search engines like Google to bump you up.
Build Brand Trust
Consumers want authenticity, they won’t just rely on adverts to convince them to shop anymore. 92% trust recommendations from influencers over celebrity endorsements and adverts.
Not only that, but due to the sheer volume of information we now have access to, people will thoroughly research about your brand as part of their consumer journey, before even considering to purchase from you. You can read more about consumer journeys and the loyalty loop here.
The Knock-on Effect
If even just one major influencer is talking about your product or service, this will then trigger the knock-on effect of others talking about your brand. Whether it’s the followers, micro influencers or potentially even other large influencers. You may even find that other influencers approach you to be able to try out your product or service, to then shout about to their following. Even friends just passing the message onto each other, word of mouth is incredibly powerful.
Thinking about influencer marketing and improving your digital marketing strategy?