In recent years, marketers and businesses have begun to trust the word of online personalities for marketing and advertising. This is known as Influencer Marketing. In simple terms, it refers to using social media content creators with a significant number of social media followers to market a product or service using their influence.
With the rise of social media, brands are exploring new ways to reach out to their target audience and drive sales through these influencer partnerships. However, this practice sometimes comes with doubts about its authenticity and effectiveness as an advertising strategy, despite the statistics pointing to its success. Here we explore everything you need to know about Influencer Marketing.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that uses social media stars or people who have significant and engaged followings on platforms like Instagram, TikTok or YouTube to promote a product or service. Companies will partner with these influencers to have them post about their product or service, usually in exchange for financial compensation.
Why is Influencer Marketing Effective?
When a marketer or a business owner is thinking about what type of content to create, it’s important to know who your audience is. To start, you need to consider who your core customers are and what type of content they like to see. This becomes even more crucial when the content is being created for a partner or client’s brand. You have to make sure it aligns with their vision.
For example, if you’re a car brand, you might want to create content that talks about the new features on your models and what makes them stand out from the rest in the market. That’s great, but is that the type of content that your customers are actually looking for? If they’re not, then it’s a waste of time and money.
Influencer marketing takes this guessing game out of the equation. You can work with someone whose audience matches up with yours. They may have a different style than you and your team, but their followers will engage with the content because it resonates with them.
What’s the Difference Between Influencer Marketing and Brand Advertising?
The approach of Influencer Marketing is vastly different from conventional advertising strategies. Traditional advertising strategies entail the dissemination of promotional messages in a one-sided manner. The audience is often bombarded by the brand or product being promoted without getting a chance to interact with the brand – whether they’re interested in it or not.
In contrast, when brands partner with social media influencers to promote their products, they allow the influencers to create their own content and publish it directly to their interested followers. In fact, it’s not uncommon for the influencers to create their own take on the product or brand in addition to featuring it in the images they post. The content is often therefore more authentic and relatable to the target audience members.
Pros of Influencer Marketing
- Authenticity: When brands partner with influencers, they allow the influencers to create their own content. Ideally the influencer would have already used the product or service and believes in it. This makes the content more authentic and relatable to the target audience members.
- More organic reach: When a brand creates its own content, it can be difficult to reach an organic audience. This may be due to the fact that the brand’s customers don’t trust promotional messages from brands directly. An influencer will be able to reach a wide audience to their followers in an organic way.
- Cost-effective: Brands don’t have to spend all their time and resources creating the content to promote their brand. Instead, they can rely on the influencer promoting the product or service featuring it in their content.
- Return on investment: Many studies have come out praising the results of influencer marketing with some ROI resulting in 5X revenue. With influencer marketing, you can easily track your ROI depending on which software, platform or agency you use.
Cons of Influencer Marketing
- Authenticity: While this is a pro, it can also be a con. Often, the content created comes off as authentic, but if not managed properly there is a chance it could be misleading. Some influencers who have not shared truthful information about products or services, or who have partnered with brands that don’t reflect their own content, have created a negative reputation for influencer marketing.
- Increased engagement: While increased engagement is usually a positive, it also leaves more room for people to react in a negative way.
- Expensive: Depending on the marketing agency, platform you choose and rates of the influencers you work with, the cost can add up quickly. So choose a plan according to your budget.
- Return on investment: While many brands promise ROI, at the end of the day no one can predict the future and a campaign may lose money if the influencer was unable to engage their audience enough.
Where Next?
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage potential customers and encourage them to take action. Rather than relying on paid ads and general marketing, you can target your ideal customers by partnering with specific influencers who share your values and appeal to your target demographic.
If you’re a brand or marketer looking to partner with influencers, it’s important to do your research. Find influencers who align with your brand, and are a good fit for your campaigns. This will result in a more organic reach. From there, you can outline the terms of the partnership, and negotiate terms that make sense for both parties.