From being on the fringes of every brand’s marketing budgets, influencer marketing is now mainstream. Marketers have realized that traditional word-of-mouth marketing is much more effective than in-your-face paid advertising. In fact, people are so used to paid advertisements that most ignore them completely, rendering the investment almost useless.
With influencer marketing, brands can advocate brand awareness and increase sales simultaneously with a well-thought-out strategy, where the influencer uses his heft to implicitly coax his target audience to buy the product.
Though this sounds quite simple, it isn’t when you consider the brand personality, the influencer’s follower profile, and various other features and insights that affect the marketing campaign. Each aspect has to fit together to complete the jigsaw puzzle.
To do this, brands have to first choose the right influencer that matches the brand’s profile. Doing this is like finding a needle in a haystack. Here is where influencer marketplaces come into the picture. Influencer Marketing Platform not only help brands find the right influencer, it also assist the brand in conceptualizing, implementing, and monitoring the influencer marketing campaign.
Anyways, with a sound influencer marketing campaign, brands can connect better with their target audience and amplify their presence. Many startup brands are grabbing the market share of established brands with the power of influencer marketing.
Here are some reasons why you need to launch an influencer marketing strategy today-
It has immense power
Social media gives brands a level playing field. If your content is interesting and engaging, there is no stopping you from achieving your marketing goals in the shortest possible time. The word-of-mouth publicity that influencer marketing gives can make an unknown brand into an industry-leading brand in no time.
It can go viral quickly
Social media as a platform can make hay while the sun shines. Again, this all depends on how interesting your content is. We all have seen how the South Korean Gangnam-style music video became viral a few years ago. If your marketing campaign is interesting enough to be shared, liked, or commented upon, there is a good chance it will go viral.
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Can be used to ‘arbitrage’ your marketing campaign
An arbitrage exists when something is sold for a lesser value than it is actually worth. Though this term is commonly used in finance, it makes sense for influencer marketing too, as it is an opportunity to make good profits while making lesser efforts. For example, when Facebook had just introduced its ad network, early-bird advertisers reaped rich dividends. However, this lasted only for a few months.
Currently, influencer marketing is arbitraged. This gives a lot of opportunities to influencers and marketers to take full advantage of this before the market gets saturated. The current influencer market is supply-driven, where there are scores of influencers competing for a smaller amount of influencer marketing campaigns. However, arbitrages are only a temporary situation. As people realize its benefits, more brands will invest in this strategy, raising prices.
People do not like paid ads
Which was the last advertisement that you remember seeing? There are so many advertisements everywhere that most people are now tired of seeing them. People are so used to ads that they now unconsciously ignore them, a phenomenon called ‘banner blindness.’ People hate ads so much that paid services like Netflix, Spotify Premium, and Amazon Prime Video are getting an increased number of signups.
It helps increase your website’s SEO
When your influencer-sponsored post goes viral, curious followers will result in more traffic to your website. This gives your website a better ranking in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). In fact, research suggests that the top 20 brands in most niches get about 25 percent of their website traffic from social media websites. With the help of branded hashtags, you get more chances of ranking number 1 on the SERPs than ever before.
You can track your ROI
Running paid ads in traditional marketing mediums like TV, radio, and print media is like shooting an arrow in the dark. There is no guarantee your target audience will view the ad and help you increase sales.
Custom links for every product give you a chance to measure your influencers’ performance by the number of clicks and conversions they help you get. In fact, many brands make their influencers a sort of affiliate marketer, where they get a fixed and variable pay for the number of conversions they bring to the brand.
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You can target the right audience
Most influencers work within a specific niche- there are male grooming influencers for men in their 20s, makeup influencers for young women, and even influencers targeting a set of professionals like interior designers or marketers.
Based on your niche, you can choose an influencer that fits your brand’s identity and has the right engaged followers that may be interested in your products.
Summing it up
Influencer marketing is a resource-efficient medium to reach your marketing goals. Brands have realized how powerful this medium can be to push the message across. It provides brands a medium to know more about their customers and interact with them, while also promoting brand awareness amongst their target audience.