Digital marketing trends are ever-evolving, and businesses need to adapt quickly for a competitive edge. In the social media age, few tactics are as powerful as influencer marketing, which leverages the fame and reputation of influencers to reach business goals. Currently, 86% of marketers and advertisement agencies employ this form of marketing as part of their outreach strategies.
The first step to creating a successful influencer marketing strategy is identifying your goals and a budget. Then, look for potential influencers in your niche through hashtags and establish relationships by communicating your expectations.
The right influencers don’t have to have the most followers. Commonly, small businesses succeed when they partner with local influencers whose followers want to discover new brands. For example, a restaurant can collaborate with micro-influencers and bloggers who sample and rate local eateries. Explore the ways an influencer can help your business below.
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Table of Contents
Build Brand Trust
Today, customers want to associate with authentic brands. However, it takes a long time to build trust with potential customers. Influencer marketing is among the best tactics for small businesses and startups that want to gain credibility quickly.
Influencers have already forged trust with their audience by creating meaningful content and sharing their lives. The relatability of social media influencers makes them as influential as celebrities in influencing people’s purchasing decisions. Indeed, 70% of teens trust influencers over traditional celebrities.
Audiences trust the opinions of the influencers they follow. Hence, endorsements from content creators will help you build credibility and establish you as a reputable brand. Moreover, people are more receptive to influencer recommendations than ads.
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Increase Sales
Modern customers have more access to information than ever before, so marketers have to be creative in getting people to spend money. As it stands, people are more likely to search for a product review before buying a new product.
Social media influencers can help your business boost sales by reviewing your products, creating content around your products, or offering discount codes. You can send a free product to an influencer in exchange for a review, but you shouldn’t dictate their talking points. People trust an influencer’s recommendations based on trust while distrusting pushy brands.
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Gain More Visibility
Social media platforms have different niches, such as beauty, food, travel, crafts, DIY, and home décor. Influencers in these niches amass followers with similar interests.
When you partner with an influencer in your industry, you access an audience interested in your products or services. Consequently, your brand gets more exposure as people exchange their reviews and impressions.
Influencer outreach also gets your brand in front of new audiences, especially if you work with macro-influencers with a lot of followers. However, these online personalities typically have a low engagement rate. In comparison, nano influencers with 1,000-10,000 followers have more engaged communities and may get you more new customers than influencers with a larger audience.
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Enrich Your Content Strategy
Many brands struggle to curate fresh content that keeps their target audience engaged. Thankfully, an influencer marketing campaign can revitalize your content marketing efforts as influencers create great content with little input from you.
Influencers are savvy, and they know the best way to engage audiences on platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn. For example, Instagram influencers leverage stories, entertaining videos, captions, reels, and live rooms to encourage conversations around specific topics or products. Hence, influencers’ posts perform better than your Instagram posts, leading to better brand awareness and more conversions. You can even use influencer posts to refresh digital signage content for visitor and employee entertainment.
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Boost SEO
Digital marketers are always searching for ways to improve SEO and rank higher on search engines. Influencer relationships are additional tools in your SEO arsenal as they boost your search engine rankings in several ways.
First, working with influencers provides excellent opportunities to build stronger backlinks for your site. Typically, influencers often have their own websites or access to high-authority sites. An influencer helps search engines establish your site’s credibility by linking back to you.
Second, influencers increase your web traffic by mentioning your brand, letting Google know many people value your content. Furthermore, these personalities create shareable content that people quickly consume and enjoy. Therefore, search engines get more high-quality content associated with your brand to rank.
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Create Valuable Relationships
Influencer marketing helps your business build long-lasting relationships with influential personalities in your niche. By building strong influencer relationships, you gain continual access to an influencer’s creative tactics and loyal following.
Moreso, a long-term partnership with brand ambassadors gets you more exposure and visibility, especially if the audience sees your products as part of the influencer’s daily life. Authenticity is vital in online marketing, and influencer marketing is the best way to make your products and services seem relatable.
Leverage Influencer Marketing to Grow Your Business
You can use influencer marketing to achieve various goals, from enhancing brand awareness, attracting new customers, better SEO, and gaining credibility. Before you launch into the form of marketing, understand the different types of influencers and what they can do for your brand.
For instance, macro-influencers have a large reach, but they may not get you high engagement rates, and they require a hefty marketing budget. In comparison, micro-influencers have a smaller following but higher engagement rates. Take the time to identify and nurture relationships with the right influencers to gain more visibility.
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