Influencer marketing serves a purpose for everyone involved, especially at its most effective. Marketers can gain credibility within the influencer audience and the influencer engages in and assists in creating original content that delight and inspires their audience to buy it. The audience gets great content that they may have not otherwise been exposed to, plus, it’s coming from someone they admire and trust. It’s becoming increasingly important to be selective when choosing influencers and to be strategic in your outreach as influencer marketing becomes more popular.
Why Social Influencer Marketing is Worth It
By incorporating influencer marketing into your company’s marketing strategy, you create the opportunity to partner with individuals who have the potential to promote content on your behalf. Added credibility or brand recognition, or tangible products, like cash or merchandise, are all incentive for influencers to want to work with you.
Some of today’s most successful digital marketing campaigns use influencer marketing. Strategies are incorporated by leveraging social influencers and their digital follower base to help push products, assist with branding company messages, or marketing campaigns to the general public. Marketers locate and partner with influential people who could potentially be current customers, brand ambassadors, or paid influencers- like celebrities and athletes.
While influencer marketing is paying someone to talk about their brand, word-of-mouth relies on consumers to talk about a brand on their own. There’s no real way to measure that. Social influencer marketing behaves in much of the same way as word-of-mouth marketing, and while some people see them as synonymous, the difference is in how customers perceive it and how you approach it.
If you are still asking the question, ‘What is influencer marketing,’ in short, when an influencer promotes and links to your business, it helps drive traffic and boosts conversions. The results are what’s most interesting about this concept. Not only do visitors show 16x the average engagement when pushed to a site by influencers, but when a brand repurposes the content, the media influencer content performs almost 35x better than the company’s own content, and 10x as high if used in Facebook posts.
In short, “influencer,” means someone who, due to their interest, engagement and expertise, has a large following, and a ‘cult’ celebrity status within their respective niche community on one or more social platforms. Due in part to millennials, technology, and social media trends, influencers have become omnipresent. These influencers exist for basically every niche across the Internet and can help get your product in front of a highly-targeted, socially-engaged audience.