Influencer marketing has seen incredible growth over the past 8 years, for example, back in 2016, influencer marketing was a $1.7 billion industry – now it has grown to become a $21.1 billion industry. This growth has attracted many brands and marketers to include influencers within their content marketing strategy, and when influencer marketing is said to have 11x the ROI than banner ads, you can see why. I want to take a look at the different benefits of influencer marketing to show why you should be adopting it into your strategy.
What Is Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing that leverages the influence of individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche.
Brands usually collaborate with influencers to promote products, services, or campaigns. This marketing strategy works because these influencers have already built a level of trust and credibility with their followers, making their endorsements seem genuine and relatable.
Influencer marketing can be categorized based on the follower count and the scope of influence of these individuals:
- Nano-Influencers: Typically having between 1,000 to 10,000 followers, nano-influencers are known for their highly engaged and loyal followers. They may be everyday consumers with a deep interest or expertise in a specific niche. Nano-influencers often have a high engagement rate because of their personal connection with their audience.
- Micro-Influencers: Possessing a follower count ranging from 10,000 to 100,000, micro-influencers are known for their focus on a specific niche or area. They are regarded as thought leaders or subject matter experts in their respective fields. Their recommendations are valued by their followers, and they maintain a strong, interactive community.
- Macro-Influencers: With followers between 100,000 and 1 million, macro-influencers are often minor celebrities, digital creators, or well-known personalities in certain industries. They have a wider reach than micro and nano-influencers, and they are suitable for campaigns aiming for higher visibility.
- Mega-Influencers and Celebrities: These are individuals with over a million followers. They include celebrities, sports stars, and global personalities. While they offer the greatest reach, their level of engagement and perceived authenticity can be lower than other types of influencers.
You Can Reach New Audiences
One of the many benefits of influencer marketing is the ability to reach new audiences. You will no doubt have your own audience, however, if you select an influencer in your niche, you will open up your content to an entirely new audience.
Influencers already have a dedicated following that trusts and values their opinions and recommendations, partnering with them allows brands to tap into their established audience, effectively broadening its reach. This is particularly valuable for brands looking to expand into new market segments or demographics.
Also, each influencer has a unique audience demographic, defined by their content niche, personal brand, and the social media platforms they use. For example, a tech influencer on YouTube may attract an audience interested in the latest gadgets and technology trends, while a fashion influencer on Instagram might appeal to those keeping up with the latest style trends.
Increases Brand Awareness
An effective way to increase brand awareness is through influencer marketing. Now, a one-off post collaboration with an influencer probably won’t have much of an effect on your brand awareness; however, a regular partnership can significantly increase the awareness of your brand.
For example, you might have noticed brands such as Surfshark, a VPN software that often sponsors content with influencers on YouTube. The same goes for A1 Athletic Greens, who sponsor influencers on YouTube to build awareness of their product (in addition to generating sales).
This is an influencer marketing benefit that applies even more so to small businesses or start-up e-commerce brands that are looking to start building awareness – but at the time generate leads/sales.
Grows the Number of Followers
As I have established before, it’s not about quantity but quality when it comes to followers. However, the great thing about influencer marketing is that not only can you increase the number of followers for your brand, but that audience ‘should’ be high-quality. As they are already interested in your niche, when these followers see your brand from an influencer post and they click through to follow you, they are interested in your product or content.
Depending on the goals of your influencer marketing campaign, you could specifically target followers as the outcome; where the content posted by the influencer encourages their audience to follow your brand – instead of to purchase a product or visit a link somewhere else. It all depends on the focus of your marketing strategy.
One of the best ways to increase followers through influencer marketing is to run a competition or a ‘giveaway’ where you can offer free items in return for people following your account and tagging friends. However, the only downside to this is you might only get 50% of new followers who are engaged and interested in your brand – the rest will just want free stuff.
Increases Sales
Partnering with influencers can increase sales of your product or service, especially when 69% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations. In fact, according to the latest influencer marketing statistics, it is one of the most effective marketing channels in terms of sales and ROI. This is why many brand-new e-commerce stores use influencers to promote their products – it’s more effective and has a better ROI.
If you are investing in influencer marketing to increase the number of sales, be mindful of offering something in return. One key strategy here is to offer a discount code, so the influencer can tell their audience that by purchasing the product they get money off with a special code made only for the influencer.
Be sure you implement custom tracking URLs and custom discount codes whenever running influencer marketing campaigns as you will need to track and measure where sales come from.
Improves Your Marketing ROI
As already mentioned, influencer marketing has one of the best marketing ROI’s out there. Actually, according to HubSpot’s State of Marketing report, 7% say that influencer marketing has the highest ROI excluding short-form video. If that’s not enough to convince you, another survey also stated that businesses make $5.78 for every $1 they spend on influencer marketing.
Influencers are trusted more than brands and other sources of media and their audiences are loyal followers, taking action when advised to do so. That’s what makes influencer marketing so effective in terms of ROI.
However, while it’s very effective and beneficial to brands, over 60% of marketers say that determining the ROI of influencer marketing is the most challenging aspect – above all other factors.
Educates Your Target Audience
Considering the levels of trust instilled upon influencers by their audiences, utilizing that to educate your audience can be highly effective. You can train and prep influencers on how to use your product/service and they can portray that effectively to the audience, but in an engaging and interactive way that resonates directly.
Educating consumers through influencer marketing can result in increased brand awareness, more sales, WOM advertising, and also an increase in user-generated content. Of course, this will only apply to some products or services, as there will be some instances where you won’t need to educate audiences.
Allows You To Connect With Audiences Differently
Generally speaking, communicating with an audience as a brand will follow the same tone, style, and narrative to align with your branding. There are only so many people that this will engage and pique the interest of. When you partner with an influencer, they speak and act in their own voice, a way that directly resonates with their audience. This means that you can interact with other audiences without disrupting your own brand style and maximizing the impact of content.
It can also be a chance to experiment. You can find influencers that have different styles in the way they deliver content, test posts, and see if one ‘style’ generates more interest over the other. Think of it like a ‘branding A/B test’, where you can use the results to inform potential changes within your own branding style to maximize reach and resonate with your target audience.
It Can Save You Money
Did you know that influencer marketing campaigns are 30% cheaper than most forms of advertising and marketing strategies? It’s not surprising considering the high ROI associated with these campaigns. When it comes to the cost of working with influencers, you can expect the following:
- Nano-influencers charge between $2 and $250 per social media post
- Micro-influencers charge between $25 and $1,250 per social media post
- Macro-influencers can charge up to $25,000 per sponsored post
- Celebrities charge beyond $1 million per social media post
Surprisingly, you can actually see more engagement and a better ROI with smaller influencers when compared to celebrities. Smaller influencers will have a highly engaged audience and will be active more as they are making the effort to grow and develop their following.
Builds Brand Trust & Credibility
Building trust and credibility is an incredibly difficult task for a brand, but influencer marketing can help. As the audiences of influencers already have high levels of trust and dedication, they tend to trust the recommendations that the influencers give. Therefore, if an influencer is talking up your brand and providing authentic information to the audience, showing they trust it, the audience is likely going to instill some of that trust into your brand.
Of course, it’s not a magic formula, there is still work that needs to be done on your side to nurture that trust and improve it even more. Nevertheless, it’s a great place to start if you are trying to establish trust with a new audience. Actually, according to GenZ, recommendations from influencers are more important and impactful than those from friends and family.
You Can Target Niche Audiences
The process of finding niche target audiences, connecting with them, and turning them into followers is time-consuming and challenging. When you partner with influencers, that whole process is different. You can search for influencers within your niche, set up a campaign, and tap into the audience that they have already built. It saves time, money, and effort on your part, whereas it’s something that the influencer has effectively done already.
While this is a top benefit of influencer marketing, it shouldn’t inform your entire marketing strategy. Niche audiences are generally small – therefore you should combine other marketing channels and strategies to build up your audience and increase awareness.
Higher Quality Content
As a small business, finding the time and having the resources to create high-quality content can be difficult. I have actually seen well-established brands struggle with high-quality content too! However, the benefit of influencer marketing is that the influencer will likely already have the resources and would have the experience in creating high-quality content for their audience.
By partnering with an influencer, you don’t have to worry about investing in equipment, and software, and learning the ropes of producing high-quality content. You shouldn’t rely on this forever, and should always dedicate some time to learning, but in the beginning or to supplement your efforts, using an influencer is a great move.
Gets Higher Engagement Rates
Influencers have really high engagement rates and surprisingly the smaller the influencer, the better their engagement rate is – as you can see in the chart below:
That’s because initially, the organic growth from influencers sees engaged and active followers who are interested in the content. Whereas when the accounts grow, influencers will start to see bot accounts, agencies, and other useless followers that do not engage, only build up the following.
When you are searching for an influencer, use a professional tool like Insense, that can identify the engagement rates and how active they are. This will save you time and help to avoid potentially fake accounts with fake followers.
