6 Reasons to adopt influencer marketing into your social strategy
Influencer marketing is one of the smartest methods to quickly grow your brand online and generate awareness among your target audience. It’s even thought to be coming as popular as digital ads, with the focus on using the power and popularity of industry leaders to grow your own business. What makes influencer marketing so appealing, is that the audience already exists, it’s up to you how you forge a mutually beneficial partnership with influencers.
It’s certainly worthwhile engaging in influencer marketing to raise brand awareness, ensure your content reaches new people and generate those all-important leads for your sales funnel.
Not convinced? Here are some appealing influencer marketing benefits that will boost your social strategy.
▹ Improve your search ranking
In the past, search engine optimisation (SEO) was largely based on keywords. While that’s still the case, recent years has seen Google switch up its algorithm so that high quality organic links have a positive impact on ranking. Without link referrals from high authority sites, you will struggle to beat your competition to the top position on search engines.
Partnering with influencers such as bloggers, to review and promote your product/service, will drive traffic to your website. Micro influencers are a good option to collaborate with as they have a substantial social following and a good domain authority to have a positive impact.
▹ Boost lead generation
Micro influencers focus on niche areas, so when they post about your product or service, your brand awareness will be heightened within a specific market relevant to you. This will boost your lead generation and the quality of leads, subsequently resulting in higher ROI.
Don’t be swayed into choosing influencers based on follower counts on the premise that they will have a higher reach. These posts may reach more people, but only a small portion of that audience will be interested in your product or service. It’s vital to collaborate with influencers that are relevant to your brand and industry, so that you target an audience that will appreciate your offering. Reach out to influencers and offer them a free trial of your service or free sample of your product. They need to know the benefits so that they share this information with their followers.
▹ Build trust
Influencers have already built relationships and established a good reputation with their followers. Their audience appreciate the content they share and value their advice and recommendations. When you regularly share an influencer’s content, you’ll win their attention and they’ll start to share yours too. This will showcase your content to fresh eyes and an already active, interested audience.
▹ Enhances your content strategy
Maybe you’re lacking content inspiration and need some high-quality posts to keep your social media presence alive. Sharing influencer content can add to your existing strategy, especially where there are gaps in your publishing schedule or within specific topic areas.
▹ Increase engagement with your target audience
Influencers that are relevant to your brand will already have established online relationships with users that are interested in your business niche. You won’t have to use time and resources to research, test and identify your audience, the influencer has already built the foundation for you.
▹ Provide your audience with high value content
You want to provide your followers with educational and inspirational content that addresses their pain points and interests. Influencers will already have established a relationship with their audience, enabling them to identify topics of interests and find what appeals to them most. You can leverage this content and share its value with your followers.
Word of mouth is undoubtedly one of the most valuable forms of marketing and has been found to influence 20-50% of purchasing decisions (Hootsuite). And in an increasing digital world, recommendations are going further than friends and family- people are going to Google for suggestions. By identifying the individuals that have influence over your potential buyers, you’re half way there to a successful influencer marketing campaign.
