Modern customers are increasingly skeptical about brands beating their drums. Getting your business noticed has also become quite tough when every other brand strives to ace its online presence.
So, how do you capture attention and win your target market’s trust? The answer lies in influencer marketing.
Social media creators offer a sense of community and engage the audience through relatable content. In short, they are the trusted communicators to the netizens, and what they say goes.
Influencer marketing gives you access to the creator’s loyal following, turning the partnership into convincing social proof.
In fact, as of 2023, the influencer marketing niche is valued at $21.1 billion, constituting a 3x growth since 2019. This exponential growth only validates the seal of credibility influencer marketing can add to your brand.
Today’s blog discusses influencer marketing and its importance for a modern brand’s success.
What does influencer marketing entail?
Influencer marketing is a promotional approach where brands collaborate with social media personalities who post content regularly and have a substantial following. It has become a popular way for brands to connect with their target audience, boost visibility, generate leads, and leverage influencers’ credibility to gain their own.
Types of influencers
The most obvious metric to categorize influencers is their follower count. These categories are:
Mega influencers
A mega influencer is a social media creator with a large following on a single platform, typically more than 1 million. This category includes A-lister celebrities and some internet-based creators as well. Mega influencers mostly have a very diverse audience with different sets of interests.
For example, dancer and social media personality Charli D’Amelio boasts a whopping 45.6 million followers and thus can be considered a mega influencer.
Such influencers are perfect for you if your primary marketing goal is to increase reach and visibility.
Macro influencers
Macro influencers are social media creators with a follower count between 100,000 and 1 million. Unlike most mega influencers, these creators commonly gained their fame via the internet. If you want to target a specific customer segment and still touch across the masses, macro influencers can be the right partners for you.
For example, model and musician Britney Manson is a macro influencer with 597,000 followers. She imitates catwalks by the most notable models, which gained her a substantial following. She mostly partners with fashion labels and make-up brands because of her expertise in those niches.
Micro-influencers
Influencers with a follower count between 10,000 and 100,000 are considered micro influencers. They mostly focus on a specific area and boast substantial expertise in it.
Micro-influencers generally have a niche audience base genuinely interested in the creator’s field. So, if you are a brand trying to establish yourself as an industry expert, they can be fantastic brand ambassadors for your business.
Dividendology, with a follower count of 27,800, can be considered a micro-influencer on Twitter.
Nano influencers
Social media users with a follower count between 1000 and 10,000 are considered nano influencers. They mostly have a reach on their family and friends and can be considered a trusted voice in their local community.
Nano influencers share a more personal relationship with their followers and thus can boost your brand’s authenticity better than other influencers.
8 reasons why influencer marketing is essential for today’s brand success
Businesses are lining up to partner with influencers from start-ups to top brands. Reports show that 39% of businesses and relevant professionals have collaborated with 10 influencers, and 12% have worked with more than 1,000 influencers.
But why is influencer marketing getting such extensive attention? What value can they add to your business’s growth? Let’s find out:
1. Builds trust and credibility
Winning your target market’s trust is essential to get ahead in a saturated market. But branded ads alone can’t help you achieve that. However, influencers can give you a share of their audience’s trust.
Influencers have a strong connection with their followers. Their audience takes their recommendations seriously.
So when a social media creator with a substantial following uses and talks about your product, they add credibility to your brand. Such partnerships foster the perception that the brand is reliable and worth looking into.
In short, influencer marketing lets brands present their qualities without seeming gimmicky. It gives them a reason to choose you over your competitors, especially when accompanied by innovative, creative marketing approaches that captivate and resonate with the target audience
2. Allows better audience targeting
Spreading brand awareness isn’t enough. No matter how good your product is, it won’t sell if you can’t reach your core market. The key here is to target the right audience genuinely interested in your field or can use your products.
That’s something influencer marketing can help you with. Macro influencers often have followers with specific interests and demographics. These are the audiences most likely to engage with your brand.
Partnering with macro influencers in your industry gives you access to their niche audience. It ensures that your campaigns reach the right crowd, increase website traffic, and bring potential customers with a higher chance of conversion.
Holger Sindbaek, the owner of World of Card Games, shares, “As the gaming industry continues to expand, we recognized the untapped potential of influencer marketing in reaching new audiences. We strategically partnered with influencers who were gaming enthusiasts and had a strong connection with their followers. This approach allowed us to tap into new segments of gamers previously unaware of our platform. By leveraging the influencers’ credibility and reach, we introduced our games to a broader audience, significantly increasing new user acquisition. It’s a clear example of how, in a burgeoning market like online gaming, influencers can be the bridge to connect with new, enthusiastic players.”
3. Promotes authenticity
While traditional marketing, like advertisements and commercials, is important, it lacks authenticity. Which brand will say anything but good things about themselves?
But when an influencer vouches for your product by blending the endorsement into their regular content style, it looks much more authentic. These campaigns are relatable. It makes the audience believe if your brand could help their favorite influencer, it can also help them.
4. Increases brand awareness
With the extensive popularity of ad blockers, running social media ads isn’t the foolproof way of boosting brand awareness anymore. But influencer partnerships can do that for you in a non-intrusive way.
If you can find the right influencers through holistic qualitative and quantitative screening, they can get you sizable engagement and visibility. People may skip your ad but not their favorite creator’s content. This way, influencers can educate their followers about your brand organically.
Influencer marketing also gives you access to the creator’s already-established fan base, helping you reach a wider audience quickly and effectively.
5. Improved content quality
Influencers are popular because their audience likes what they do. These creators are fluent in their audience’s likes and dislikes, know how to hook attention, and build a positive perception through their content. You can use this to revamp your content strategy through influencer marketing.
You can include the influencer in your content planning process. It may be a good method to keep your content plan in a common pool with influencers so that influencers can better understand your comprehensive content plan and collaborate harmoniously on your strategies. They can add a fresher perspective and give you pointers to elevate your campaigns. The results will have a much better chance of resonating with your audience. That’s why many top brands even give influencers substantial creative freedom to create content for their partnership.
6. Boosts social proof
Influencer marketing is also an excellent way to boost word-of-mouth marketing. For example, when a micro or nano influencer with their community’s trust talks about how your product has helped them, their endorsements act as testimonials. It comes across as a recommendation from individuals your audience adores or admires.
Influencers often present a lifestyle that we aspire to achieve. That’s why, their endorsements make people believe the product can help them reach those aspirations. This enhances your brand’s perceived value and increases your product’s desirability.
In addition to verbal endorsements, influencers can seamlessly integrate your brand into their lifestyle by embedding Instagram feeds. This visual storytelling adds authenticity to your product, fostering a deeper connection with the audience.
7. Cost-effective approach
Reaching a larger audience through traditional marketing isn’t easy. You must keep at it constantly to acquire substantial followers, and they still may not get your desired attention. Plus, producing TV and print commercials and running social media ads for the longer run can be a huge financial burden. All this becomes much more complex if you want to grow your small business.
Influencer marketing, on the other hand, is a much more cost-effective approach. Your partner influencer already has a strong following. So you won’t need to drain your budget striving for a larger audience.
Tailoring influencer campaigns to fit your marketing budget is easy. They are easy to scale up or down according to the changes in marketing goals. Businesses with a tight budget can also use a pay-per-click model where your influencer will get paid every time someone buys your product through their link.
8. Improves SEO
Influencers featuring your product and linking your website on their posts generate quality backlinks. Your link reaches a wider audience whenever someone shares the influencer’s content, creating a domino effect. This boosts referral traffic, gets your website noticed by the search engine algorithm, and enhances your ranking.
Conclusion
With the right partnerships and a well-mapped-out strategy, influencer marketing is a sure-shot boon for your brand’s success.
Why?
- Influencer collaborations improve your authenticity and get you noticed in an otherwise crowded space.
- Their endorsements act as testimonials from someone your target audience trusts.
- Influencers can enhance your content quality.
- You can leverage their large follower base to boost brand awareness.
- Influencer marketing is much more cost-effective than traditional ads.
So, if you want to gain widespread exposure quickly and earn your audience’s trust, give influencer marketing a chance to get a bang for your buck.