Influencers can be an excellent way to help grow your brand awareness and profits. Not only are you tapping into a loyal customer base, but the types of customers buying from you are beneficial as well.
With the influencer market growing by over 4 billion dollars in 2021, choosing the right type of marketing campaign for your business is critical. Let’s get into the pros and cons of influencer marketing, how to choose the right partner for your brand, and the next steps.
Influencer Marketing for Small business
Influencer marketing is a powerful way to help grow your business. With the main focus being on connecting loyal customer bases with your product, obtaining sales-qualified leads can be done quicker than ever.
Influencer marketing for small businesses is an excellent way to build sales quickly and target active, engaged audiences. Typically in these types of campaigns, payment is upfront, and the influencer is paid for a post, shout-out, or mention on the predetermined social platform at a specific time. Companies who use influencer marketing, often prefer to work with influencers that like their products or are current customers.
Examples of influencer marketing include:
Leesa Mattresses
Leesa is a luxury mattress manufacturer that exclusively sells through their online store, one of the great examples of influencer marketing. Since there’s no showroom for customers to try out the mattress, using influencer marketing to tap into loyal, engaged customers was vital. For this influencer marketing campaign, the brand wanted to work with key bloggers who specialize in DIY, style spaces, and interior design.
Loot Crate
Loot Crate is the perfect example of successful influencer marketing, especially considering it’s the basis of their company’s foundation. They target YouTube and Twitch Infelucers with high engagements to create user-generated content, build a community, and create a product their audience genuinely looks forward to every month.
Pros & Cons of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is now a well-known marketing strategy that many brands leverage to reach out to their customers and engage them.
More and more brands are choosing to incorporate influencers into their marketing strategy. In fact, 71% of marketers feel that influencer marketing effectively drives quality traffic and leads.
The influencer marketing benefits are significant, including increasing trustworthiness, saving time, and broadening your reach.
Pros of Influencer Marketing
1. It Helps You Target the Right Audience
When companies choose influencers for their campaigns, they often choose those who are either their perfect buyer persona, ones who are already customers, or those who have the right audience for that particular campaign.
Because of this, influencer marketing for small businesses can quickly help you obtain your objective if increasing your reach is your goal.
These audiences are also often loyal and dedicated to the figures they follow, meaning influencer audiences often don’t need the typical 7-9 mentions before they choose to buy from a new brand.
2. It Helps You Build Trust and Credibility
Over the past few years, a brand's credibility and values have become an increasingly important part of the buyer’s purchase decision.
In response, brands have not only reconsidered how they advertise in a tone-appropriate manner, but they've also had to become more strategic and selective in seeking out the representatives that best reflect those values.
When audiences see a trusted figure supporting and using your brand, they are more inclined to see you as trustworthy and credible as well. After all, why would their influencer suggest using a product or service if it wasn’t dependable?
The following ways are examples of how buyers support brands they trust:
71% make more frequent purchases
61% make recommendations to a friend
41% join the brand's loyalty program
40% will post positive comments or reviews online
3. It Widens Your Brand’s Reach
Would you be surprised to learn 82% of people will buy a product recommended by an influencer?
Regardless of the social media platform you choose, influencers can help you add new potential customers to your basket. These audiences often mimic the audience you are trying to reach, saving you time and effort targeting them personally.
4. It is Usually Less Pricey
You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars utilizing influencer marketing. In fact, micro-influencers often have the highest engagement rates and ROIs with the least amount of costs.
To find the right influencer for your budget and audience, click here.
5. Higher Likelihood of Sales-Qualified Leads (SQL)
Influencers spend a lot of time and effort building their audiences. That’s why most legit influencers have highly engaged audiences who trust them. Because of this, the likelihood of these audiences becoming real buyers is much higher than running ads on social media using the same budget.
SQLs, otherwise known as Sales-Qualified Leads, are leads that are more likely to convert, therefore, are more attractive to a sales team.
Cons of Influencer Marketing
1. Working with the Wrong Influencers Can Harm Your Brand
No one is immune to scandal, poor decision-making, or quotes taken out of context, meaning your chosen influencers aren’t either.
One prime example is the James Charles x Morphe Controversy of 2021.
In February of 2021, Charles was accused of exchanging inappropriate messages with minors online. Morphe addressed Charles' scandal and released a statement claiming that they would "end their business relationship [with Charles] and wind down sales of the Morphe x James Charles product offering."
Although it seemed Morphe was actively distancing themselves from him, consumers were taken aback when they saw that Charles' products were still being sold on their website. Their audience responded by burning their palettes, exchanging them for others, and refusing to purchase from the company again.
Although Morphe continues to be a successful brand, sales have never quite returned to what they were pre-scandal.
2. Competitive Market
The influencer market is competitive; whoever is more exciting and engaging will naturally have more followers.
Since the market can only handle rewarding those who are best at reaching audiences and generating sales, the pool of Influencers is limited by the money brands are willing to spend. This has also increased the number of “fake influencers.”
One of the most noticeable issues inside influencer marketing is over-immersion. Being paid to post to web-based media has become the new "American dream," and more and more influencers are out there pushing more paid posts.
Many of these hopeful influencers may have the supporter check to help their status but lack the key characteristic that is fundamental to your brand — real impact.
How to Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy
Like any marketing effort, a strategy is highly suggested to ensure everything runs smoothly. This strategy will also include how to talk about your brand, the do’s and don’t of mentions, the KPIs you want to measure, and more.
Here are the steps you’ll want to take to create your influencer marketing strategy:
Outline your goals and KPIs
Map the influencer information and segments
Find and research influencers
Nurture the relationship
Define your plans
Execute and analyze your results
Key Takeaways
In today’s digital world, social content creators with niche audiences can often offer more value to brands than ads. These people have dedicated and engaged groups of followers on social media who often make better SQLs and improve your overall conversions.
However, choosing the right influencer and strategy is vital for success, as the wrong partner can actually cost your brand its reputation.
Still, while there are some unique considerations to working with influencers, setting up a campaign is the same as most marketing campaigns: research, set a budget, determine goals, find your influencers, and review and revise.
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