5 Benefits of Influencer Marketing
We speak with a lot of clients that are just learning about influencer marketing and they aren’t completely sure of why they should add it to their marketing plan and budget. They are often hung up on one metric- how many people will it drive to my website? That is definitely an important factor and measurement of success, but it isn’t the only one. There are five main benefits of influencer marketing and they are all very important in factoring your budget and your goals.
1. Reach Your Target Customer
Of course you want to reach the person that might actually buy your product or service. Your target customer is who will be most likely to click through to your website to see what you are offering. It is really important to select influencers that actually engage with your target customer. This isn’t always as easy as you think- some bloggers have a very local following while others are more national or even international. Some may have kids, but their children are already in elementary school so they don’t write about baby topics anymore. They wouldn’t be ideal to speak about the best new diapers on the market because their audience isn’t interested. So be sure to work with influencers that can reach your target customer and drive her back to your website.
2. Brand Awareness
Many businesses do not have the budget for television ads, radio ads, or even print advertising. It can be difficult to increase your brand awareness and let people know that your business even exists. Consider influencer marketing a great complement to your traditional PR efforts or advertising efforts and it has a broad reach that can definitely help create your brand awareness.
3. Content Marketing
A properly executed influencer campaign gives you an incredible amount of content that you can then reuse across all marketing platforms- from email marketing to social media to your website. A great blogger will not only write about your product but they will create images, awesome photography, videos, and more. These pieces of content are like gold! Curate that content and use the influencers’ authentic stories to tell your story in new ways. Sometimes we build out a hub page to pull all of the information together and sometimes we use it to fill out social media feeds with great information. All of it should be considered and planned.
4. Follow-on Marketing Opportunities
We always try to include a giveaway with our influencer campaigns and one of our favorite ways to do this is via the Rafflecopter widget. This application is fantastic because you can decide the entry options based on your goals and almost all of them give you follow on marketing opportunities. We generally require Facebook , Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and/or Instagram follow for the business, a specific question to comment on the blog post (can provide fantastic feedback and insight), and sharing about the giveaway on social platforms. You are also provided the email address via their Facebook sign in so you can follow up with them via email marketing. All of those follow on touch points are yours to take advantage of, so don’t miss out. If you structure your giveaway correctly (make it your actual product so that it isn’t something unrelated), then you know that they are interested. Follow up after the giveaway and offer them an incentive to buy to help them not feel so badly for losing.
5. SEO
I have worked hard with many SEO firms to help my clients get as many inbound links as possible. We often did guest blogging and looked for great PR opportunities, answering as many HARO requests as possible. Well, influencer marketing is another fantastic way to get links back to your site and we know this is so incredibly valuable for SEO. We recently began working with a company that did a campaign with us completely out of their SEO budget- very smart!