Over the last couple of years, the marketing landscape became incredibly diverse, creative, and expansive. Keeping in mind the rapid development of digital and communication technologies as well as the increasingly competitive business landscape this shouldn’t come off as such a big surprise.
The fact remains however that present-day marketers are presented with an entirely relentless corporate environment and a plethora of marketing choices that, due to their sheer volume, serve as a detriment rather than a benefit.
Still, even in such circumstances, influencer marketing quickly picks up steam as one of the most prospective and cost-effective marketing approaches on the horizon. Let us take a look then at how this strategy works and why it should become a part of your portfolio in 2023.
What is influencer marketing exactly?
In the simplest of terms, influencer marketing usually involves a brand collaborating with some famous online influencer to publicly promote its products and services. The power of this approach comes from the fact that people with strong social media following are experts within their niche or simply serve as general role models. Their recommendation thus serves as excellent social proof replacing the traditional channels like user reviews and similar.
Also, people put very much trust in peer recommendations. According to a recent survey published by Nielsen, as many as 84% of global respondents cited peer recommendations as the most trustworthy advertising channel. Even though it is not exactly the same thing, influencer marketing basically taps into similar consumer sensibilities.
How to implement influence marketing strategies
In this regard, influencer marketing is not that different from traditional marketing strategies. As a matter of fact, even though this form of outreach seems very spontaneous and organic, in most cases these efforts are conducted by a professional influencer marketing agency that takes a very data-based and methodical approach to the whole matter. However, all influencer marketing campaigns can be made more efficient by following methods:
- Determine clear goals
- Know the audience you are trying to influence
- Compile the short list of influences with social leverage in the intended customer base
- Set up relevant parameters and KPIs
- Set up plans for collaboration and content creation
The critical three Rs of influencer marketing
Also, you should always keep in mind what marketers like to call three Rs of influencer marketing. If you are not familiar with the term, these three Rs are Relevance, Reach, and Resonance.
Relevant content creators should already have a history of sharing posts related to your industry. Going too far across borders considerably diminishes this factor. Reach, represents the number of people you will be able to reach through the influencer’s follower pool. Depending on your goals, you can use even the smaller but more focused bases. Resonance can be roughly described as the level of influence the content creator can demonstrate over the audience relevant to your brand.
As long as these basic conditions are met, your influencer marketing campaigns will have a much higher chance of success.
The benefits of using influencer marketing
So far, we have spent quite a lot of time talking about the concept and implementation of influencer marketing without pointing out its place in the grander marketing constellation – at least past its basic purpose as yet another social proof. However, this form of marketing is capable of producing some far more relevant outcomes. Here are a couple of the most notable examples:
Improving brand awareness
Essentially, the target audience gets the opportunity to get a taste of your brand, its quality, and its mission statement in a very natural and approachable manner.
Reinforcing trust and authority
Even the best-advertised brands have a very hard time making themselves appear trustworthy and authoritative. Influencer marketing effectively moves this issue off the table.
Expanding the core customer pool
Unlike other, more focused marketing efforts, influencer marketing has the benefit of speaking to a very wide, diverse, often global, and very young target audience.
An easy way for setting trends
Novel ideas often have a hard time breaching into public consciousness. Influencer marketing allows followers to experience these abstract, trend-setting concepts in a very natural and tangible manner.
Room for collaboration
In the best-case scenario, content creators can take an active role in the project development process and infuse a healthy dose of creativity and fresh ideas.
We hope this short breakdown gave you a general idea about the basic concept of influencer marketing and hopefully demonstrated how this novel approach can be used to the benefit of your organization. But we only need to remember that we are living in a time of digital media and social networks. People capable of demonstrating sway over this market are nothing short of tremendous marketing assets.