Influencer Marketing: What Are The Benefits?

Influencer marketing is an excellent strategy for building your brand awareness and attracting attention very quickly. In addition to this, it’s a great way to build trust with your customers and then to reach a wider audience quickly. Many businesses already use this tool to build up trust and establish business partnerships with a wide range of people. But what really is influencer marketing?

But … What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is the use of online personalities (usually a celebrity or sportsperson, but more frequently somebody with authority in the same niche) – whether it be through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or otherwise – to advertise your product or brand.

Let’s put it in an analogy: for example, you own a small make-up brand, which specializes in eyeshadow and lipsticks. You would send one, or a couple, of your products to a very popular makeup influencer – for example, someone who uses many high-end brands.

Utilizing influencer marketing companies, which are agencies set up to help you with this task, the business owner can find and select the influencers appropriate to your brand, send them an email saying, ‘can you give this product a mention and a test in a video, and we’ll pay you x amount’.

This is the well-used method of making a win-win deal with someone with a large fanbase to feed off their already established trust with their audience to benefit you and your brand. In addition, you can usually gain a new business partner on the way, one you could return back to at any time as a reliable source of advertising output.

So What Are The Benefits?

There are many benefits to this strategy of marketing, and below find a list that works as an overview of some of the upsides to this easy, and replicable method of advertising your products. (It’s also affordable, and doesn’t rely on brand size or prominence).

1. Association

Even if viewers don’t buy your product, they will still associate the brand with the influencer. If they enjoy watching the influencer, which more likely than not they will, they will automatically think it’s a trustworthy brand.

Put it this way – you are far more likely to buy a product from a brand that a friend enjoys than one a stranger does, and if the person makes it look good – going back to the makeup influencer analogy, if they create an iconic look with said eyeshadow or lipstick, people are more likely to pay attention to your brand, which in turn builds brand awareness and intrigue, adding to the credibility of your brand.

2. Builds Partnerships

This strategy is handy for a number of things, including time fillers for schedule space. This means that if you have a gap in production or your social media views have plateaued for a little bit too long, you can send out your product to an influencer to pique people’s interest again.

Building partnerships is also good for people getting in contact with you. Influencers are generally in circles of influencers, and a partnership with one might end up being a partnership with many. You will really be able to hit a range of target audiences then. Also, you can use influencers more than once – you can build business partnerships and create collaborative products, which also helps draw attention to your brand.

3. Helps Promotional Marketing

Sending out a new, soon-to-be-released product is also good. Many consumers that follow influencers are always looking for new trends and shiny new products to add to their collection, so sending these products out to a small group of influencers will build up hype, and will give people more warning for when your new product drops on the market.

This is also a great opportunity for putting out promo codes and such like, as then people are more likely to go to your website and see what they can get. It’s also a great way to announce sales and special deals you have on, too. People are eager to dig their fingers into the ‘one time offer’ or ‘limited edition’ of an item. Especially if it’s linked to an event, such as Christmas or an autumnal revamp!

4. It’s Not ‘In Your Face’!

People tend to react badly to ‘hard-sell’ tactics in this day and age. Customers get impatient and annoyed, and everything feels forced.

So, soft selling generally works an awful lot better. Having a quick mention, or even better, product placement is a good and subtle strategy. People also often watch influencers as a method of escapism and relaxation, as a result, it’s a bad marketing technique to interrupt that – you don’t want to push such things down people’s throats, especially if they’re trying to wind down for the day.

This means your brand might be seen as an interruption if it’s done through a skippable advertisement. This is bad for business, so it’s better to be integrated into something watchable than be right in people’s faces.

5. It’s A Win-Win Deal

This means that you both get something good out of it. They get a sponsor and a few free products that help them create their content in a more efficient manner. In addition to this, they get some of your audience if you promote your collaboration, and you get some of their audience from the video or post. This also improves your SEO, (search engine optimization) as you are associated with brands and people that are far better known. But not only small brands do this tactic – larger brands do it too, but there are so many influencers nowadays it might not be as competitive as you might first have thought!

So, here is a very basic overview of the tactics of using social media influencer marketing. It’s a great opportunity to sell your product in a way that is easy on your pocket and brings in a mass audience, no matter how big or small your brand is. It’s a very handy tool to have and works wonders for your brand identity.