We’ve all seen it, you go onto Instagram and there will be a celebrity you follow sat drinking Bootea telling you this is how they stay in shape. The times are changing, we now live in an age where everything is accessible online – we can see exactly what our peers are up to just through social media.
This leads to a change in buying habits. Rather than looking at brands, consumers are looking at what fellow consumers are buying and doing. Resulting in a decision-making process that is changing.
As a brand, this is something that we should embrace, it is another channel that we are able to exploit. There are so many social influencers for all different industries allowing you to pinpoint those that you want to work with, ensuring you are appealing to your target audience.
With more and more brands using it, why exactly is it that influencer marketing is becoming so popular?
ROI
There are so many ways to measure influencer marketing, from using a tracked link to impressions of tweets, you are able to calculate ROI. In fact, TapInfluence conclude that influencer marketing has an 11x higher ROI than the traditional ad banner campaign. The analytics you can acquire through social media allow you to constantly improve your ads and see what is working for you.
Organic
The average consumer is drifting away from forced ads which are why inbound marketing is becoming popular, nobody wants to be forced to watch an advert which delays them from the content they are trying to access. Social influencers, allow adverts to appear to be ‘natural’ meaning the consumer won’t become frustrated by your adverts, it is helping to develop brand awareness.
Thought Leadership
Social influencers tend to be thought-leaders within the industry. Again, look at fitness for example, you have YouTubers with over 100k followers sharing their journey and how you can build your perfect physique. As the audience invests time into these influencers. We naturally ‘look up to’ these people for guidance and assistance in achieving our fitness goals. Therefore, buying products we feel will work.
SEO
It wouldn’t be a digital campaign without benefitting your SEO in some way or another. Usually overlooked, social influencers can have a positive impact on your site’s SEO. Social influencers help to increase the number of times your content is shared, further improving your site’s SEO. The more people that share the link, the more Google will begin to recognise this as a ‘quality link’ thus helping to improve your sites organic SEO.
Social Channels
Depending on your product or service offering, you can tailor the adverts for maximum R.O.I, it doesn’t all need to be images of a celebrity with your teeth whitening kit. For example, if you are a sports nutrition company utilising YouTube with product reviews helps build trust with the consumer. By looking at social media statistics and the audience on each platform, along with amount of followers the influencer has, we can pinpoint how would be best to target these.
With studies showing that influencer marketing is on the rise, and has such a high ROI, there is no better time to start considering using social influencers within your marketing plans. Get researching and pinpoint those that you want to become brand advocates.
Your competitor could already be doing so!
{{cta(‘c1acec2f-65ee-4b87-b05a-487541d5afbc’)}}
This article was originally published on Linkedin.