Chances are, you know more about influencer marketing than you think. An article on Sprout Social defines influencers as people who use their reputation to help companies build brand authority by promoting a company’s product or service to a specific market segment.
Influencers have loyal followers who respect their opinions and are interested in their lifestyles. They speak on everything from which resort to visit and which excursions to take to which local restaurant has the hottest chicken wings or which workouts you should perform for the best results. Every company with a social media presence could highly benefit from having its very own influencer. According to an article on influencermarketinghub.com, influencer marketing was worth $13.8 billion last year.
With the amount of reach an influencer may have on social media, the right influencer could open the doors to positioning a company exactly where they want to be in the mind of their target consumer. A blog from oberlo.com discusses the anticipated impacts of influencer marketing including increased sales, a direct connection to your audience, and social proof that can elevate the brand.
Influencer marketing can be a practical approach to spark interest and increase consumer sales through social media. According to the oberlo.com blog, businesses could earn approximately $18 for every $1 they spend on influencer marketing.
Influencers help you reach your audience by promoting your company’s products or services without involving them directly. In other words, the influencer can get your message to your target audience wherever they are. The influencer’s social media connections allow them to use their status, persona, and reputation to provide positive feedback and recommend products or services to their followers.
Influencer marketing has taken the traditional word-of-mouth tactics and significantly increased their impact. An article on digitalmarketing.org confirms that 92% of consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations above all other forms of advertising. The report suggests a surprising amount of people have become skeptical and no longer trust traditional forms of advertising. Instead, consumers rely heavily on reviews and testimonials from influencers, trusted sources the consumer has never met, which is where social proof comes in. The idea of social proof, according to oberlo.com, is when people see other people interested in something, they become interested in it too.
Influencers will target you during your downtime, and because you follow and trust them, you won’t mind when they promote a product or service to you. As a marketer, investing a portion of your budget in influencer marketing could be a risk as results are not guaranteed. However, with the growth influencer marketing has experienced, choosing not to adapt and trust someone who already has the ear of the consumer could be a greater risk.
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