Influencer Marketing: The secret to increasing brand awareness and driving sales!

With more than 2 billion active daily users on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you’re probably wondering why you only have 18 followers six months after starting your company’s Instagram page. However, you have been posting great content. We may have the answer in just two words – Influencer Marketing, or in this case, the lack of it.

‘Build it, and they will come’ is possibly the most fallacious theory when it comes to social media marketing and building brand awareness. Sure, you can set up accounts on every social platform created. Still, unless you understand and strategically market your brand using tested and proven channels, like influencer marketing, you can forget trying to develop a Kate Middleton effect on your products or services.

While influencer marketing has been the buzzword for marketers in the last few years, it’s not a new phenomenon. Think of Tony the Tiger who graces Kellogg’s cereals. He’s been saying, “They’re great!” since 1951! Of course, no one called him an influencer then, but he characterizes what the modern-day influencers like Lele Pons did for Sprint or Ashley Thurman for Bigelow Tea.

Influencer marketing is one of the best shortcuts to increasing your brand’s social media presence and convert followers or fans into leads. If one, well-suited influencer, endorse your product or service, it could send your profits skyrocketing.

So, we’ll get down to the business of showing you why influencer marketing is vital to increasing brand awareness and driving sales.

Influencer marketing is a relationship between your brand and key leaders used to drive the brand’s message to a broader audience. Rather than directly marketing to a large group of consumers, you instead pay or inspire an influencer to spread the word for you through social media platforms such as Instagram or YouTube. It involves endorsements and product placement from people (influencers) who have a purported knowledge or social influence in their field.

Influencer marketing should not be confused with celebrity endorsement, which is merely attaching your brand to a well-known celebrity after signing a contract. Influencers do much more. Influencers are trusted figures within a niche community whose followers are almost cult-like. These followers are loyal to the testimonies from influencers because they have established their brand on honesty, impartiality, engagement, and, most importantly, being human.

According to a recent study by Big Commerce, around 40 percent of people bought a product online after seeing it used by an influencer on a social media platform. Another survey by Tomoson shows that businesses are raking in $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. The study also found that marketers see influencers as their fastest-growing online customer-acquisition channel, outperforming email marketing, and even organic search.

When asked about the findings, Jeff Foster, CEO of Tomoson, said: “Social media users tend to spend more money and are likely to spread the word to family and friends.”

That’s what you need as a small business. After all, established corporate giants are using this type of marketing to see unprecedented jumps in their profit margin.

Take Dunkin Donuts’ recent decision to raise awareness for their coffee and espresso beverages to Millennials. To create a buzz, the company hired a team of Nano-influencers on Instagram. These influencers can have as few as 1,000 followers, but their word is gospel to their dedicated fans. The Nano-influencers then went about their daily routine holding their favorite coffee drink from a local Dunkin Donuts and sharing to their platforms at different times of the day.

The company subsequently realized a 5 percent engagement rate on Instagram and a record of $300 million in coffee purchases in 2018.

The influence economy has drastically changed the way we purchase products and consume content. Marketers can no longer ignore that consumers trust brands with social proof. Followers are more likely to use a product or engage with a brand after seeing people they respect engaging or using that brand or product. Ultimately, this results in brand recognition and loyalty, effective reach to your target audience, and a ready market for future products.

Consumable content is something all marketers dread but know they need to keep audiences, particularly those on social media. Including influencer content in your content strategy is crucial to your overall social media marketing goals. Influencers can keep content relevant, finding new and innovative ways to showcase a product or service in their everyday lives. They can also help your target audience to cut through the noise of consistent ads to get to your message faster. Customers trust customers, so followers are more likely to open an email or read a review from an influencer, rather than an unfamiliar source.

The best type of content is one that bears relevance to the influencer’s audience. This is the only way to have testimonials sound believable, and the post maintains consistency with other entries on the influencer’s page. This means that you wouldn’t expect a nomadic influencer known for country hopping to be extolling the advantages of a home security system.

In creating content for your influencer:

• Allow them to guide the process and be comfortable with how you expect it to be presented.
• Study their feed to see their promotion style and if it fits with your brand persona.
• Get to know their audience and how the influencer engages with them.
• Don’t produce content that is corporate or a hard sell. Fans/followers scroll through to get insights on real people, not a sales pitch.
• Create a unique hashtag for your campaign. This will help you gauge results and help with brand recognition.
• Videos generate three times as many comments as static posts do, so put your director’s hat on and get creative. This process should not exceed your budget, because a low-budget selfie video is more believable than a professionally edited version coming via an influencer’s feed.

Every business or individual who has a website wants to leverage Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a search engine’s way of determining which sites deserve to rank highly for every query entered.

Users trust search engines, so websites that achieve a top spot in search engine rankings are seen as credible sources. The higher you rank in results pages, the more organic (think free) clicks and traffic your site will generate. These clicks and traffic are potential leads that you can convert to paying customers with a well-designed landing page.

This is why every brand clamors for that coveted first-page spot on Google, and this is where influencer marketing can help.

Influencers create content but not just any content; they create quality material that keeps their followers interested. In ranking websites, Google looks at keyword usage, content readability, content quality, and social shares. Influencer marketing, when done correctly, significantly boosts a brand’s SEO. In some cases, influencers also encourage a company’s target audience to create its content with a unique hashtag for the brand. This means content increases, and there’s a higher awareness about your brand, hence a higher ranking.

Backlinks are another method Google and other search engines use to decide whether a particular website is trustworthy and relevant. A backlink is a link from one site to another, commonly used when discussing links pointing to a specific website. Having high-quality, relevant backlinks can increase the likelihood of your webpage or content showing up in organic search results.

A brand can ensure quality, relevant backlinks by writing guest posts on useful blogs belonging to influencers in its niche. When you guest blog, you are usually allowed to write a bio on yourself or company, in which you can include a link to your website. If the blog you posted were exciting and helpful to the influencer’s readers, they would likely follow the link in your bio to look at your website or even search through your social media profiles. The more traffic you gain from this link, the more favorable Google looks at your page and gradually improves your ranking.

Influencer marketing is a cost-effective, proven method to get the word out about your products and services as well as connect with your target audience. Consumers trust consumers who have impartial testimonials and are increasingly seeking companies with social proof to spend their money. Find an influencer that aligns with your brand’s ethos and create a partnership to level-up a campaign, build brand awareness, and reach new audiences without busting your budget.