Krista Neher

Nov 08 2022

Influencer Marketing Benefits

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is when businesses partner with people online who have a large following as a way to gain exposure to their audience. Typically a business compensates an “influencer.” In return, the influencer promotes the brand based on agreed-upon terms.

Influencer marketing can work for B2B and B2C businesses. While many B2B businesses don’t think about influencers, we recently ran a two-day Influencer Workshop for a medical device company that wanted to help their influencers create and share better content online. The brand has been able to trace measurable sales back to the influencers that they partner with.

Influencer marketing is almost like a celebrity endorsement, but instead of you promoting the celebrity to your audience, the celebrity is promoting to their audience.

Online influencer marketing isn’t new. It has been around for over 10 years, since the early days of social media. It continues to be an in-demand and high-growth area of digital marketing.

Why Businesses Use Influencers

Influencers are popular with marketers because it allows them to reach new audiences in a way that is trusted by the audience.

Organic Social Media Reach

Many businesses struggle to gain organic reach on Facebook, so working with Influencers is a way for them to reach people in the feed.

Some influencers can reach millions of people, but even smaller influencers often reach tens of thousands. Their posts are in the news feeds of the people that you want to reach.

Influencers Make Great Content

Often influencers can make better content vs. brands. An influencer’s business relies on creating content that their audience loves. That’s a win-win for both the business and the influencer.

Endorsement from the Influencer

Influencers are also powerful tools because their followers trust them. Since they will often try to integrate your product naturally into their posts, you are essentially gaining an endorsement.

Example:

Seth Godin, a famous marketer shared an anecdote on his blog several years ago. He said that when he promotes his books he generates only a few sales, but when he promotes other people’s books he generates tons of sales. This is because a recommendation or endorsement is much more powerful vs. promoting something yourself.

Reaching the Influencers Network

One of the biggest advantages of influencer marketing is that you gain exposure to a new audience – the audience of the influencer. One of the big challenges online is getting your message in front of the right audience. If you choose your influencers well, they are probably already in front of the people that you want to reach. By partnering with them your business is exposed to a new audience.

Influencers Can Drive Sales

Some fashion and beauty brands have started to rely heavily on influencers to sell their products. Even though you can’t share clickable links on Instagram, the power of seeing people rave about a product is huge.

Try  our Influencer Marketing course at Boot Camp Digital. 

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