As social media platforms transformed the way businesses functioned, influencer marketing shifted the way businesses promoted their products. Influencer marketing is a marketing style that revolves around a business working with a social media influencer in order to share the brand’s product with the influencer’s audience. If you’re a business owner with no real experience or understanding of why you need to utilize influencer marketing strategies, consider the following reasons why you need to adopt this method.
1. Exposure to a New Audience/Brand Awareness
Within the United States, over 600,000 businesses are launched and registered on a yearly basis. Just by looking at the United States alone, it’s clear that there’s a lot of competition to contend with. There are countless brands and small businesses thriving on social media platforms. Even if you simply look at women’s clothing brands, household names and department stores maintain social media presence as well as thrift stores and vintage retailers. Then, when you tap into the entrepreneurial fashion designers, that’s another niche to contend with.
Thankfully, there’s room for the best brands to establish loyal tribes of paying customers. To stand out from the rest of the competition, you’ll need to make sure your brand is visible. Even if you start by connecting with a number of micro-influencers, influencers help to drum up some brand awareness and buzz around your company.
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As you develop content on your own social media pages, micro-influencers can help by sending even more followers to your brand’s page. In combination with tactics like hashtags, live broadcasts, and other social media ads, you can actively increase your exposure in your ability to consistently attract new followers.
Even when you’re ready to gain more brand awareness, diversify the influencer partnerships. Brands like Shea Moisture prove that there’s more than one way to partner with influencers. One way to conduct an influencer partnership involves a themed photoshoot.
When Shea Moisture was ready to launch a hair care line for men and boys, they found male influencers who were also fathers. The famous haircare brand always partnered with natural hair vloggers to partake in tutorials that offered product links in the description box. Vlogging was especially powerful because viewers were able to see the product in use on real hair. With the tutorials, there’s nothing left to the imagination. The viewer knows what to expect. This helps to make a customer comfortable before they even pull out their credit card to purchase. When you’re in the midst of negotiating the best deal, don’t forget to consider affiliate marketing as a way to sweeten the deal.
2. Collaborative Effort
There’s a famous proverb that stands as a testament to collaboration. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Building a thriving enterprise isn’t a one-man endeavor. Even if you’re the only one running your company in the beginning, collaboration is key to getting to the next level.
In the beginning, you might not have the bandwidth to hire a full-time legal team, CFO, and more. You might only have the financial margin to hire a part-time virtual assistant, and that’s okay. Depending on how much financial backing you have, collaborations and partnerships might come together down the line.
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As it pertains to marketing, collaboration is essential. If you want to make your marketing efforts more effective, collaborations and partnerships with influencers, other brands, and media outlets will be key to growth. Influencer partnerships are effective because they help you do the hard work of promoting your brand. When you’re able to tap into multiple audiences, you’ll go a lot further in your ability to get sales. While the micro-influencers and nano-influencers can push a product, the macro-influencers and celebrity placements can do so much more.
Just be sure that when you’re ready to collaborate with a larger influencer. If your product goes viral, you’ll need to have systems in place to handle the capacity. You never want to get your moment to shine and miss it because you weren’t prepared. This includes details like a working website, opt-in buttons to capture emails, and enough staff to help you package and send the orders out in an acceptable timeframe.
3. Recommendations from Trusted Sources
When people follow specific influencers, they want to know their opinion. They care about their Instagram Stories, their outfit of the day, and what type of latte they drank that morning. People like to learn more about their favorite influencers because in many cases, they aspire to be just like them.
So when an individual’s favorite influencer shares the latest makeup primer they’re using or the pre-workout formula they use before they exercise, it’s not uncommon for followers to purchase because they value their opinion. That influencer is, to its audience, a trusted source.
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When you value and trust a person’s opinion, you’re more likely to take their wisdom and utilize it. When an influencer says that they love a specific product by a certain business, followers want the link to purchase said item. This is where you, as the business owner, can thrive. By partnering with influencers who’d most likely use your products anyway, you can get the validation from an influencer who a host of followers trust. Social proof (or social validation) is worth its weight in gold. This is especially true since the digital space thrives off of reviews.
Think about the times when you visit Amazon to make a purchase. It doesn’t matter how nice the item actually looks. Most people like to read the reviews in order to get the real deal. This is also true for Google Reviews, Yelp, and other sites that allow customers to authentically leave their true opinion. When your business partners with influencers, you’re essentially paying them to leave great reviews.
With influencer partnerships, it’s so important to ensure that the connection gets perceived as authentic. If you’re trying to pitch soda to a nutrition-centric influencer, it’s going to get a lot of negative feedback. It can also damage the credibility of the influencer. You need to know who your target audience is. Then, you’ll need to connect with influencers that your target audience would love.
4. Brand Growth (Increased Number of Followers)
As you partner with various influencers, it’s still wise to maintain a business social media account. As the influencers tag your business account in their promotional ads, their interested followers will usually follow your account. As you promote your brand through influencer partnerships on a consistent basis, this is actually an excellent way to attract and retain new followers for your brand’s social media accounts. Just be sure that once those new followers arrive, your social media account is interesting and compelling enough for them to stick around and engage.
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5. Faster Track to Profitability
One of the main reasons why businesses don’t experience sales is due to a lack of visibility. When you’re able to get your product in front of larger audiences, you’ll increase your chances of obtaining more sales. In most cases, business is a numbers game. When you’re able to partner with an influencer who knows how to sell products, you’ll put your business on a faster track toward success. When your business is growing from complete obscurity and you’re able to secure a partnership deal with a major celebrity influencer, their influence can completely fast-track your success. In most cases, this is what’s considered a business’ viral moment.
For many companies, profitability doesn’t occur for the first few years. Depending on how much you initially invested in the company, it can take a while to get in the clear. However, when you’re intentionally seeking out new ways to promote and sell your products, this will help you to move more units and make more money within a shorter time frame. Social media marketing is one of the most effective options out there. Furthermore, influencer marketing continues to serve as a full-time career for many individuals.
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With countless people quitting their full-time jobs to become influencers, there’s room on both sides for growth. This also shows how consumers are shopping. When they do shop for goods and services, they’re checking in with their favorite influencers in order to know what to buy. Consumers will watch the unboxing videos and the mini-haul videos in order to discover what they should invest in next.
Whether your company sells ring lights or fish food, find influencers who organically fit the mold of your company’s target audience. When you’re able to find the best collaborative partners, it’s much easier to move forward in picking the best ones as you move forward.
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The Trend of Influencer Marketing
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok aren’t slowing down any time soon. There’s a lot of money to make within the numerous platforms. As a business owner, you can take advantage of the direct-to-consumer model and sell directly through the platforms. You can also use marketing strategies like influencer marketing in order to turn your brand into a household name.
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