Do you own or manage a business or brand? It’s an exciting role to be responsible for the success of your product or brand. But there is also much to carry in such a role, as you need to drive success for your brand, increase revenue and ultimately profit. That’s why marketing is so important. Social media marketing, and a particular influencer marketing, can be a complete powerhouse for your brand, driving customer retention, loyalty and new sales. However, influencer marketing is so much more than mere social media posts, which this article will unpack. We’ll take a deep dive into influencer marketing and learn how you can leverage it for your brand, unlocking the potential of massive reach and influence. Continue reading to learn more.
What is an Influencer?
An influencer is a social media personality who has a large number of followers, put very simply. As the name suggests, they can influence trends, such as consumer spending behaviour and brand loyalty. An influencer might have follower numbers in the hundreds of thousands to over a million. Brands will often partner with influencers in order to promote their products, as an influencer advertising or endorsing a product is a powerful statement, and they can convince their followers that the brand is worth following, buying and supporting.
Deeper Strategic Value to Brands
Influencer marketing is more than just an influencer making a social media post about your brand. In fact, these partnerships can offer deeper strategic value to brands, through content creation, brand partnerships, consumer trust, community engagement, SEO impact and long-term brand building. We’ll explore each of these topics now, so keep reading.
Content Creation and Marketing
The concept behind content marketing is quite straightforward. It refers to brands using engaging, high-quality content to help build their brand, foster trust and convey authority in their specific field. The core idea behind content marketing is that if a brand can make itself a leading authority on a topic, then brand awareness, loyalty, and trust will be built as a result. It can go a step further, though, with content marketing being quite closely interwoven with search engine optimisation and other types of digital marketing, including influencer marketing. For instance, a good quality blog post can help build brand trust while also helping a company rank higher on organic search engine results pages, and this, paired with an influencer marketing strategy, can help a brand to reach further, generate interest and build consumer trust and loyalty.
Brand Partnerships
When influencers partner with brands, the brands’ reach is amplified exponentially. Say your brand has a follower base of 100 thousand people, who might engage with your brand sporadically or barely. When an influencer with an audience of over a million partners with your brand, suddenly your brand’s reach is amplified to this amount. Building partnerships with influencers is an excellent strategy to increase your audience size, drive engagement and allow you to curate campaigns and messaging to a larger follower base enabled by influencers.
Building Consumer Trust
Influencers can be a powerful method to build consumer trust in a brand. If they endorse or partner with a certain brand, they are telling their large follower base that this brand is trustworthy. Through curated social media posts highlighting the brand, the message to their followers is that your brand is trustworthy and reliable. Consumer trust takes a long time to build, often through repeat purchases and positive interactions with the brand. Influencer marketing, such as via platforms such as Lefty, can go a long way to fast-tracking consumer trust and brand loyalty.
Community Engagement
Community engagement is the term given to when brands engage with their communities. This is an excellent way to build brand awareness, trust and loyalty with consumers. Brands that engage with and connect with their audience are more likely to stand out in the crowded marketplace and succeed with greater sales, revenue and profit. Influencers can enable a deeper level of community engagement by facilitating connections between the brand and consumers.
For example, an influencer might do a live video feed with a brand representative, where they ask some questions about the product and its benefits. This live event might be viewed by a decent proportion of the influencer’s follower base, thereby raising brand awareness, building loyalty and creating hype about the brand on social media. As followers share content, this can mean such a live event can go viral, creating a huge audience for a brand.
SEO Impact and Influencer Marketing
It might seem strange, but search engine optimisation (SEO) and influencer marketing are linked through their shared goal of increasing online visibility for a brand and driving organic traffic and reach. Influencer marketing supports SEO strategy by generating high-quality backlinks when influencers mention or link to a brand’s website in their social media or web content.
These backlinks are the backbone of SEO and are crucial for improving domain authority, which search engines use to determine ranking positions, with higher rankings being the goal of SEO. Furthermore, influencer content often ranks well on its own accord, especially if the influencer has a strong online presence, and this high organic reach further increases a brand’s visibility in search engine results. Influencer marketing campaigns also drive traffic and engagement for brands, which in turn signals to search engines that the brand’s content is valuable, authoritative and relevant.
Long-term Brand Building
In today’s hypermodern era, brand building is everything. This is the term given to increasing a brand’s reach, follower base, and brand loyalty and trust amongst customers. Influencers, through brand partnerships, can help treat long-term brand building for products and services, fostering a sense of trust and loyalty to the brand through their massive follower base. It is worth considering partnerships with influencers and influencer platforms when it comes to long-term brand-building strategies.
An Influencer Summary
This informative article has explained why influencer marketing is so much more than merely social media posts. We’ve also discussed how these crucial partnerships can offer deeper strategic value to brand, through strategies such as content creation and marketing, brand partnerships, consumer trust, community engagement, SEO impact and long-term brand building.
