In a time when social media has become the primary go-to place for decision-making, marketers are increasingly relying on influencers to get more reach and sales for their products.
In 2022, 39% of marketers invested 10 to 20 percent of their total marketing budget into influencer marketing. Why? Because influencers get results.
In this article, we’ll explore exactly how influencers impact business growth, generate buzz, and drive sales.
First, let’s understand who exactly influencers are.
What Defines an Influencer? Understanding the Role of Influencers.
Influencers are influential personalities online with a social media following. They have a strong personal brand and are viewed as authentic, relatable, and knowledgeable sources of information. They may also be considered experts, which is why their opinions are trusted and valued by their followers.
Why Do People Trust Influencers?
Customers relate more to influencers than to businesses. When influencers openly share their personal experiences with their followers, people see them as ordinary people and not businesses looking to sell them something or make profits.
To customers, influencers are consumers, just like them, with more expertise on the subject. This is why marketers capitalize on influencer marketing to impact consumer behavior.
For instance, consider a beauty influencer who regularly reviews skincare products. When she shares her personal journey of struggling with acne and how a particular product helped her, it resonates with her followers who are going through similar challenges. They perceive her as a relatable individual rather than a faceless brand that doesn’t relate to consumers on a personal level.
We now know influencers sway followers in their decision-making process, but does influencer marketing impact the success of your business?
How Influencers Play a Key Role in Elevating Your Business
Influencer marketing is a proven strategy for boosting business growth.
So marketers are increasingly employing it as a regular part of their marketing strategies to generate results.
A study of 3,500 marketers and agencies by the Influencer Marketing Hub, revealed that 23% intended to spend more than 40% of their marketing budget on influencer marketing. While a staggering 67% of respondents planned to increase their influencer marketing budget in 2023. This is because the methods have been tested for years and continue to show promising results for brands in all industries and categories, small to enterprise.
Let’s see how exactly influencer marketing impacts business growth:
Influencers Create Brand Awareness and Reach.
We know influencers have a huge following. When they promote a brand or product, they introduce it to their dedicated and engaged audience, increasing its visibility and awareness. This gives your brand recognition to previously untapped markets.
Plus, prospecting is hard!
Getting your product in front of your desired audience takes time, effort, and money.
Collaborating with influencers with a well-defined niche that aligns with your target market enables you to reach a highly relevant audience. This precision in targeting minimizes the time and resources spent on advertising to uninterested or irrelevant audiences.
Influencers Help Build Trust and Authenticity.
Influencers consistently deliver valuable and informative content, developing credibility in their niche. By collaborating with influencers, companies can also gain this trust through association.
For instance, when an influencer talks about their real-life experience using your product, customers view it as an authentic endorsement, instilling a strong sense of trust.
This trust is extended to your product and company, leading to loyal customers who feel a genuine connection to your brand.
Influencers Educate Your Customers for You.
Influencers often specialize in specific niches or industries. So they possess a deep understanding of your product’s features, benefits, and use cases. Consequently, they can convey this knowledge to their audience with clarity and expertise, addressing any questions or concerns.
Plus, the visual and multimedia nature of influencer content, through videos, images, and interactive demonstrations, allows influencers to showcase your product in action. Consumers witness firsthand how your product functions, its practical applications, and the value it can add to their lives.
Influencers Drive Greater ROI with Lesser Costs.
Currently, Influencer marketing offers the 2nd highest ROI after short-form video content.
How do influencers help you achieve a greater ROI?
- Influencer collaborations involve lower upfront costs compared to producing and running traditional advertising campaigns.
- Influencers often produce user-generated content showcasing products or services, reducing the need for you to create your own content. This not only saves money but also adds authenticity to your marketing efforts.
- It’s easier and costs less to track and measure influencer marketing effectiveness.
- Influencer marketing is scalable. You can work with micro-influencers for niche markets or mega-influencers for broader campaigns. Adjust costs and reach to suit your budget.
Even though marketing is expensive, it doesn’t necessarily have to cost you an arm and a leg. With the help of influencers, small and medium businesses are cutting costs and boosting ROI.
Influencers Generate Targeted Marketing Leads to Better Conversions.
Influencers bring in high-quality customers—leading to increased conversions. Studies show that 82% of marketers believe that the quality of customers from influencer marketing is better compared to other forms of marketing.
The followers who come from influencer content are more likely to make purchases. It’s because they place a high degree of trust in the influencer’s authenticity and expertise.
This trust is built over time through consistent, genuine recommendations and valuable insights shared by using influencer marketing platforms like Glewee. As a result, when an influencer endorses a product or service, their followers view it as a credible and reliable recommendation.
Influencers Generate and Promote Better SEO
With influencers generating buzz about your products and company, you get the chance to build and generate quality backlinks.
When influencers create content featuring your products, the content often gets shared on various online platforms, like social media, blogs, and forums. These shares and mentions act as organic backlinks to your website or specific product pages.
This boosts your SEO (search engine optimization) and also drives more organic traffic to your site, contributing to your online presence and business growth.
The Role of Influencers in Shaping Consumer Decisions
To understand consumer behavior, let’s recap some psychological principles:
- People tend to do what they perceive as being a social norm.
- Proximity plays a significant role in influencing your decisions, people who are physically or emotionally closer to you have a stronger impact on your actions, preferences, and behaviors.
This is why we always ask our peers, relatives, and neighbors their opinions while making major purchase decisions.
Influencers and influencer marketing may be relatively newer terms, but people have always relied on prominent figures or societal norms for driving buying decisions.
Consider Tupperware parties from the 1970s, where peers influenced each other to make purchases or the use of celebrities in advertisements to sway viewers. Now, 62 percent of social media users trust influencers over celebrities for buying decisions.
This heightened reliance stems from the trust and credibility they place in influencers. They are perceived as trusted authorities whose advice is highly insightful and dependable.
Now, when social media heavily influences our purchase decisions, people turn to those with significant social media presence to guide their buying choices. This is why a staggering 50% of Millennials trust influencer recommendations before making their buying decisions.
Leveraging Influencer Marketing for Business Growth
You can also accelerate your marketing efforts by employing Influencers to boost business growth. Let’s break that down into nine easy and actionable steps you can follow:
Set SMART goals.
Know what you want to achieve, like creating brand awareness, driving website traffic, boosting sales, or expanding into new markets.
Create an Ideal Customer profile (ICP).
Know your target audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points to help you choose influencers who can effectively reach and engage them.
Determine your budget.
Budgets impact influencer marketing choices. Assess how much you’re willing to allocate to your influencer and campaign.
Find the right influencers for your business.
Research and identify influencers whose followers align with your target audience. Consider factors like influencer niche, reach, engagement rate, authenticity, and platforms.
Leveraging micro-influencers is a smart and strategic choice for small to midsize businesses. 56% of marketers prefer to work with micro-influencers due to their specialized and engaged audience base.
Educate influencers on your brand product or service.
Provide influencers with comprehensive information about your brand, product, or service.
Collaborate Creatively.
Create engaging and authentic content that resonates with their audience and aligns with your brand’s message.
Track and measure the results.
Track key metrics such as engagement, reach, website traffic, conversion rates, and sales. Use analytics tools to assess the campaign’s effectiveness
Engage with the Audience.
Respond to comments and questions, fostering a sense of community and trust.
Inspire User-Generated Content.
Encourage influencers to Inspire their followers to create and share content related to your brand or products to amplify your reach and authenticity.
Prepared to Amplify Your Business Growth With Influencer Marketing?
With influencer marketing, you get direct access to targeted niches and a chance to capitalize on influencers’ expertise and discover effective ways to connect with their followers.
The impacts of influencer marketing on business growth are also self-evident. Use the steps mentioned above to create your influencer marketing strategy and optimize as you go.
As times change so do marketing strategies and consumer behaviors. Keeping up with social media and trends keeps your brand alive and shows its commitment to customer needs. To get started, create your free account on Glewee, the easiest and fastest influencer marketing platform and launch your first campaign in minutes.
