So, you have embarked on a digital marketing career. The fundamental goal of digital marketing is to promote products and services, by using online media.And how does Digital marketing seek to achieve this goal?To attain this primary objective, a digital marketer follows a coherent strategy and uses certain tools and techniques that are available. One such important technique to achieve higher engagement with target audience is Influencer Marketing. There are many views within the marketing community on what is Influencer Marketing. Let’s dig into what is Influencer Marketing and then go on to tell you how it is important for your digital marketing career.
When we are buying something the first time, we seek some kind of an assurance that we are buying the right product or service. We look up to those, with experience and knowledge about that product, for advice. This is where Influencer Marketing comes in.
To simply put, the definition of Influencer Marketing in the digital marketing context, Influencers are the people who have a huge following on social media. These influencers have the ability to convince and/or influence their followers to buy a given product or service, and become loyal customers, hence it’s called Influencer Marketing.You would often see a top athlete or sportsperson endorsing a health food or a food supplement? You would also frequently come across supremely fit celebrities giving lessons in Yoga, Zumba or Pilates; or those with a perfect figure, endorsing a pair of jeans or a dress. You would also have heard about several top celebrity beauticians, with thousands of YouTube followers. That’s what is Influencer Marketing, and this phenomenon has seen continued success and huge growth for Influencer Marketing in recent years. Influencer Marketing has been seen to drive 11 times more ROI than traditional online marketing according to Invespcro. An influencer could be used as a brand ambassador, she may be asked for product reviews or mention the brand in her social media posts. Three key benefits of using Influencer Marketing campaigns would be –
One of the main benefits of digital marketing is to promote a brand or a product to a targeted audience. This is often done by identifying an audience using specific demographics. Yet, it is very difficult to ensure that the identified target audience is made up of genuine prospects.In case of Influencer Marketing, the marketer doesn’t have to specifically identify target audience. All you have to do is to identify the right influencer. That’s what you, as a Digital Marketer, need to take care of. You have to look at the trends in Influencer Marketing. For instance, if yours is a cosmetic product, a beautician with massive following on social media would perfectly fit the bill. All her followers would necessarily take interest in a new cosmetic product, if it is endorsed by that beautician. If it is a health food product that you wish to promote, an athlete or a gym trainer with a huge YouTube following will be the right influencer. In such cases, you get a big volume of people who would want to try your product. This would also trigger a large volume of traffic to your website, from the social media platforms that the influencer uses. Apart from getting a targeted audience to promote your brand, another benefit is that your audience actions are easily trackable. Website visits, social media posts or likes, all of these actions can easily be tracked with basic analytics, and these could provide useful insights. P.S. Refer to this article to get access to free Influencer Marketing Tools.Becoming an ace at running impactful Influencer Marketing can be a very valuable and saleable skill on your profile as a Digital Marketer.
Influencers are available for almost all industry sectors. You make a food product, cosmetic product, or even an engineering or an automotive product; you would always find influencers who could be asked to promote your brand. Similarly, if you have a services business, such as hotel or resort, cab service or even software development, you would get effective influencers. Once you identify the right influencer, you get higher leads and higher conversions. Surely a value proposition in any marketing context. Almost all business could benefit from a well-executed Content Marketing campaign. Gaining some relevant experience on this front would open up more doors than you can imagine, to further your career as a Digital Marketer.
Apart from receiving high volume traffic to your website and social media pages, Influencer Marketing offers an excellent opportunity to enhance your brand reach and brand awareness. Once an influencer creates content and includes your brand in it, all her followers would begin to recognize your brand and associate it with quality products. As these followers share the influencer’s content with their family and friends on social media, it would further broaden your brand’s reach. Moreover, the influencer’s followers would begin to trust your brand which would lead to a long-lasting relationship between your brand and the target audience.If employed correctly, a successful Influencer Marketing campaign can help you get better results and derive improved RoI for the Digital Marketing budget. You can imagine the boost your Digital Marketing career will get when you’re able to demonstrate improvement on these crucial and real performance metrics.
Marketers are gradually realizing that consumers need to be engaged during the entire cycle from brand awareness to purchase to after-sales service and until the customer buys a replacement product. Influencer Marketing can play an important role in this whole cycle. Influencers have a large volume of followers who trust the influencer. This builds customer loyalty which is more desirable than mere customer satisfaction. When the customers have trust, they buy the product of their own volition and are more likely to remain loyal to the brand. In such a situation, the customer would tend to justify his/ her own choice of the product rather than blame the seller for having hard-sold a product to an unsuspecting buyer. Also, a customer would likely revert to the influencer in case of product quality or a service issue and through this channel she may receive a faster and more favorable response.Utilizing and optimizing your Influencer Marketing as an informal customer reach-out platform, could be a very strategic value that you can contribute to your company, going beyond your obvious scope of duties and firmly establishing you as a valuable contributor to the firm’s marketing initiatives.
As for online promotion, paid ads rule the roost, be it Google search or social media ads. But paid ads are so ubiquitous and widespread that most people subconsciously ignore them. This is called “banner blindness”. Infolinks, a digital advertising platform, deduced from a survey that only 14% of respondents could remember the previous ad they saw or identify the product being promoted. Paid ads may continue to struggle with this handicap. Influencer Marketing, on the other hand directly addresses a very willing audience. Influencer Marketing is also being likened to arbitrage, because there is a large supply of influencers but not all are currently being utilized. This means the cost of buying an influencer promotion is below its real value, because of the supply-demand imbalance in the market. Influencer Marketing not only beats paid search when it comes to being economically sensible, but is also more cost effective than organic search and email marketing. Tomason Research has found that for every $1 spent on Influencer Marketing, a business was able to earn $6.50. In fact 13% businesses earned $20 or more. This cost advantage is in addition to acquiring more targeted customers, whose conversion rate is likely to be much higher.If you are a small brand you anyway need a small influencer who would not be very expensive. If you are a large and renowned brand, then influencer would herself stand to gain with association and would promote your brand with greater zeal.
Influencer Marketing, with its core advantages of targeted audience, enhanced brand reach, and customer loyalty, has proved to be an important strategy for any digital marketer to achieve her marketing goals. Once a digital marketer has adequate experience in identifying the right influencer and work with her over a period of time, it would prove an important part of work experience, which is sure to further her career in a favorable manner.
Also read: Digital and Social Media Marketing Strategy Trends to watch for in 2018
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