Marketing with the help of social media influencers, also known as influencer marketing, has exploded over the last couple of years. According to a study by Emarketer, 86 percent of marketers that used influencer marketing in the last year are looking to double their investment in 2017. And they aren’t doing this for no reason.

Brands wouldn’t use influencer marketing if it wasn’t effective and businesses would certainly not abandon other ways of marketing such as TV unless it didn’t prove to be more effective than the marketing methods already being used.

Influencer marketing has been able to explode in popularity because the preconditions for it to do so have been there. Social media has become a commodity that billions of people have access to right at their fingertips. And social media lays the foundation for influencer marketing as it is where individuals are able to establish themselves as industry leaders and build a following.

Today, anyone can become a social media influencer with the right strategy, but back in the days, only celebrities cut through the noise and were the individual’s people looked up to.

If you don’t yet know the benefits of influencer marketing, I recommend that you continue reading and see if influencer marketing can be valuable for your brand. As with everything new, many marketers are scared of trying influencer marketing because they are not convinced about its benefits. But in this article, we’ll share some of the benefits of partnering with influencers and what it can do for your brand.

Benefits of partnering with influencers

1. Their opinion is trusted

The first

Did you know that customers are more likely to trust the opinion of people they look up to compared to the brand itself?

It might seem obvious that customers are more likely to trust someone they look up to rather than a brand that is just trying to sell them stuff- and with all right!

This is why teaming up with an influencer to spread the word about your brand to their followers has a big impact on their followers. Because most influencers only choose to work with brands that they truly believe in and like, the marketing will be very transparent and genuine and this is something that is very well noticed by the influencer’s followers.

By having influencers who truly love your brand, you will run a marketing campaign with an influencer whose opinion is trusted. When the influencer is endorsing your brand, your ROI will be great because of the trust that the followers have for the influencer, meaning that if the influencer recommends a product, there’s a big chance people will want to buy it.

2. They can create unique content

Not all influencers create their own content when it comes to brand collaborations but a lot of influencers do.

If you are struggling to come up with new ideas for content to post, influencer marketing is a great way to get the new, unique and fresh content of your products.

Apart from the influencer posting the photo(s) onto their page and endorsing your brand – giving great results, you will also have the photo(s) at your disposal later on. If you partnered up with a highly known influencer, people will see that it has been taken by that influencer when you post it on your own page and because of that, there’s a big chance that they will trust that particular image more than your other pictures that have been taken by someone in your team.

So to sum it up – often, influencer’s posts generate better results than yours.

3. They reach your target audience

Influencer marketing is extremely targeted and there are several ways to make it as targeted as it can be.

You can search for social media influencers with influencer directories based on different criteria in order to reach your target audience in the most effective way possible.

You can find influencers suitable for your brand’s niche as well but finding the perfect influencers can be time-demanding and take a lot of effort.

The reason why influencer marketing is so effective is that you choose who you work with and therefore, you know who the audience – their followers are.

If you do a marketing campaign on Television, you have very little chance of knowing who watches your commercial and there’s a very big chance that only a very little share of the total people who saw it was actually targeted and genuinely interested in your brand.

Therefore, influencer marketing is opening up a completely new way of reaching your target audience with the help of genuine and trusted endorsements.

4. Their followers look up to them

Social media influencers are a bit like celebrities. Often, a lot of their followers are looking up to them.

This means that your brand has very good leverage when partnering with influencers.

Because the followers of the influencers are looking up to them, they also want to be like them, dress like them, etc. This means that if an influencer is making a post when they are endorsing your brand and using your products, it will leave a big impact on the followers and most importantly – the followers who are looking up to the influencer.

The result of this is that the follower wants to be just like the influencer and if the influencer used your products – so be it. They have to have it.

What this does is creating a tremendous ROI and interest in your brand because if the influencer likes it, the fans of the influencer have to like as well.

5. You can measure results

You can’t do this every time everywhere but often (if you ask for it), you can get access to the results of the promotion campaign to see how it did.

If the influencer marketing was done on Instagram, you can ask the influencer to send a screenshot of the statistics of the post with Instagram Insights.

If the marketing was made on Twitter, you can ask them to send a screenshot of the statistics from there.

Long story short, compared to the more classic ways of marketing such as TV or billboards, you now have a completely different way of seeing the statistics of your marketing campaign and what results are generated.

Meaning that you can see exactly what your marketing budget helps you achieve.

6. Improve Your Search Ranking

This can only be done with the help of website blogging influencer but it has shown to be extremely effective so it isn’t something you should ignore.

If you don’t know where to find blogger influencers in your niche, there are many influencer directories you can use that will help you filter and find the most suitable influencers.

The way influencer marketing on blogs can improve your search ranking on Google is because backlinks from high authority websites are favored by Google in the form of better ranking. SEO (Search engine optimization) should be a very highly prioritized form of marketing, and influencer blogs can help you with just that.

By getting links from a high-authority website, you will not only get traffic from the links themselves but you will also slowly but surely crawl higher and higher in Google’s ranking- meaning that your website visitors will increase.