Is Influencer Marketing Necessary for Your Brand?

The concept of influencer marketing can be new and overwhelming to people. While influencers and social media are relatively new in the history of business, the concept of using a personality to sell products is nothing new. TV, radio, and even print have been using famous personalities to market products for years, but today we’re focusing on social media and influencers.  

Did you know more than 80% of people make their next purchasing decision using social media? However, thanks to the oversaturation of ads, people tend to be more discerning with their purchases. While it’s great to have a marketing campaign and post advertisements, customers are more likely to purchase from brands they trust, which is where influencers come into play. Influencers can help make your brand appear more trustworthy, and influence customers to purchase your products, hence the name. 

Let’s get into what influencers are, and how they can help boost your marketing strategy. 

Influencer Marketing at a Glance

• 80% of people make their purchasing decisions thanks to social media
• Organic marketing and influencer marketing are the foundation of a good media management strategy
• Influencers can increase brand recognition and brand trustworthiness
• While results from influencer marketing can take time, the far-reaching effect of this marketing strategy is worth the time investment

How Influencers Work into Your Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategies are laid out like an inverted pyramid, to focus your efforts on things that will engage more potential clients. First, at the top of the pyramid, is brand awareness, followed by engagement. These marketing strategies help create a social relationship with potential customers and provide learning experiences for your followers. 

The more you interact with your followers, the more they trust and recognize your brand. At the bottom of the pyramid are purchases, which are the end goal of your marketing strategy, yes, but are worthless without the trust and brand awareness that creates repeat customers. 

Top of the Pyramid: Organic Marketing Strategies

At the top of that pyramid is organic marketing strategies, including influencer marketing. Influencer marketing helps you gain brand awareness and can help your brand appear more trustworthy and appealing to a wider audience. The key performance indicator (KPI) here is an increase in new followers, higher social media engagement, and an increase in impressions. Influencers come with their built-in pack of followers, who in turn are likely to follow your accounts once they are aware of your business. 

Middle of the Pyramid: Customer Engagement

While this is not as crucial as the first stage of marketing, customer engagement is what truly makes or breaks sales. You can drive brand engagement through social media presence, email newsletters, and more, but influencer marketing is where engagement truly grows. 

As long as you have a cohesive brand identity and tone in your posts, the followers from influencer marketing are likely to stick with your social media account once they hit the follow button, giving you potential repeat customers from the get-go. Customers need reviews, they need insight, and they need to trust the brand is real. 

When you work with influencers, you’re showing potential customers that you’re trustworthy. When someone posts about you, they’re telling their entire audience “I love this brand, and you should too.” Influencers bring the personal connection of word-of-mouth marketing, with the far-reaching influence of social media, creating a powerful tool for online marketing. 

Bottom of the Pyramid: Sales and Gauging Influencer Marketing Success

Like all organic marketing, influencer marketing is hard to track while it is in progress. In most cases, influencer marketing is a slow and steady, long-haul strategy. A lot of influencer marketing comes down to connecting with the right people, targeting the right audiences, and in many cases, a lot of experimentation. Thankfully, every marketing campaign is a chance for experience, and the feedback you gain from not-as-successful influencer campaigns will help point you in the right direction. 

Because influencer marketing is at the top of the pyramid, it can take a long time to see the effects run down to the bottom of the pyramid where sales are tracked. However, by gaining more followers, you can set in motion the right chain of events to create more sales down the line. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools that we use to help track the success of influencer marketing, including affiliate programs with a custom link that tracks where each customer came from. We also may provide influencers with a custom discount code, which allows us to see which customers came from which influencers. 

Another thing influencer marketing creates is user-generated content (UGC), including tagged photos. UGC creates another level of trust for potential customers and helps give your brand the authority you need to build a larger customer base.

Influencer marketing is ideal for businesses that are looking to create brand recognition, and are hoping to drive up sales as well as customers. While it is not a fast marketing strategy, the results of a well-planned influencer marketing campaign like the type we’re experienced with here at Planted Marketing can lay the foundation for future growth and return customers. 

Not only does influencer marketing carry the same emotional resonance as word-of-mouth, but it also employs the far reach of social media to help broadcast your business to a larger audience thanks to the power of organic marketing. 

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Planted Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in content marketing and organic solutions for woman-owned brands. We create and manage influencer marketing programs for a variety of brands and have seen so much growth for each business! Wondering if influencer marketing is right for your business? Let’s talk about it – info@plantedmarketing.com. Talk soon!