How will an influencer marketing strategy help your business?
As a business owner, you work hard to produce great products and services. And you’ve done your best to explain the benefits to your target audiences, but the leads or sales aren’t coming in.
Why? Because you don’t have third-party validation. No matter how truthful or authentic your marketing outputs are, your audiences are less likely to trust you if all of the information about your offers comes exclusively from your company.
This is where influencer marketing enters the picture. (And no, this picture isn’t a selfie.)
Influencer marketing has become a potent tactic for business owners who are struggling to gain traction with their intended audiences. The ability to tap into existing communities who are engaged with online personalities is a surefire way to reach new prospects and generate qualified leads.
And even though you’re paying influencers to talk about your product, their audiences know that they’re only sharing products that they trust — or those same audiences will stop listening to their recommendations.
That said, there’s a big, fuzzy gap between hiring influencers and marketing success. If you’ve worked with influencers before (or tried to), you know that results aren’t guaranteed.
If you don’t have a strategy that defines how you’ll leverage influencers and what you expect from them, you may find yourself relying on little more than hope and luck — which aren’t exactly reliable for marketing campaigns.
At KWSM, we incorporate influencer marketing as part of your Digital Marketing Strategy if the tactic is a good fit with your business goals. Further, as brand journalists, we approach influencer marketing with a public relations mindset.
5 Ways An Influencer Marketing Strategy Helps Businesses
As we mentioned above, an influencer marketing strategy is only effective if it furthers your business goals. Here are 5 benefits of influencer marketing for businesses.
- Boost Your Brand Reputation
- Target The Right Audience With An Influencer Marketing Strategy
- Increase Brand Awareness
- Authentic Storytelling
- Achieve Measurable Results
Let’s dive in.
1. Boost Your Brand Reputation
Take a look at your website and social media accounts. Who is screaming from the rooftops that your product or service is amazing? If it’s you and you alone, that’s a problem.
Working with independent third parties like influencers infuses authenticity into a video ad or social post, which is harder to manufacture when the message is coming from “inside the house,” so to speak.
Simply put, partnering with the right influencers allows you to leverage their established trust and credibility. When they endorse your product or service, it adds a layer of social proof, strengthening your brand reputation in the eyes of potential customers.
2. Target the Right Audience with an Influencer Marketing Strategy
For most brands, growing your audience through mass-market advertising isn’t in the cards. The days of capturing leads and increasing sales via late-night infomercials or celebrity endorsements are long gone.
Audiences are too fractured, mass-market media placements are too expensive, and the return on investment (ROI) isn’t always measurable.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In contrast, influencer marketing gives your brand access to specific demographics and niche communities where your ideal customers are already active.
Platforms like Instagram and TikTok allow brands to devote their marketing efforts to prospects who have already shown interest in topics that relate to the brand’s offer.
And while privacy challenges like the iOS opt-out for tracking make attribution more difficult, you’re still more likely to generate a profitable return through influencer marketing than mass-media placements.
By partnering with influencers who are already connected to your target audience, you can craft a targeted message that addresses your audience’s challenges and desires.
More importantly, you can ensure that your message reaches the right people, and not just the people who dozed off in front of their TVs at one in the morning.
3. Increased Brand Awareness
Teaming up with influencers can expose your brand to a wider audience because they have already built a dedicated following in their niche.
Identifying and partnering with relevant influencers gives you access to pre-existing communities that are more likely to be receptive to similar products or services.
This translates to increased brand awareness, which will generate more traffic for your offers and foster brand loyalty when customers start to discover the benefits of your offer for themselves.
Heightening awareness through your influencer marketing strategy can also help you generate more advocates for your brand, as positive word-of-mouth spreads and leads to positive ROI. A KWSM client experienced these advantages firsthand when we leveraged influencers to support a niche product launch for an audience that was outside of their typical target range.
Influencer Marketing Strategy Case Study
A luxury energy drink brand wanted to generate interest in their premium cocktail mixer for US-based bars and nightclubs. KWSM developed and implemented a digital marketing strategy to build the brand’s online presence and support launch events in Las Vegas and Orange County, California.
Dozens of influencer posts during the launch period generated thousands of new social media followers and millions of impressions across social channels:
4. Authentic Storytelling
Effective influencer marketing and public relations both emphasize authentic communication.
In public relations, a press release provides the public with factual information and quotes about a significant or newsworthy event. Similarly, influencers can craft compelling narratives that showcase your product or service in a real and relatable fashion that’s applicable to their lives.
Further, the natural look of user-generated content (UGC) created by influencers also reinforces authenticity. Most influencers don’t need high-end production value to connect with their followers – in fact, users prefer videos that look organic and native to the platform they’re on.
When you have the right influencers generating the content you need to reach your audiences, you should be able to rely on them to know what will resonate with their audience and generate engagement.
Finally, collaborating with influencers also helps you generate fresh, unique content that keeps your brand relevant and top-of-mind for potential customers. When these outputs reach your target audience, they can foster trust and drive engagement far more effectively than traditional ads.
How Do You Find Influencers to Represent Your Brand?
First, choosing influencers to collaborate with your brand requires a deep analysis of both your audience and theirs. You’ll want to ensure that there is significant overlap in interests so that the influencer’s followers
A high follower count on Instagram or TikTok, for example, isn’t enough to accomplish your goals. You’ll need to verify that their audience is engaged, and ideally the influencer in question will be able to provide examples of successful campaigns with
“Researching potential influencer partnerships for clients is an exciting challenge. There are people out there creating amazing, trendy, unique content with a strong point of view who are willing to do so for your brand, too.
When planning an influencer outreach strategy, we focus on a few factors: the client’s budget and how much they’re willing to invest, the target audience, and the desired impact or results – whether that’s brand awareness, lead generation, or unit orders. By balancing all the variables, we can identify which influencers align with the brand message and have the best chance of helping achieve those results. Then, it’s a numbers game of introductions and negotiations as we determine what kind of content will be produced. Influencer marketing is never foolproof, but it’s always productive to build relationships with the public.”
– Roni Blackburn, Digital Account Manager, KWSM
5. Measurable Results
Unlike traditional marketing methods, including public relations, influencer marketing campaigns provide measurable results.
When influencers publish content that links back to your brand or offer, you can track engagement metrics that include likes, comments, clicks, and conversions to gauge the effectiveness of your campaign and optimize it for future success.
Tracking results allows you to test different approaches, such as measuring results from micro-influencers in comparison to more well-known personalities. You can also test the performance of content formats in the context of your campaign goals. Data-driven experimentation helps us identify and iterate on the most effective strategies for your brand.
Build Your Brand Presence with Influencer Marketing & Public Relations
By combining an influencer marketing strategy with a public relations mindset, you can build a powerful brand presence that resonates with your target audience, strengthens your reputation, and fuels your business growth.
And when you partner with KWSM, influencer marketing and public relations are just a few of the tactics in our toolbox. Together we can supplement your influencer marketing strategy with social media management, website development and maintenance, content optimization, and other services that will help you achieve your business goals and sustain growth over time.
Fill out the form below to discuss your influencer marketing strategy needs with the KWSM team.
