MARKETING
Influencer Marketing
By Joe Nyutu
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that uses influencers to promote a brand to a larger market. Influencers are opinion leaders with a social following base. Influencer marketing employs leading, niche content creators to improve brand awareness, increase traffic, and drive messages to brands’ target audiences. It is this collaboration between brands and creators that allows businesses to expand their reach across their buyer personas.
Influencer marketing works because it uses tactics like word-of-mouth marketing and social proof, which are now critical aspects of any successful marketing strategy. Customers sometimes trust their peers, friends, and people they admire more than the companies selling the products and services they buy and use.
Influencer marketing programs present unique challenges and opportunities for brands. By cultivating a network of engaged influencers and ambassadors who can support your existing marketing campaigns, you position your brand for success in today’ s influencerdriven marketplace.
But not all influencers are created equal. Coordinating influencer campaigns can be complicated, time-consuming, and the campaigns themselves can be costly, depending on the fees you pay to partners.
At a fundamental level, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers- individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche. Marketers rated influencer marketing as their fastest-growing channel for acquiring customers online. Organic search and email are too mature to provide the same yearly growth that influencer marketing now delivers.
Our 2019 survey results irrefutably proves that influencer marketing is a highly effective and viable marketing strategy. Instead of looking at influencer marketing in a singular way, it can be evaluated across various factors and among many more marketers. The results speak for themselves- influencer marketing is on an ever-steepening path to becoming an integral part of advertisers’ marketing arsenal. Whether a brand is new to influencer marketing or the company has already greased the influencer marketing wheel, these results serve as a solid industry benchmark for influencer marketing effectiveness.
“ Before you sign paid contracts for influencers, make sure they are skillfully creating content on multiple channels, and that your brand’ s values are in sync with theirs.“
Notice influencer marketing represents a new type of independent thirdparty endorsers who shape audience attitudes through blogs, tweets, and the use of other social media. As mentioned before, influencer marketing is gaining momentum and popularity in developing countries and is fast becoming an alternative to traditional forms of marketing communication( Booth & Matic, 2019).
Influencer marketing is very effective in ensuring a positive eWOM( electronic word of mouth). The effectiveness of influencer marketing is further supported by studies which found out that influencer marketing promotes a level of credibility that traditional marketing communication usually finds difficult to achieve.
Importance of influencer Marketing
Brand awareness growth: Majority of the marketers use influencer marketing to boost brand awareness, and this strategy works great. Industry opinion leaders share your brand’ s story, mission, and values with their follower base. It automatically expands your outreach and positioning online.
Content strategy enrichment: Influencer marketing is a golden opportunity to liven up your company or personal social media posts. As a company you can repost the influencer’ s content or encourage their followers to create user-generated content of brands. As a person or company, you can also use blogger’ s images for other marketing channels, such as targeted advertising. To avoid problems with copyright, include it in the contract. Equally it works well if you identify influencers who connect with your brand’ s core values and who will engage on multiple platforms multiple times.
Similarly, as studies have shown that potential consumers often only convert to traffic or customers after seeing a product multiple times, you want to identify whether influencers are meaningfully engaged with
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MAL 46 / 22 ISSUE