The power of influencer marketing is multidimensional, as it simultaneously affects different aspects of brand success: exposure, reputation, audience engagement, customer loyalty, and conversions. Influencer marketing is a way to tell your company’s story to the millions simultaneously through the mouths of those who already have the ear of your target audience. Here is word-of-mouth marketing in 2020 and beyond.
There is power in social media influencers.
The power in social media is generated by influencers — individuals whose content resonates with broad audiences, impacts their lives, changes their mindset, and even affects their purchasing decisions because of their authority, knowledge, or position.
“Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell.” — Seth Godin
Influencer Marketing: What Is It and Why You Need It?
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing tactics to enter the trust circle of potential customers. These people are an automatically loyal community since your brand is introduced to them by a person they already trust. Customer loyalty is the primary factor impacting the buying decision, particularly in times of a recession, when uncertainty toward the future is soaring in the air. That’s why it’s so crucial for companies to invest in building trust and give customers more confidence.
Influencer marketing is fueled by an ancient but still actionable word-of-mouth method. It allows you to accelerate online brand expansion by partnering with a thought leader who can be the first to start the word-of-mouth chain nourished by helpful content instead of ads. According to McKinsey, word-of-mouth marketing generates two times the sales of paid advertising. At the same time, Deloitte reports that customers acquired through word-of-mouth have a 37 percent higher retention rate than by any other means.
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Customers come and return to a brand trusted by influencers. They are considered experts who always keep abreast of the latest industry trends and recommend something really worth attention. To drive brand growth and success, businesses should learn more about influencer marketing and actively leverage it in the digital age.
Benefits of Influencer Marketing: a New View
Influencers build friendships, not “brand” relationships
If you ask customers what kind of relationships with a brand they’d like to have, you will likely hear about something similar to friendship. People want to feel appreciated and know that brands care about selling and empowering and inspiring them. Influencer marketing is the key to building human connections between a brand and its target audience.
Interacting with a brand through a prism of the influencer’s positive feedback, customers feel more value in what the brand does and creates. They start associating its products and services with authoritativeness and reliability as they are recommended by the leading niche experts, aka thought leaders. Influencer marketing transits brand-customer relationships to a more personal level and makes them friends.
It allows you to discover what resonates with your customers.
When partnering with influencers, you can explore what types of content, messages, and visuals work best with your target audience. Influencer marketing allows you to promote your brand and conduct “field studies” on the influencer’s social media pages, investigate how they are interacting with potential customers, and what drives audience engagement.
By monitoring and analyzing influencer-audience relationships, you can learn more about your customers, define better strategies for your future marketing campaigns, and improve products.
It helps provide anticipated WOW & emotion-driven engagement.
Leveraging the benefits of influencer marketing, you can introduce your brand engagingly and creatively. Influencers are mostly driven by creativity, curiosity about getting new experiences, and desire to bring value to their followers. They invest time and effort in producing highly engaging content that targets people who might be your potential customers.
Making your brand intro a part of the influencer’s amazing content, you significantly raise chances of making the WOW effect, creating an unforgettable first impression, and driving continuous customer engagement. It helps provoke the person’s thoughts about a product and forths the first emotional interaction with it.
Companies should care about creating emotional bonds with a target audience because they are fertile soil for growing customer loyalty. Consumer loyalty is a significant business value since it helps smooth sharp edges of customer experience and keeps conversions up. When emotional connections are damaged, rational (or even critical) thinking rears up again, and it may negatively impact sales in the future.
It promotes a brand through useful content instead of ads.
People trust advertising much less than before. On the contrary, word of mouth still is relevant and actionable even today. The sunrise of new digital innovations has just given it a new boost. Today, most of our words are digital and can spread at wind speed across the web. You can add your brand more significance and amplify word of mouth arising around it by producing quality content that inspires people and helps them tackle the most actual problems.
At the same time, you can also save time on content production and reach a new audience with the help of influencer marketing. Influencers may endorse your brand and introduce it to their followers, involving your brand information in their own content.
It is a highly cost-effective digital marketing channel.
Social media influencer marketing is becoming one of the most actionable digital marketing channels, even if compared to email marketing, paid search, display advertising, and affiliate marketing. According to Convince & Convert, 22% of digital marketing managers find influencer marketing the most cost-effective customer acquisition channel. As reported in a study conducted by Tomoson, influencer marketing brings a $6.50 return on investment for every dollar spent.
Is Influencer Marketing Worth It?
Influencer marketing is a goldmine that may help companies keep the target audience’s attention in the highly competitive digital world. Is it worth investing in? Only you can answer it for sure. However, before you do it, just look through the above-mentioned values arising when someone influential talks about your brand once again.
A successful collaboration with thought leaders can help you increase brand awareness, conquer the hearts of a new audience, gain its loyalty, grow brand popularity, and multiply revenue. It’s a powerful machine producing new, exciting human-brand interactions bringing plenty of benefits for both of them.
