Why Are Big Brands Using Influencer Marketing? - Viral Bao

As a brand new emerging concept of marketing, Influencer Marketing is not just a popular marketing trend. It’s a dominant practice which helps brands in expanding their reach and awareness as well, while boosting their overall sales! While establishing a healthy and strong partnership, and perfectly synchronized brand goals and a well-run campaign, Influencer Marketing raised the standards of traditional marketing practices. This has caused more brands to be aware of the efficacy of this practice on their business’s success.

We’re all aware how Influencer Marketing proved to be good for smaller brands, but we can’t ignore the impact of Influencer Marketing on bigger brands as well.

The advantages of working with an influencer is that you’ll have access to a focused spectrum of audience. For an instance if you want to reach viewers of ages 20 to 25, interested in fitness, there are influencers with that particular audience only. Or, if you want to reach viewers ages 25 to 35, interested in Automotives, or even something extremely-specific like gardening tips, there are influencers in those niche with highly targeted audiences. This is the biggest reasons why big brands are moving towards influencer marketing.

Influencer campaigns can be beneficial to many things, apart from just the monetary benefits. Like, it can make your brand popular amongst the audience of your niche. This could lead to your increased social following, or an increase in sales or web traffic. This not only drives traffic to your website, Influencers can drive traffic to your social accounts as well. The more your brand is exposed to the people, the more potential clientele you can target in the market.

What’s the most common way of advertisement you can think of? Bill-boards right? The billboards of brands we notice on our way back home every day, even they get thousands of views every day. Consider a social media influencer as a billboard. Audiences come across these influencers and are highly inspired by the content they create. They always trust in what influencers recommend. Influencers have become a part of the lives of their fans, featuring every day on their smartphones. Audiences appreciate the content of the Influencer and trust the brands they use, which is being represented through their online channels. As a brand, collaboration with an Influencer can help in gaining this same trust with audiences (potential consumers). They already are familiar with Influencers and fully trust in what they represent. By including Influencer Marketing into your marketing strategy, you are encouraging the Influencer’s audience to trust in your brand, the same way they trust the Influencer.

The sole purpose of all the marketing strategies and decision making as a big brand is your sales growth. Influencer Marketing can be used for numerous different objectives, investing in Influencers can even help in converting your leads into sales. This is one of the biggest reasons, why brands choose Influencers to collaborate with them to promote their products. Consumers are highly attracted towards the products that are advertised by the Influencers, which clearly gets reflected in the sales as a result.

ROI (return on investment) is a means of measuring performance that helps in evaluating the efficiency of an investment. That is, evaluating the profits made which outweigh the expenses (investment made). Although Influencer Marketing may look a bit complicated to evaluate than traditional marketing techniques, more Key Performance Indicators are emerging to help brands in evaluating the overall success of any campaign. Influencer Marketing campaigns are proven to generate up to 11 times more ROI than other traditional marketing techniques like banner advertising.

It’s crucial to align the campaign goals with what could actually be quantified and backed up with data. This includes calculating your web traffic or reach on social media. Working with this data, brands can easily determine an Influencer’s social worth based on how audience respond to their content, and evaluate the performance of the Influencers campaign based on this data. Although the online visibility of the brand is not directly linked to your ranking on Google , Influencer's blogs and social mentions that are directed towards your website are highly beneficial to your SEO.

Which do you believe more: a brand talking about how great they are, or your favorite social media influencer taking a picture of themselves using a branded product in their everyday lives?

The biggest benefit brands avail by working with influencers isn’t just targeted exposure, it’s consumer’s trust. If an influencer mentions a brand, specifically within the brand’s domain or market, then it actsss like getting a co-sign from a celebrity.

As compared to other modes of advertising, working with influencers is still very cost efficient. Here’s a fun-fact, high reach super celebs like Cristiano Ronaldo csharge up to $500,000 for a single post from their Instagram account, then too it seems fair as they have a very substantial reach like 100 million followers. But as we all know, by collaborating with influencers you’re not just getting a more focused exposure, but also a signed verification from the influencers themselves. That is far more valuable than an ad coming from a brand that is being shown to anyone and everyone.

But the paradigm shift shouldn’t happen all at once, that means big brands shouldn’t ignore all the other marketing strategies and spend everything on influencers. It’s a part of the bigger picture, an important component that should never be ignored.