Influencer marketing is a form of digital marketing that entirely focuses on building positive relationships and sentiments within your target audience through specific key individuals – The influencers. It’s about attracting, building trust and generating engagement with the audience. Sounds like love relationship yeah? It is.

Your audience can enjoy and feel positive attributes for a brand and its product, and as an end result, they build lasting and loyal relationships with the brands that serve them.

For brands though, connecting with a potential customer at this level is tough and time consuming. This is because consumers do not easily trust brands due to perceived bias. It can take a long time for brands to lead a consumer through the journey from the awareness stage to the final purchase stage.

Brands tend to need help with developing and organizing this sort of brand-customer relationship that is solely built on trust, and that’s where influencer marketing takes center stage. Influencer marketing involves identifying the people who have the most influence on your target audience.

Who is an Influencer?

An Influencer is a third party who significantly shapes the customer’s purchasing decision and has a greater than average reach or impact in a relevant market place.

A highly viewed youtuber, a Blogger or even a largely followed twitter user who has wowed their fans with content that appeal to them is as much an influencer as a famous celebrity. You can read my story on how i became an Influencer . Hence, an influencer is defined based on the nature of the influencer marketing campaign, in order to reach the marketing goals. This may differ for each brand and campaign.

Influencers can encourage long lasting customer loyalty by means of promoting engagement, appeal, and trust; the three attributes that result in long-term relationships and loyal customers. They use social media to achieve all these attributes. You can also read this article to learn more about how social media works and what you can do to grow.

Why should your business consider influencer marketing?

Build awareness and engagement: 

Partnering with an influencer can help get your brand and products in front of an engaged audience that is inquisitive about your product.

An engaged target audience is an active target audience and influencers know how to get a response from their followers. In truth, within the past couple of years, influencers on twitter and YouTube have been reaching a higher engagement rate than even famous celebrities.

Generate quality leads: 

An influencer’s actual testimony about your product can generate far more qualified leads than loads of ads, without all the additional marketing fees.

Latest research indicates that influencer marketing has become the fastest developing customer acquisition channel, beating paid search, email marketing, and organic search. Entrepreneurs were asked about the customers they generate through influencer marketing, 51 percent believed the leads generated through influencer marketing are better than the ones they attracted using other marketing strategies.

Working with influencers can also foster quality leads due to the fact that they exert their impact on specialized niches. Because of this specificity, the leads you generate from these influencers are more targeted and relevant. The result is a better number of leads who are already interested in what you sell.

Build Trust and Brand Affinity: 

Trust is one of the most effective forces in the world of marketing. Trust between brands and customers can bring about a loyal relationship that outlasts the worst and most difficult of instances. Furthermore, an influencer who trusts your brand and your products might also become a brand ambassador. The influencers you partner with ought to clearly admire your products and if so, this sentiment could be evident to their fans. When your influencers love and trust you, so will their followers.

Influencers are regular people, who are with huge media reach, followers/fans, industry associations and community. Influencers may not necessarily be aware of your company, but have influence of an audience segment that is important to your business.

Influencers are not just marketing tools, but social relationship assets. They could be responsible for affecting important contracts, product releases, market awareness and industry shifts before they happen.

To sum it all up, influencers are a key type of advocate for your company.

by AURACOOL