what is influencer marketing and why should you care about it?

Influencer marketing is on the rise globally. If you haven’t yet heard about it, it is about time that you did and implemented it into your everyday business practices. The first thing you need to know about influencer marketing is that it holds unimaginable prospects for the future of your product and service deliverability. While you might think that a year-long organic growth in demand and sales is what you need, there is no harm in speeding up this surge in sales. An effective influencer marketing strategy will cut the wait time by over 85% and boost your ROI for marketing budgets.

Understand today’s consumer mindset.

Most of the business operations take place over the internet, especially through mobile phones. Owing to this progressive trend, we have seen how social media plays a central role in keeping up with consumer demands. This, in turn, has helped advertisers who are promoting brands of large and small businesses alike.

Today, a typical consumer makes important purchasing decisions by consulting another customer either through social media or by word-of-mouth coming from a close friend with similar taste in shopping. So, the big question to address here is who to target and how? The answer is- social media influencers.

In the past, you’d have a celebrity endorsing a product, which would then be bought by his or her fans. Influencer marketing follows the same concept but you do not require a “celebrity” to convince millions to take the first step.

If you follow an artist on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., the visual aids help make the decision. There is a greater-than-ever possibility for brands to connect with their end-customer directly and organically. Such a branded content that uses social media influencers to amplify their business delegation is “very much IN” right now & this is the strategy behind influencer marketing.

Social media influencers versus outbound advertising techniques.

The digital landscape has changed the way we do business, have access to information, exchange views based on facts and figures, and even form new alliances over the internet. Studies have found that over 75% of B2B buyers are swayed by the wealth of information that they discover on social media, which means that outbound marketing and other traditional means of advertising are decreasing in value, although they do serve some distinctive purpose. Influencer marketing brings the added benefit of targeting and nurtures relationships that together bolster the inbound marketing strategy of any business.

Over 76% of B2B and B2C marketers today prefer inbound as their primary marketing approach using social influencers.

Also Read: 3 Currently Used Social Media Marketing Strategies By Small Businesses

Influencer marketing is powerful.

Whereas making a sale through a word-of-mouth recommendation is an honest way to bring loyal customers to a business, it is however slow in progress. But if you insert a marketing-induced C2C word of mouth then you can double the sales than any paid advertising can do.

Influencer marketing gives the brands an amazing opportunity to leverage the power of word-of-mouth by way of using personalities with a large following and respect on social media outlets such as Twitter.

Strengthen your SEO with influencer marketing.

This type of inbound marketing builds your brand and gives it a real identity, but it also brings consistency in your sales figures and helps to build a better Domain Authority & SER (Search Engine Ranking). The more people talk about your brand on social media channels, the more popular and relevant you will become to Google and correspondingly to the Google search engine.