Key takeaways:
1. Authenticity and Trust: Influencers with authentic engagement build trust with their audience, making them effective at promoting your brand organically.
2. Cost-Effective Marketing: Partnering with influencers can be cost-efficient, especially when micro-influencers accept products instead of monetary compensation, providing professional content creation in return.
3. Extended Reach: Influencers provide a vast and genuine reach, enhancing your brand's visibility and credibility across diverse audiences.
4. Micro-Influencers Benefits: These influencers have highly engaged, niche audiences, resulting in better engagement rates and a more targeted marketing approach.
5. Risk of Fake Influencers: It’s crucial to verify influencer authenticity to avoid wasting resources on fake followers and maintain your brand’s reputation.
More and more brands are realising the benefits of influencers on social media and how they can leverage their audience to generate reach. Social media is becoming the new word of mouth in marketing.
The key to gaining the best return on investment is to find influencers with an audience that interests align with the brand. The influencer must be perceived as authentic as it allows them to build relationships and trust. Celebrities with large audiences are often seen as not genuine and unrelatable. Therefore there is a huge trend on micro influencers with smaller audience numbers, between 1,000 and 100,000 followers, with greater engagement rates.
The biggest risk with using influencers as a marketing tool is the possibility that the influencer is not genuine and has bought their followers. This will result in a lack of engagement and ultimately little to no return on investment. The key to identifying these fake influencers is to verify authenticity through the links in their bio, review the follower count verse engagement rate, analyse the quality and quantity of posts and look for spam on comments [Captiv8, 2017]. There are now lot of apps and companies that use new technologies to authenticate real influencers with wannabees. Not only do fake influencers waste time and money but they can also ruin a brands reputation.
Key benefits of influencers
Cost
When you pay for an influencer not only do you gain their audience and organic reach but you get their original influencer content; including stylist, photographer and editor. This can work out to a huge massive financial saving.
Depending on the size of the influencers follower numbers there may be no exchange in money but rather a simple exchange in products.
Reach
An influencers organic reach is perceived as more genuine, relatable and trustworthy than other streams of advertising. Thus boosting the brand's perception as a truly authentic organisation. These influencers essentially become the faces of your brand. With over 24 million Instagram accounts, the opportunities are endless regarding the audience you could reach.
Micro Influencers
Micro-influencers offer a host of advantages in influencer marketing. With a smaller but highly engaged and niche audience, they can build authentic connections and trust with their followers. This often results in higher engagement rates, cost-effectiveness, and a more targeted approach for brands. Explore the numerous benefits of micro-influencers in our upcoming blog on 'The Power of Micro-Influencers in Your Marketing Strategy.'
Influencer Marketing Agency
Leveraging an influencer marketing agency can be a game-changer for your influencer marketing campaigns. These experts have the industry knowledge, connections, and experience to help you identify the right influencers for your brand, negotiate contracts, and ensure the success of your campaigns. Discover the benefits and best practices of working with an influencer marketing agency in our upcoming blog on 'The Art of Influencer Collaboration.'