The 5 Most Important Benefits Of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has been an important part of successful brands for many years. From the very start of marketing, companies have turned towards influencers in their industry to expose their businesses to new audiences, gain more authority for their brands and bring in more sales.
Thanks to the Internet, the utilization of influencers has become much easier. More importantly, it’s a cost-effective strategy that even smaller businesses can utilize without depleting their marketing budget. According to Acorn Influence, over 50% of marketers find influencer marketing to be an effective strategy for increasing the number of customers they have in their database. At the same time, influencer marketing has been recognized as the marketing strategy with the most potential this year, with the results gained from utilizing influencers simply becoming more and more powerful.
Inc.com also reports that amongst marketers not utilizing influencer marketing as of yet, at least 84% plan on doing so in the next year. Let’s consider five essential benefits that influencer marketing has to offer any business looking to boost their reach and attract more customers.
1. Unaffected By Ad Blocker Technologies
PageFair reports that over 615 million devices have been installed with some sort of ad blocking technology, with 11% of all Internet users blocking advertising while browsing the Internet. Furthermore, the use of ad blocking technology is growing quickly, with a 30% growth rate in 2016 alone. For businesses and website owners utilizing the traditional Internet advertising platforms, which place banner ads at the top of websites, ad blocking technologies are causing significant problems. This type of software blocks these banners, which means the visitor is unable to see them. In some cases, the advertiser may even be expected to pay for the ad impression, even when the visitor’s browser blocked the banner from showing up on the website!
With influencer marketing, ad blockers are no threat to the advertiser. This is one of the main reasons why so many Internet marketers are now starting to utilize influencer marketing instead of traditional advertising campaigns.
2. Works For Any Business In Any Industry
Another important aspect of influencer marketing is that there are influencers in virtually every industry you can imagine. Whether your business is producing nutritional supplements or designing software, selling cars or consulting services, there are always a significant number of influencers that can be utilized to help promote your business.
For this reason, influencer marketing poses as an excellent opportunity for any type of business. It can help to reduce your cost of advertising and ensure that you get the most value for your money, since there’s alwatya an advocate on your side to promote your message.
3. Highly Targeted Traffic
While driving a thousand visitors per day to a website is an excellent goal to achieve, it is important to know that if these visitors are not highly targeted, they will most likely not be interested in the products or services offered by your brand. Traffic that is not highly targeted is likely to quickly leave a website when visitors realize the website does not contain the information they are looking for. This can lead to low conversion rates as well as high bounce rates, which negatively affect the website’s search engine rankings.
Since influencer marketing utilizes the marketing channels of an influencer in the particular industry a business is targeting, traffic that gets directed to the company’s website will be highly targeted. In other words, each visitor will already be interested in what the company has to offer. Targeted traffic can be retrieved from virtually any source, whether the influencer specializes in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or their own authority blog.
4. Excellent For Boosting Brand Authority And Awareness
Apart from sending high-quality, targeted traffic and avoiding the dreadful effects that ad blocker technology has in store for companies utilizing traditional Internet advertising campaigns, influencer marketing is also an excellent way to boost the authority and awareness of a brand.
When the influencer publishes content related to a company’s brand on their marketing channels, their followers will recognize the company’s products or services as trustworthy. They do, after all, trust the influencer. This creates a higher level of authority for the brand that promotes its content through the influencer. Additionally, the followers of the influencer may start to share the content on their social media accounts; thus boosting awareness and driving larger amounts of traffic without becoming more costly.
5. Google Boost
Finally, business owners should also be aware of the fact that influencer marketing does not only bring them additional, highly targeted traffic, it also offers them valuable backlinks. When the influencer publishes content regarding the products or services offered by the company, they will also link to that company’s website from their blog (or social media channels). Influencers usually own websites with high ranking metrics. This will count as a backlink for the company’s website. And high-quality backlinks can also boost the website’s Google rankings.