As a London based social media agency that has extensive influencer relationships, a question our team is often asked is “what is the cost per post of an influencer” and how many sales can I expect as a result of that post. Perhaps the question could be reworded to allow us to provide some more information: “what is the value of influencer marketing and how could it benefit my business?”
Well let us break down the varying positives:
1. Build Brand Trust
Influencers have built their audiences for a variety of different reasons but above all because their followers trust their validation, enjoy their content and welcome their recommendations.
Influencers tend to only post about brands/business they genuinely believe in because false advertising could endanger the trust they fought so hard to establish with their community. As a result, influencer advertising can be a transparent, honest and an effective technique for marketing any business.
2. Improves Brand Awareness
Influencer marketing can greatly expand the number of people that are aware of your product or service. Social users will begin to know more about your business, the story behind the brand and the products/ solutions you offer.
Where we see influencer marketing campaigns fail is when the strategy does not ensure that value is created for both the influencer and the business. “Content opportunities” should create projects that add value to the influencer’s social media presence too, ensuring it is a win-win relationship.
3. Drives Down Content Costs
Content produced by an influencer is efficient and cost-effective, it helps to build and diversify your content schedule whilst driving down the cost of content creation.
The reason an influencer has a large following will typically be down to the quality of the content they produce, for small businesses the day rate of a content creation agency or photographer/ videographer could prove to be too expensive, whilst influencers can be a high quality alternative that have the added value of targeted exposure.
4. Targets Your Ideal Audience
Using relevant influencers can be one of the most effective ways of targeting your messaging to a hyper relevant audience. Relevant content is placed directly in the feeds of social users that are already interested in your niche. No additional budget will be required to test and find your ideal audience – the influencer has already grown this community offering a heavily engaged audience.
Now more than ever influencers have become, in some instances, the only source of high quality imagery and video for brands due to photographers and videographers confined to their homes during this lockdown period.
5. Inspires Your Audience
Influencers look to educate and inspire their audiences through their content. Businesses that have products or services that align with the influencer’s content and audience can provide value directly to their online community.
A brand can leverage the content created during the campaign to give value back to their audience.
6. Less Is More
Influencer Marketing is approachable for every business, long are the days where reaching out to influencers seemed like a costly game of chance. The influencer marketing industry is rapidly changing and people no longer want to go for just the biggest names in the business.
Low-reach, high-engagement micro- and nano-influencers are slowly taking over the spotlight as they allow room for companies to create bigger campaigns that involve a higher number of smaller influencers.
7. Builds Relationships
Connecting and engaging with influencers can be the start of a powerful long-term relationship. Influencers are active within your market, attending events, speaking to your target customers and creating content daily to serve them.
Being a London based Social Media Agency, the CEEK team has developed influencer relationships for brands using their IRM (Influencer Relationship Management) methodology resulting in joint-ventures, events, and various content opportunities. With one of the biggest influencer marketing databases in the world, CEEK has the reach and personal relationship with both key influencers and management companies alike, from micro to macro influencers in a variety of niches and countries.
Is Influencer Marketing the best marketing strategy for my business?
At CEEK we believe influencer marketing is crucial as part of a well balanced omni-channel marketing strategy.
Over the past few years, data privacy has gone from being a niche concern to something that people actively think of in the course of their digital lives. Some users are no longer happy to give their data away and rely on GDPR and/or ad blockers to protect their data usage, making the typical paid advertising routes less effective and sometimes more expensive.
Whilst this is completely understandable and social media platforms have already been making significant changes to become more transparent with regards to user data, there are plenty of other ways to market your brand online and build a stable customer trust including Influencer Marketing.
Influencer Marketing provides a way to create campaigns that are both effective and non-intrusive by creating a relationship between your brand and your audience built on trust from end-to-end.
