Influencer marketing is now a leading marketing strategy that many brands have incorporated to drive quality traffic and customer leads. However, no opportunity comes without risk. Before you invest your time and money into influencer marketing, it is important to learn about its main challenges and advantages. Here are our Top 3 views on the opportunities and challenges that you should consider when deciding if Influencer Marketing is right for your business.
OPPORTUNITIES:
1. Expands Your Brand’s Reach
Collaborating with the right influencers can boost your brand awareness and help your business reach hundreds or millions of relevant followers, that you could not have reached otherwise through social media marketing alone. A simple way to identify influencers who have an audience that you are trying to target is by approaching influencers who promote brands similar to yours. This is a great way to drive purchase decisions and connect with customers on their preferred platforms.
2. Builds Trust and Credibility
Trust takes time to develop and influencers have already dedicated much of their time and effort to build their own trusted communities within their followers. Through these communities, businesses can then attract potential new customers more effectively than with branded content. Influencers create an engaging and relatable experience, which makes it easier for them to influence the buying decisions of their followers. Consumers value the opinions of the influencers they follow. When an influencer talks positively about a brand, their followers are more likely to trust their recommendation which helps cut through ad blindness. Consequently, one of the biggest advantages of influencer marketing is that it enhances your brand’s credibility.
3. Saves Time and Money
Contrary to what most believe, you don’t necessarily need a huge budget, especially if you are targeting micro-influencers. Influencers, who are new to the industry, oftentimes agree to work for free products or services as well. With numerous platforms now available to aid you with your search, you are able to narrow down influencers based on the number of followers that they have or by their rates so you can choose to partner with influencers who charge an affordable price. A good influencer knows how to develop content that resonates best with their followers so that you don’t have to worry about creating the great content. Content created by influencers is usually trustworthy content that is more engaging than the content created by brands. This ultimately gives you access to quality content, saves you time and may even help reduce your sales cycle length.
CHALLENGES:
1. Involves High Risks
Finding the right influencer can be a challenge in itself, especially if you are new to the world of influencer marketing. It is of great concern for most brands to match with proper influencers for their campaigns and partnering with the wrong influencers can actually cause great damage to the reputation of your brand. If an influencer lacks the ability to create impressive content, they might fail to appeal to your target consumers which can result in a waste of time and money invested by your brand.
2. Mistakes can be Costly
Influencer marketing is still a relatively new strategy and so it is inevitable to run into mistakes. Since this strategy isn’t bound to a right or wrong approach, brands are usually learning from their mistakes and successes. A common mistake that influencers make is posting content that does not resonate with their target audience. When partnering with an influencer, it is vital to carefully choose influencers who are relevant to your niche and industry. A good tip is to always think about your audience first: their demographics, what content they like, on which social media platforms are they active. Other influencer mistakes to be aware of, which can affect and harm your brand, include the use of bots to increase followings and engagement as well as not disclosing that a post is sponsored.
3. Difficult to Measure Results
Measuring the results of influencer marketing can also be a challenge. However, if you can’t track and monitor the performance of your campaign, then all your efforts and the investment put into finding the right influencers or launching a campaign are wasted. Your business needs to properly analyze if an influencer is able to deliver the desired campaign goals and measuring results should include hard metrics rather than tricky statements such as “people responded positively to the campaign” for example.
While there are some considerations to working with influencers, with the right planning and research, just about every business can benefit with this strategy. Influencer marketing is here to stay, and it’s only going to grow more in the coming years. No matter what your brand goal is, influencers can help you grow your following, make sales, or simply get the word out about your business.