The Value (& Effectiveness) of Influencer Marketing for Brands

Forming a partnership or collaborating with influencers has become one of the most popular methods of marketing nowadays. It’s more than a trend; it has established itself as a go-to digital marketing strategy that businesses from all industries can implement.

Influencer marketing has definitely become a major player in modern-day marketing, with more businesses employing it to boost their business.

If you’re looking at influencer marketing as an outsider, you may wonder how exactly influencers can help a business. How do you even find and partner with the right influencers? And, the most important question, how effective will it be?

Well, there are various variables that impact the answers to those questions. But it’s understandable that you’d want a general idea of what influencer marketing is and its effectiveness for businesses and brands before going into it.

Let’s examine this subject in more detail and explains how effective influencer marketing can benefit your business.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is simply a method used by brands and businesses to promote their products and services through recommendations or endorsements from influencers.

An influencer is someone who’s cultivated a loyal following on one or more social media platforms through content creation. These individuals produce different types of digital content, such as video blogs or “vlogs” and blogging.

Since 2019, the global influencer marketing market value has more than doubled, standing at around $13.8 billion as of 2021. Brands usually employ influencer marketing to increase brand awareness, sales, and or conversions among a specific target audience. And influencer marketing is well suitable for these purposes because of its nature and effectiveness.

With highly active social media profile(s) and an established loyal following, a social influencer has earned the trust and attention of their fans and followers over time, and thus can add to your customer base and the number of people who know your brand.

Employing influencers involves striking a deal with them by paying them to promote or create content that endorses your brand. You could sponsor their content to promote your product or service, and drive purchases or subscriptions in this way.

Now that you know what influencers are and how brands utilize them for digital marketing, here are some facts that point to their effectiveness:

High Receptiveness to word of mouth

Social media connects users online and increases the reach of people’s words. Those two factors are what make influencers potent digital marketing partners. Their followers trust what they say because they see them as a reliable source of information.

Social media also serves as a digital medium to cost-effectively spread the word about anything far and wide, even across international borders. People trust what people they know or people who are close to them say about something, and social media is the best source to find those kinds of words from trusted friends.

Influencers are well known and trusted within their niche. They are custodians of the messages and content on their social media channels, and proof of how a person’s thoughts and feelings can influence other people’s mindset. This means their followers, who are potential consumers, are more receptive to what they say about a brand.

On Twitter, for example, new research has found that influencers on the platform have built quite a high level of trust with their followers. Nearly 40% of Twitter users say they’ve made a direct purchase based on an influencer’s tweet.

Google has also found that 6 in 10 YouTube users would follow advice from their favorite creator over their favorite TV or movie personality. This statistic says a lot about influencers, and one of them is how people see them differently from celebrities.

More people, especially those who are in the younger demographic (millennials & Gen Z), think influencers are more believable than celebrities, which is notable for brands.

High average earned media value

Marketing is about promoting a brand by releasing tailored content publicly to gain consumer attention and win their business.

One way you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing is by looking at media value, that is the monetary representation of media publicity a brand gains from promotional efforts other than paid advertising.

According to a 2019 influencer marketing survey conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub, businesses who employ influencer marketing well gain outstanding earned media value. These businesses’ average ratio of gains stood at $18 per $1 spent on sponsoring influencers to promote their brand.

Those kinds of numbers where businesses are making $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing in 2021are yet to be re-produced when using other marketing tactics. This proves the value of influencer marketing that if you want to get the word out about your brand, influencer marketing is arguably the best option aside from paid advertising.

However, earning those returns can only be achieved through finding and partnering with the right influencers, e.g. those who are in the same niche as your business.

High marketing reach and growth potential

As already mentioned, influencer marketing isn’t just a trend anymore. It is a go-to digital marketing strategy. Influencer marketing won’t fade away as it’s not done growing. It has a big growth potential that can help your business to grow with it.

More and more people are becoming influencers and are choosing influence marketing as their professional career. This results in the continuous growth of social media platforms, providing more opportunities for people to become influencers and brands to reach bigger and more targeted audiences through influencer marketing.

Aside from that, there are also more content options that influencers are creating and that brands can choose from, including audio-only types of content like podcasts. This creates new avenues for brands to experiment with and reach new leads.

In addition, influencer marketing has also been increasingly standardized, with more influencer marketing agencies being established to represent influencers and help brands find the right partners for them. This makes everything more streamlined.

In conclusion

Influencer marketing is no doubt a valuable and effective option that you should definitely consider when promoting your business and offerings. It can help you get more eyes and ears on your brand and drive more paying customers to your business.

If you’re going to use it, make sure that you understand it well and find the right influences and micro-influencers to harness its potential and reach your objectives.