Influencer marketing has been around for decades. Jello-O was only a minor success until 1904 when free cookbooks were distributed to supermarkets. The first families to pick up a cookbook and enjoy these new desserts became early influencers in their neighborhoods. And Jell-O took off.
Over the past few years, influencers in digital marketing have been a popular topic. Let’s examine who they are, how to find them, and what benefits they provide to your marketing efforts by expanding your content reach.
What is an Influencer?
An influencer is someone who has a significant following on social media platforms, a large market reach and can dramatically impact your marketing campaigns. Influencers usually offer their expertise through informative posts, classes, services and products to specifically targeted groups and can enhance SEO. A lot of times they are educators, inspirers and experts in their particular field and have a breadth of connections and knowledge in the field that may help increase traffic and grow content engagement.
When you need to find a partner that could benefit your growth, finding an influencer to work with can do just that. Imagine a celebrity or a social media icon promoting your product, you will see an increase in traffic, sales and leads.
Influencers will help:
- Generate more sales
- Develop more leads
- Build the trust of customers
- Grow social following
- Increase site traffic
- Build brand awareness
- Increase content engagement
How to Find Influencers
There are many ways to partner up with influencers. It is important to make sure you do your research to gather the right information to select the right influencer. There are a lot of tools on the market that can help identify influencers. Once again back to the research, you need to see which influencers are advocating products or brands in your niche and which ones you can match your brand with. Use content research tools like Buzzsumo and Followerwonk.
After conducting research, make a list of those influencers who can best serve your needs. It is important to identify those influencers that you have the best chance of working with, and more importantly, if you have something to offer of value to them. Remember, relationships are a two-way street and having a well-known, respected influencer on your friend list can be invaluable.
With research and tools, you can pinpoint your ideal influencer and you can focus your efforts on building a mutually beneficial relationship.
Influencers and Marketing
Influencer marketing is the number one form of marketing and helps aspirants gain an advantage over competition trying to get heard. In a study conducted by Moz-content, and engagement, are the fifth most important factor in search engine ranking. Another study concluded that most people trust influencers nearly as much as they would a close friend.
We encourage digital media agencies to harness the power of this marketing, as it can affect enhance your search engine optimization and provide much more content to reach. You will need to understand the importance of content creation for your brand and business. By doing so, you add a larger layer of credibility to your business.
Link building served as the highest factor for search engine rankings and for those interested in enhancing their SEO, link building provides an opportunity to focus efforts by strategically aligning with business goals and social media influencers. It also provides a profound value for search engine optimization as it can establish authority and imply a strong relationship between two parties.
Backlinks are links that are used to send traffic to another website, usually as a credible reference on your page. They can redirect to videos, blogs, pages, shops or to most any valuable content. Backlinks may also direct visitors to specific content native to your influencer.
Linking to authoritative sites can help enhance your rankings in search engines and helping to provide content directly to your specified targeted audience as opposed to the entire broad parameters found in your niche.
The Takeaway
Companies looking to grow their brand should seriously consider what influencers will do for their business. Long-term relationships will help strengthen your position in a particular subject area and make you more credible to your audience. Influencers have more impact than most content you can create alone.
In a study conducted by Neilsen content that comes from an influencer, was 88% more valuable to users than branded content. What does this mean? People trust influencers, and when you add an influencer plus valuable, meaningful content, you will make a greater impact to accomplish with your marketing goals.
Marketing from influencers is here to stay. Integrating it into your marketing campaigns will grow your brand.
