Influencer marketing offers the best ROI (return on investment) for all your sales and marketing campaigns.
Here are 7 reasons why influencer marketing needs to be the top priority in your marketing strategy if you want to squeeze all the juice out of your marketing campaigns. But first, let’s define influencer marketing.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is the practice of enlisting everyday consumers who have carved out a thought-leadership niche for themselves to educate and influence their readers (other consumers) who follow them online. We tap these influencers with marketing dollars to develop visibility campaigns on behalf of B2C and B2B brands and companies.
Influencer marketing campaigns can have a number of different goals:
- driving brand awareness
- enhancing brand affinity with consumers
- moving consumers to purchase (product sales)
- debunking myths and misinformation
- consumer education
- combatting inaccurate or harmful media coverage
Working with influencers is also an excellent method for connecting with consumers quickly through trusted channels, either to address challenges to the brand or to optimize opportunities in the digital landscape.
Why does influencer marketing matter?
Consumers are already talking about your brand (or your category or industry). The conversation is taking place now, and you need your brand to be a part of that conversation. Eventually, you’ll want to own the conversation with consumers. To do so, your brand first has to jump into the conversation with consumers and engage with them. Influencers are the best vehicle for doing this.
When you put together an influencer campaign the right way you invite consumers into a conversation with and about your brand. This in turn allows you to capture the voice of your consumer, understand more clearly the pain points they have, and gain critical consumer insights you can funnel into your other marketing efforts. Rather than a “push” tactic it’s a “push-pull” tactic where you share information out to your consumers, but you also get important insights back through engagement with ideal consumers.
This is real time data from your ideal consumers which will make your marketing efforts even more effective in driving the marketing outcomes you desire.
Another critical reason to work with influencers: your competitors are already working with them. Every day that goes by that your brand is not working with influencers is a day that you lose ground to the competition. (Keep in mind: competition can be a brand or misinformation that is harming your brand’s reputation with consumers if left unaddressed.)
Influencer marketing spend is estimated to increase to over $21B in 2023. Even worse, according to Boston Consulting Group, you will need to spend $1.85 for every dollar saved by sitting on the sidelines right now, to catch up with your competitors (who are already investing in influencer marketing).
If that’s not incentive enough, consider that 41% of Gen Z has made a purchase after seeing a creator post about it on social media according to Pew Research Center. With $143B in Gen Z buying power, letting your competitors own the influencer space means you’ll lose out on a significant revenue opportunity.
Consumers Trust Influencers
Adding influencer marketing to your marketing mix will also expedite the time it takes to build Know-Like-Trust factor with consumers. As a brand, consumers automatically view your message with less trust. 71% of consumers say they trust product placement from influencers, while only 34% trust brands. Smart brands leverage influencers to tap into the trust they’ve already built with their audience. That trust flows over to the brands being promoted or mentioned by influencers.
Skepticism of Brands
It’s only natural that consumers are skeptical of what brands have to say. Consumers know that brands have a vested interest is presenting a highly polished message and targeted information to consumers. This leads consumers to be resistant to messaging shared by a brand directly. That lack of consumer trust for brands creates a barrier to meaningful conversation between brands and their consumers.
This doesn’t mean you can never talk about your brand, for instance across your brand’s owned social media channels or via earned media. Rather, your content strategy needs to include outreach tactics that encourage interaction with consumers and provides an opportunity for meaningful conversation.
Trust in Influencers
Influencers are consumers and speak consumer language. They ask themselves the same questions consumers do. They share the same life experiences consumers do. All of which makes them the perfect channel to answer those questions for consumers.
Influencers build their brand and online presence by engaging authentically with consumers – their valued readers – to build their trust. As a result, consumers trust influencers and seek out conversations with them.
This is what we call the Know-Like-Trust factor (KLT). Influencers build KLT by relating to their readers on a personal level and making programming decisions that prioritize delivering value to that audience. They are “just like them.” This KLT factor makes influencers a trusted source of information and word-of-mouth marketing for their readers. It also makes working with influencers critical to your marketing campaigns.
KLT With a Megaphone
Influencers use their platform as a megaphone to share your message to readers. We call this a “One-to-Many” amplification. At the same time, the personal relationship they build with consumers allows them to engage with them on a one-to-one level as well.
Because of this, they are able to speak directly to a consumer’s needs, concerns, questions, and more, which is a direct benefit to your brand for many reasons, some of which we discuss below.
Our Secret Weapon
In fact, one of the benefits of working with Maverick Mindshare is the fact that we have a proprietary process that connects your brand with the right influencers who speak the right language and engage the right consumers to grow mindshare.
Grow Mindshare
We all know the importance of word of mouth marketing when it comes to raising brand awareness and growing mindshare. Word-of-mouth is directly responsible for 90% of all consumer purchases. This is another place influencer marketing offers incredible return on investment. It’s word-of-mouth marketing on a large scale.
Here’s why. Rather than one consumer sharing about your product in their personal circles, that influencer with a “One-to-Many” megaphone is skilled at crafting messaging that resonates to a larger consumer base. The megaphone is made up of the tools and channels influencers use to share content: blogs, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, newsletters, email, and more.
Influencer marketing has the same effect as trusted friends sharing recommendations with each other, only at scale. This is because influencers meet readers/consumers where they are in their everyday life and offer solutions as a trusted resource in a format that is comfortable and safe to your consumer.
This increases visibility with your target consumer in a personal, more impactful way. The result is that your product is more likely to be top-of-mind and even preferred when they see it on store shelves or add items to their online shopping cart.
Building this kind of mindshare can lead to accelerating the consumer’s speed to purchase, as influencer content often motivates your consumer to move directly to purchase (much more quickly than branded content will.)
Accelerate Speed to Purchase
When done right, partnering with influencers who have built trust with their readers can create speed to purchase with consumers. The ability for an influencer to be a “One-to-Many” megaphone paired with their one-to-one connection with your consumer, gives you, as the partnering brand, a direct line to speak to consumers. Best of all, it’s in a place they are primed to not only hear your message, but also feel confident to take action more quickly.
The key here is that you need to do it right.
How do you do it right? It’s quite straightforward, and yet often challenging.
For starters, you partner with the right influencers to share the right message.
Leverage Leading Edge Best Practices
Along with influencers speaking the same language as your consumers, they are experts on how and where to reach the consumer with messaging delivered in a way that effectively engages their readers (consumers).
This is because influencers make it their job to stay up-to-date and leverage the latest best practices: SEO, trending social media platforms, and best methods for reaching as many people on those platforms with their content as possible.
Their expertise gives your brand the ability to leverage the hottest trends, platforms, and channels without having to invest an incredible amount of time and money on becoming the (or maintaining) authority on each best practice and platform.
All the points above already provide an incredible amount of positive ROI for your marketing department. But there’s even more value in working with influencers.
Offers Customer Service Opportunities
Another hidden benefit with influencer marketing is customer service. Customer service is important to building consumer confidence. However, this is a cost center for any brand and most marketing departments are either not tasked with it or do not have the bandwidth/budget/team for this. It is simply not factored into the brand’s customer journey.
Influencer marketing provides customer service without impacting your bottom line in either budget or team hours. Influencers naturally provide guidance and feedback to your brand’s consumers when those target consumers engage with the influencer content.
Here’s how it works: when an influencer publishes content, they then engage with their readers on a one-to-one level on each content channel. Through this online conversation, they are able to knock down myths, educate consumers, answer questions, and encourage purchase. It could be as simple as the influencers sharing which retailers carry certain products or as nuanced as making specific recommendations to their readers based on what they know about that reader.
While your team can (and should) also engage with consumers on an influencer’s content (for instance, in the comments), an influencer doing so resonates more authentically and optimized the exchange. In addition, as the brand you only have the ability to engage with public-facing conversations.
More and more these days, consumers are engaging outside the public eye – via email, DMs, and “in real life” conversations. Influencers are motivated to respond and nurture those conversations with their readers, wherever they happen.
Provides Measurable Results
At the end of any marketing initiative, it’s crucial to have the right data packaged the right way so you can showcase your ROI success with your stakeholders like the rockstar marketer you are.
Key Performance Indicators That Matter
Many marketing initiatives, such as a print publication, the brand website, billboards, radio spots, and TV ads, offer vague KPIs (key performance indicators) via impressions or a general idea of what consumers are seeing and may be reacting to. This is not the case with influencer marketing.
While an influencer campaign does measure impressions, it goes far deeper in measuring ROI. A key value of influencer marketing is that it offers in depth concrete measurable results in the form of quantifiable data that is much more granular than impressions. This is true for both social media influencers and blogging campaigns.
Quantifiable Data Driven Campaigns
In fact, the quantifiable data that results can become so deep and granular that you risk being swamped in data. The danger here is that you may get so much data that you don’t even know which data matters. Secret: we can help you with that.
Importance of Qualitative Data
In addition, an influencer marketing campaign provides you with a treasure trove of qualitative data. It will tell you exactly what your consumer sees and engages with, and whether or not it is resonating with them. In fact, as described above, your consumers will tell you that directly!
What About Engagement Rates?
Speaking of engaging, engagement rates are one of the most coveted data points in influencer marketing. Both brand platforms and influencer programs alike can offer engagement rates to show the success of messaging.
However, we see time and again that influencer marketing campaigns offer a significantly higher engagement rate than a brand’s platform or any other marketing that comes directly from the brand.
Why is this? Simply put, consumers trust influencers and want to engage with them.
ROI That Continues to Grow
Once you have a wrap-up report for an influencer program, you can use all your influencer marketing ROI – both the quantifiable and qualitative results – to boost your other marketing initiatives. Think: website, digital media buys, owned social media channels. Those are just a few examples, but insights from an influencer marketing campaign will yield tremendous impact to every other marketing tactic and channel you are leveraging.
In addition, our clients find immense value in sharing these results with their internal sales team to ensure B2B customers and all end-user consumers hear the same message across all platforms.
As mentioned above, an influencer campaign delivers unparalleled ROI. However, as with all reports, you have to choose a point in time to measure your results. By nature, the metrics any program gathers are a snapshot in time.
ROI Continues to Increase
The beauty of an influencer program is that your influencer marketing ROI continues to grow over time as influencers continue to engage with consumers, grow their audience, and reshare their content during relevant conversations and seasons.
This means your cost continues to decrease as your ROI increases. In addition, there are always opportunities to gather more data and insights to get a clearer picture of how your ROI increases over time (just ask us how).
In Conclusion
At Maverick Mindshare, we can go on forever about all the ways that influencer marketing offers you the best ROI for your marketing budgets. To sum up all we discussed above:
- Influencers engage authentically and personally with your consumer in a highly human and relatable way.
- Influencers build trust faster and easier (and more economically) than your brand can on its own.
- Influencers clear the obstacles to purchase in a way you as a brand simply cannot.
- Influencers deliver expertise in engaging with their readers the right way on the right platforms.
- Influencer ROI is measurable and grows long after the marketing campaign is finished.
We are passionate about helping you do influencer marketing the right way. We don’t just talk the talk. We walk the walk. We have proprietary processes, which include campaign management tools, that ensure you share the right message using the right influencers on the right platforms at the right time.
We then take all that data and package it up into reporting that you can showcase to your stakeholders. So that you can protect and defend your ideas and–most importantly–be a rockstar for your brand when you deliver successful results.
Take the next step.
Reach out to us: hello@maverickmindshare.com | (484) 240-5880
