Influencer Marketing: Know How to Build Your Own Brand

The current situation in the consumer market is simple. If consumers don’t develop brand loyalty, then businesses cannot grow. There are examples of companies who produced high quality products, yet found themselves floundering on the market because of a lack of brand loyalty from their consumers.

Why Brand Building is Important

Although Digital marketing, with its broad spectrum, can cover most aspects of brand building, companies always look for new ways to spread their message easily and quickly. This brings us to Influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a relatively new concept. Marketers often focus on key leaders who have a substantial influence on the buying patterns of other consumers. These influencers, who are consumers themselves, can drive a large group of consumers towards their brand. This way, they do not have to market directly to a large group of consumers, as the work is being done for them by the influencers themselves.

Most Influencers have either a social media aspect or a content element through which they spread their message to other consumers. Influencer marketing is, in this way, closely related to both Social media marketing as well as Content marketing.

How Influencer Marketing Works?

Influencer markets are the perfect way to brand building through social media. Influencer marketing makes use of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. The reason for this being the unmatched reach both Facebook and Twitter can amass. Twitter influencers have a much bigger volume of organic reach than Facebook, although Facebook is used almost as a target marketing tool.

YouTube is also being used as a tool to build an effective brand image. YouTube users, who have amassed a substantial amount of subscribers, are ideal candidates to be market influencers. These users, or YouTubers, can help generate awareness of the business or product through unboxings, product demos, product reviews or simple endorsements. This allows the consumers to experience products before purchasing them. Consumers also have developed a strong trust in the reviews and recommendations of the YouTuber.

Influencers can be paid or rewarded for their part in the marketing campaign. They can be offered incentives like free products, discounts or even paid commission for purchases made in return for their marketing. The process of incentivising ensures that the influencers remain happy with the organization.

The Benefits: The benefits of using influencer marketing to spread a brand image are plenty, and can be comparable with the impact of social media.

1. Social Media Presence: Social Media presence is a prerequisite for a successful marketing campaign. It is much different than just creating pages or posting promotional content. Influencers can reach out to other social media users with the information about the product or service. They can provide positive feedbacks or reviews, which can influence a substantial amount of his or her followers towards buying the product. It is a natural process that fits in perfectly with how social media works. Using influencers can, in turn, increase a company’s social media presence, which can ultimately lead to more customers.

2. Customer Loyalty: The benefits of building customer loyalty are fully realized when using influencer marketing. Influencers, who have had a positive experience with the product attract more potential customers through their influence. Potential customers trust the influencer and thus, trust in the brand that they’re endorsing.

3. Expansion of reach: An influencer usually has a large number of followers or subscribers behind them. Businesses can tap into these groups through the influencers marketing campaign. This is more advantageous than a company carrying out its own social media campaign. For example, a company’s Facebook page might contain a significantly smaller number of likes. This is because the users are on the social media platform for socializing and not for making a purchase. If a marketer uses influencers in their marketing campaign, s/he will have access to a wider range of potential customers through the influencer’s followers or subscribers.

4. Unaffected by Ad-block or other advertisement prevention software: Due to the growth in the number of online advertisements consumers often use software like Ad-block, which can effectively hide such advertisements from appearing. By using Influencer marketing, there is no need for making online advertisements as this method is subtle and blends in with other social media content. Thus, Ad-blocks or similar tools do not detect such kind of advertisements and are rendered useless.

Each influencer is unique. They may operate through social media, multimedia or blogs. The marketer should collaborate with the influencer in order to develop a better understanding of how to incorporate the product into the influencer’s content. If successfully done, influencer marketing can yield the best results and can be more beneficial than traditional marketing techniques.