The Power of Influencer Marketing

The power of influencer marketing has never been more prevalent, with more than 60% of brands in the UK using influencer marketing to create authentic and reliable content to connect with their audience. This popularity is only set to grow with the influencer marketing industry estimated to be worth over 15 billion pounds by 2025.

The rise of influencer marketing

In an ever-increasing digital world, many of us are turning to social media to seek recommendations from individuals that we trust and resonate with. As the online world is creating an overwhelming amount of noise, consumers have become increasingly sceptical about self-promotion from brands and are instead relying on recommendations from real people.

When the pandemic hit, people became increasingly dependent upon social media and the internet for communication and so brands had to ramp up their digital strategies to engage with consumers. This led to a growth of power for influencers, with 31% of social media users discovering new products through influencers, there has been a strong correlation between increasing influencer marketing spending and higher engagement. This is helping brand to specific target audiences and create a genuine and authentic image that increased trust and credibility.

Benefits of influencer marketing

In a time when consumers are increasingly conscious about where they spend their money, achieving credibility and trust is vital. Choosing to work with influencers that share the same values as yours can help enhance this and build confidence in your brand, directly with their followers.

Influencer marketing provides the opportunity to expand your reach to your target consumers in a transparent and relatively low-cost way compared with traditional methods. Nano and micro influencers’ rates are much lower than TV, radio or magazine advertising costs and allow you to tap into new and previously unreached audiences.

When used correctly, brands can leverage the credibility and reach of influencers to amplify their own brand awareness and help with their positioning, with content that showcases the benefits or value of their products and services whilst building relationships and creating lasting connections with customers.

Challenges of influencer marketing

With such a wide range of influencers to choose from, finding the right one to represent your brand can be a challenge! It is important to take time to understand if their followers are a good fit with your target audience, so you can be confident that the content will resonate with the right people.

You should consider what content the influencer has produced previously, ensuring that they are a natural fit for your brand. You want to avoid choosing influencers who work with your competitors, or worse, everyone, so that their content appears disingenuous. It can be a minefield identifying influencers who have a genuine passion for your sector, create ‘brand-safe’ content and won’t have a conflict of interest due to other partnerships.

Influencer content can be difficult to measure if you are unsure what results you are looking for, so it is important to know what goals you are trying to achieve before jumping into influencer marketing. From engagement rates to reach, to clicks, conversions and brand awareness, the diversity of these metrics can make it hard to determine which ones are relevant for your campaign and help with your wider PR & marketing strategy.

Key things to consider when creating an influencer marketing strategy

• Make sure you understand precisely what you want to achieve from a campaign which uses influencers. Start by setting clear goals and outcomes that will help you map out the correct approach for your campaign.
• Always choose influencers who resonate with your brand and want to authentically collaborate. This will help build long term relationships, build trust with your target audience and enhance your credibility.
• To achieve long-term success, have the correct tools in place to measure the performance of influencer marketing. This will allow you to understand how it has impacted your brand and what to focus on in the future.

We have worked with influencers from across the UK to drive great results and help our clients expand their customer base. If you would like to find out more about how an influencer marketing strategy can help your business, please get in touch!