How Social Media Influencers Can Drive Sales For Your Business
One of the biggest problems with marketing in the early 21st Century is that ads are everywhere we look when scrolling through the internet. So much so that a term known as ‘banner blindness’ has been coined, meaning users subconsciously ignore these ads because their eyes are trained to recognise them before they have been correctly read. This is where social media influencers step in to help drive the sales for your business rather than relying on these banner-style ads. Working with a global influencer marketing agency can help you cut the clutter.
Choosing which influencers to target for your social media marketing campaigns is vital for success. Macro influencers with huge followings tend not to have brilliant engagement rates. This means that while it may seem like a good idea to get somebody like Kim Kardashian to endorse your product, it will most likely not have the reach you are hoping for, decreasing your ROI. Targeting micro-influencers instead has proven to be the key.
Can Influencers be ‘too’ big?
With a modest following of around 10k-100k, micro-influencers are the perfect partner for digital marketers, as they fall more within a certain niche. Furthermore, their highly concentrated audiences mean that the endorsement of your product will reach ears and eyes who are genuinely interested, increasing your ROI. Regarding ROI, influencer marketing is known to have a much higher ROI than traditional forms of marketing, up to 11x higher, to be exact. Naturally, micro-influencers also cost a lot less to work with than macro-influencers, meaning that money is saved in this area and who doesn’t want to save money?
Where it all began
Delving deep into the roots of social media influencers, we find ourselves met with the likes of Zoella and Pewdiepie, who kickstarted the influencing phenomenon on YouTube in 2009. To this day, YouTube remains an incredibly effective platform for keeping influencer marketing authentic and ROIs high. As well as this, video is the future, and many people will continue to head to YouTube for advice on new products. So if your product is already somewhere in the YouTube sphere, you don’t have to worry about getting lost in the void – it will always remain relevant.
With audiences being more willing to buy a product they see their chosen influencers using first, YouTube offers many creative marketing options to adhere to this. For example, beauty influencers tend to make ‘First Impressions’ videos whereby they test products from certain brands for the first time live on camera, giving their honest review. This solidifies trust between the influencer and viewer as they can see first-hand how the product performs, knowing that the influencer is not fabricating the truth to sell something for a brand.
Times are a-changin
Perhaps the scariest statistic from recent social media findings is that teens are 7x more attached to YouTube stars than traditional celebrities. This certainly highlights the world we live in, where young people consume media much differently than we did in the past. These young people represent how the future will operate. The brands who are aware of this will be the ones to go on to sell more products through utilising influencer marketing. Those who do will be unable to operate on traditional marketing methods forever. As a brand, it would be wise to move with the times rather than fight them.
Frank Partnoy is a tech blogger who loves to share his thoughts about the latest gadgets and technology. He loves everything from smartphones, laptops, tablets and more!
