influencer marketing 101 with kelley of at home south shore
In today’s “digital era”, consumers are spending increasingly more time online. Gone are the days of magazine, radio, or TV advertising being a reliable form of marketing. Instead, it is becoming more mainstream to spend your advertising budget where your potential customers are consuming the most content — on social media. Better yet, why not place an original and custom advertisement on the platform of a relatable source that your target audience already knows and trusts? This is where Influencer Marketing comes in.
Let’s back up a bit - What is an influencer? An influencer (a good one, that is) is someone with a significant social media following who creates quality content, oftentimes within a specific niche, that is educational, inspirational, or entertaining. These influencers can recommend products or services and have the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with their audience.
Similar to the advertisements in a magazine, influencers partner with businesses to host advertisements on their page to fund their content creation. Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses these influencers to endorse a business or product, in exchange for a fee. Because more and more brands are being educated on the value of influencer marketing, or have seen the ROI first hand, the industry has more than doubled since 2019. And it's just getting started.
With all this being said, partnering with influencers who have a follower demographic similar to the target audience of your business is a great strategy to add to your marketing efforts, especially if you are a small business looking to build brand awareness.
THE FOLLOWING ARE FIVE BENEFITS OF INFLUENCER MARKETING FOR SMALL BUSINESSES:
1. It aligns with today’s consumer behavior
In 2021, a person spends an average of 2.5 hours per day on social media. Because of this, businesses have a great opportunity to reach their target audience on these platforms. Today’s consumers are expecting to connect with brands on social media, and if they can’t, they may overlook the brand. When seeing a brand’s sponsored advertisement on an influencer’s page, the first place a follower will look is that brand’s own social media page. If this follower likes what they see, they will either immediately convert to a customer or follow that brand’s page, with the potential of being a future customer. This is why before you entertain influencer marketing as a small business owner, it is important to have your own social media presence that is appealing to your target audience. Remember, followers are potential customers.
2. To effectively reach your target audience
Before agreeing to partner with an influencer as a small business owner, make sure that they provide you with the demographics of their audience. This will always include the gender, age, and location of their followers, and based on their niche, they may be able to infer other things like the marital status, children, pets, or income level. This information is extremely important. For example, if your target audience are mothers of school-aged children located in Massachusetts with disposable income, it won’t help if the influencer has a following of budget-conscious Gen Z-ers located in California. If your demographics line up, you are reaching a curated community of your target audience that may not have otherwise found your business.
3. To Increase brand awareness
This is the overall goal of marketing, isn’t it? Your future best customers may not even know that your brand exists yet. Even with all of the other amazing marketing efforts that I’m sure you've put in place, your own reach may only take you so far. This is why partnering with an influencer who already has trusted followers within your niche & target audience will increase your brand awareness, and to the people that matter most. The larger the influencer’s following, the more impressions you will get, but keep in mind that good micro-influencers often have higher engagement rates, and are more budget-friendly for small businesses.
4. Have your message delivered from a trusted & reliable source
An influencer’s audience follows them for a reason, and at the highest level, that reason is that they like and trust what they post. If the influencer has introduced a follower to a product, service, or experience they have enjoyed in the past, or if the follower simply relates to the inlfuencer’s lifestyle, that follower (or more likely, many followers) will likely trust their future endorsements. If the influencer is a good one, they will only promote a product or service that they use or approve of themselves. (This may require the business to send the influencer free, or #gifted, product to try out and use before their sponsored post is scheduled.) The influencer should then relay your message in an relatable and personal way that endorses the brand based on their personal experience and review, which can seem more authentic and unbiased than a similar message coming directly from the brand itself.
5. To provide affordable & original advertising
If you have created advertisements before, you may know the process of having to hire a combination of the following: a photographer, a creative director, a model, a location, a copywriter, an editor, and/or other vendors, while you watch your budget steadily increase. But guess what? An influencer is all of those things in one! Although you want to make sure that you are paying an influencer for the value that they provide, influencer marketing may seem affordable comparatively. The influencer will also be creating original content in a way that they know will resonate with their audience (that you have already confirmed is your target audience). You can arrange that they then share the content they created with you to use on your own social media or marketing materials.
Bonus: More Sales Leads!
Of course, increased revenue is what it is all about at the end of the day. When followers trust an influencer, and pay attention to their message with any given brand, they are likely to navigate to that brand’s social media page and give them a follow. You can gain up to several hundred (depending on the influencer) new followers immediately following the marketing campaign, and these new followers are immediate or potential customers!
If you are the owner of a small business, I highly suggest looking into influencer marketing opportunities for the reasons listed above.
Kelley is a micro-influencer located on the South Shore of Massachusetts, focused on partnering with local businesses to promote their products or services to the South Shore community.
Connect with her on Instagram @athomesouthshore, and reach out to kelley@athomesouthshore.com with questions or if interested in learning more about her offerings!