Jason Falls
Based on headlines from mainstream media outlets, you can’t blame business owners for being skeptical about the effectiveness of influencer marketing. It seems like the only time we hear about influencers is when one gets busted for staging fake pictures or fraudulently buying followers.
But the worst actors are a small portion of the whole. The truth is there are hundreds of thousands, even millions of high-quality content creators on social media channels who attract engaged, genuine audiences. If those audiences align with your prospective customers, partnering with those content creators is smart marketing.
Investing in influencer marketing needs to make business sense, of course. Our default thinking says if we pay an influencer to post about our brand, we should see direct sales in return. But think about that for a second: How easy is it for someone who creates content on a social media platform to drive people to convert on a third-party website, when the audience they have is engaged with their content and not there to shop?
That’s not to say influencers can’t drive revenue, only that we have to think more broadly about what influencers can do for your business. There are five core business drivers online influencers can affect. Choosing the driver helps define your goal and how you quantify success.
To increase brand awareness. People with big audiences can put your product, service or message in front of a lot of people. Naturally then, influencers can drive reach and impressions for your brand, sometimes more effectively and efficiently than other channels. But be careful. Someone with 100,000 followers won’t put your product in front of all 100,000 of them. Use influencer software or ask the influencer to share their post impressions, video views or actual reach numbers to work with a realistic outcome.
To help protect your reputation. Good products have good reputations and can weather the storms of negative press because they have advocates willing to stand up for them. The more influential and impactful those advocates are, the more protection they can provide. Influencers posting about and linking to your website also helps support good search engine optimization, as inbound links and traffic are fundamental ranking factors.
To build community. The best influencer programs use a small number of impactful influencers consistently over time, which checks the dual boxes of reach and frequency. That frequency incorporates your brand into the influencer’s content and worldview. That’s what attracts the community around them, which then becomes an extension of your own community. Some brands, like online retailer AdoreMe.com, use their own customers as influencers, leveraging the community they have to validate their product and attract more customers in a beautiful influence cycle.
To further research and development. Guess what happens when you invite influential people to participate in R&D around your brand? They turn and tell the people they influence about it. Find the right influencers to give you product feedback, tour your facilities and advise your marketing campaigns. Then empower them to tell their audience about how important they are to your efforts. They will. They can’t help themselves.
To drive sales and leads. Yes, influencers can drive sales and leads. In fact, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok have features like shoppable images and direct call-to-action buttons for brand partnership posts that are powerful for retailers. Third party applications like Bazaarvoice take that feature set to different levels and applications for your website (or the influencer’s) and beyond. In the B2B space, partnering with an influencer for a webinar or white paper is a tailor-made lead-gen bonanza, as their audience is far more apt to sign up for their insights than a brand’s. Now that you know what influencers can do for your business, you have to decide which you’ll leverage. You can choose one, two, or all five. Build your strategies and plan to measure from the onset so you don’t get to the end and wonder if it worked.
Jason Falls is the senior influence strategist at Cornett. He is the author of the new book “Winfluence – Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand,” available on Amazon or wherever you buy books. He also hosts “Winfluence – The Influence Marketing Podcast” and “Digging Deeper,” Cornett’s weekly marketing and creative interview show.