Team AdfluenceA typical customer sees countless ads every day, across various channels, including social media. Almost every single business imaginable is online, trying to be visible, memorable, and profitable. The chances of a small business cutting through this online noise are quite slim.
Some may argue that digital marketing is not a feasible option for small businesses because it takes time to build an audience online. But the advantage small businesses have is that they can build relationships with their audience by striking a personal, emotional chord right from the very beginning. And influencer marketing campaigns can prove to be very helpful in this regard.
Short of running quick bursts of ads, no marketing strategy can get brands the quick jolt in sales they need. But these ads prove to be quite expensive and don’t make for the best long-term strategy. Influencer marketing can help small businesses establish a strong base of loyal customers. How? Here are some of the more obvious advantages we can think of.
But before we get to that, a quick detour. When we talk about influencers, we’re not referring to celebrities or movie stars. For you, influencers can be anyone who meets two basic criteria: a) They are aligned with your business interests and b) they command the attention of an established base of audience. If an influencer is able to connect you to a qualified audience to boost either visibility or sales, he / she will prove to be more valuable you don’t have to track down A-list influencers for making your campaign fancy, With micro influencers who resonate with your brand’s values you can create your own ripple effect.
Now, let’s move on to the advantages of influencer marketing for a small business such as yours.
1. Flexible and cost effective campaigns
When it comes to influencers, there’s a wide variety that you can choose from. This means, you can customize a campaign to your heart’s content. Whether you’re looking for a simple post just once or a week-long arrangement, they can make it happen. From product reviews to attending events, they can make that happen as well. And if you want an influencer to take over your social media for a while, they can do that too. Like we said, flexible and customizable campaigns.
When it comes to being cost effective, there’s no beating influencer marketing. You can launch a campaign for as less as 5,000-10,000 rupees, for which a micro-influencer can help you reach a genuine base of 10-50k followers. This means that the money constraint most small businesses have during their initial days isn’t a stumbling block. Besides, once the campaigns start performing well and your initial investment pays off, you can always scale up your marketing budget and widen your horizon.
There’s another way in which influencer marketing can save you money. Content creation – an integral part of marketing – takes time, effort, and resources, which a small-business may not have. But influencers are major content creators. By partnering with them, you can have more than one benefit. For example, if you have a fashion brand, pairing up with a fashion influencer will not only bring you visibility but also professionally produced content in the form of photos and videos that you can repurpose. That is a win-win situation, isn’t it?
2. Helps build brand loyalty faster
A startup or a lesser-known brand does not have the benefit of capitalizing on years of brand loyalty and customer relationships. However, by having an influencer create native content promoting your brand’s message, you can build equity with potential customers more quickly. You leverage the long-standing relationship of trust an influencer has with his/her audience.
Furthermore, this gives your brand a major advantage when it comes to social media engagement. Once the audience gets to know about your brand and that you are backed by their favourite influencer, they wouldn’t mind investing their time by visiting your website and social media pages. And if they like what they see, they leave impressions by interacting with you and eventually by making a purchase. So there it is, the foundation to building your own fan base is laid!
3. You can target a specific kind of audience
In an attempt to reach a large, broad audience, the traditional paid advertisement can prove to be costly and inefficient. However, with influencer marketing, you can create a highly targeted campaign by zeroing in on concrete variables. For instance, collaborating with an influencer who has a huge following in a particular city or a high concentration of young followers could make a campaign more focused and budget sensitive.
By carefully selecting key influencers on social media whose followers are most likely to appreciate your products or services, the campaign can result in augmented brand awareness and eventually increased online sales. The smartness is in reaching the right people, which is sometimes far more important than reaching a lot of people.
4. ROI can be easily tracked
With influencer marketing, return on investment is highly quantifiable. In fact, the ROI for influencer marketing is much higher than the ROI for other forms of marketing or advertising. On average, companies earn upto $5.78 per dollar spent on an influencer marketing campaign.
When it comes to calculating ROI, you can draw on a wide array of metrics to track the effectiveness of the campaign. From the responses you get on an individual post to seeing how well followers are reacting to the content and if it translates to sales, you can get numbers on everything. At the same time, using hashtags can make your post discoverable and help you keep a tab on the total impressions and engagement your campaign received. Meanwhile, promo codes can help you monitor sales and usage, making them valuable indicators of ROI.
5. Usage of micro influencer for constant visibility
There’s no denying that influencer marketing is the way to go for high levels of engagement with your audience, but micro-influencers, specifically, take the game to a whole new level. On Instagram, micro-influencers with followers ranging between 10,000-50,000 have the highest rate of engagement (an average of 7%) on their feed posts.
These stats go to prove one thing – that micro-influencers can really work wonders for your brand, that too while fitting comfortably into your marketing budget. They also charge much less as compared to macro-influencers and they are known to forge stronger connections with their audience. This, when coupled with the authenticity of the content they produce, makes them an effective marketing medium for smaller bands.
While bringing micro-influencers onboard may seem small scale, you can actually create your own niche by reaching out and engaging with your target audience. Consider taking on 5-10 micro influencers every month. It is a great way to persuade followers to view, comment, share or click on your landing pages to learn more about your product or service. If somebody they know vouches for you, the audience will be more receptive to your branded content.
In the end, all you want is to appraise the success of an influencer-driven campaign. For your brand, a follower of the influencer is essentially a potential customer who can be targeted at no additional cost. This potential consumer is more likely to become a purchasing customer if he or she shows interest. The job of the influencer, to make his followers hear and respond to your brand. And your job is to find that particular influencer.
As tedious as it may sound, you don’t have to do all of it alone. There are several influencer marketing platforms, softwares and companies like Adfluence who are experts in this domain. All you need to do is connect with them and they will take out much of the hassle and stress of launching a new campaign so that you can focus on what matters most to you — growing your business.
