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Traditional marketing strategies might involve promoting your products or services through targeted advertising, blog posts, social media, email newsletters, and various other methods. While these strategies have their benefits, using people to connect with potential customers through influencer partnerships can dramatically increase your brand’s visibility.
Maintaining long-term relationships with influencers can turn them into brand ambassadors. This can help you solidify your place in the market and lock down a loyal customer base for a long time to come.
Keep reading to learn about what exactly influencer partnerships are and discover five ways partnerships help promote interest in your brand.
A Brief Overview of Influencer Partnerships
There are many different types of influencers. Anyone who can persuade others due to the authority they hold or the admiration they elicit can be considered an influencer. In modern influencer marketing, many successful influencers make their name on social media platforms including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.
An influencer doesn’t have to have hundreds of millions of followers to make an impact. In fact, influencers that work within a smaller niche (micro-influencers) are often more effective in marketing campaigns due to the balance between number of followers and engagement rate. These micro-influencers have fewer followers than celebrities, but their audiences are interactive and loyal.
Influencer/brand partnerships can exist between any type or ‘level’ of influencer, as the positive exposure of your brand to a receptive audience is all that really matters.
So, once an influencer marketing campaign is underway, what kind of benefits can you expect to see for your brand and your business?
Reach More People in Your Target Audience
Many factors go into connecting with the right influencer, including what kind of content they normally produce, the values and messages they promote, and the size of their audience and level of engagement. An influencer marketing campaign strategist is usually responsible for making the best connection possible between brand and influencer.
Assuming a partnership is made with an influencer that is truly aligned with your brand and your mission, you will have a direct line to your target audience. When an influencer is genuine in their promotion of your brand, their audience will be attracted to it in the same way they are attracted to the other content the influencer produces.
This increases brand awareness within your intended audience: people who will actually use and enjoy your product or service. An influencer’s promotion of your products doesn’t have to be seen as a sneaky “trick” either一it’s all about making authentic partnerships that benefit everyone, including the consumer.
Creating long-term partnerships with influencers (as opposed to one-off promotions) also means that your brand awareness will grow as the influencer’s audience does.
Bypass Uncertainty About Customers’ Common Characteristics
Narrowing down your target audience by identifying common characteristics and similar demographics is part of the traditional marketing strategy. One of the many perks of running influencer marketing campaigns and making partnerships is that most of this work has already been done by the influencer.
Influencers pick up followers from all walks of life that may have only one thing in common一they like the kind of content being produced by that influencer. When you partner up with an influencer that aligns with your brand, you automatically tap into a lasered-in market that you might not have had access to otherwise.
Consider the following example: Joe is a 55-year-old male that works an office job in the finance industry. He follows a wildlife/hiking channel on YouTube because he is an amateur birdwatcher in his free time. Samantha is a 21-year-old female college student studying Architecture. She follows the same wildlife YouTube channel because she occasionally goes hunting with her father.
The channel’s creator promotes a specific brand of binoculars and both Joe and Samantha buy them. Though their only common characteristic is that they both follow the same YouTube channel, they were both marketed to effectively thanks to the influencer/brand partnership.
Make Your Brand More Relatable and Accessible
It’s no surprise that when a human talks about your products or services authentically, it humanizes your business and your brand. With a third party acting as a relatable middleman, people can get a glimpse into who you are as a brand and the value that you offer.
Marketing is all about showing people that might be interested in your products or services exactly how they can benefit from what you offer. After all, your business only exists because you do provide something valuable. Communicating the value you offer in an effective way that gets through to the audience is what drives sales and breeds happy customers. Of course, this is easier said than done.
When someone’s favorite influencer promotes your products in a genuine and straightforward way, it makes you seem much more relatable to them, which increases your offer’s value and accessibility. In other words, you are no longer just another business trying to make a sale. You become a relatable brand that is backed up by a trustworthy figure.
Boost Your Credibility
People are increasingly wary of scams and tricks in this modern digital age. This is especially true for younger generations who have grown up learning to distrust the unknown on the internet.
For small businesses specifically, it can be difficult to get your name out there and grow your visibility enough to become a trusted brand with authority in your industry. A great way to begin building trust among your target audience is by partnering with influencers within your niche. When a credible influencer promotes your brand, it automatically improves your credibility.
Just like products with the most reviews are usually the most trusted by consumers, brands that are supported by influencers with authority in an industry are often the most popular.
Appeal to the Younger Generations
Millennials and Gen Z consumers can be hard to reach if you aren’t using social media and content marketing strategies correctly. Influencers are becoming more popular, and the global market value for influencer marketing has increased double-fold in the past two years. In 2019, the market size was $6.5 billion, compared to $13.8 billion in 2021.
Many young people care more about influencers than they do about mainstream celebrities, and pursuing content creation/becoming an influencer is one of the most sought-after career choices for many members of Gen Z. Social media consumption is also on the rise in the younger generations, and more applications than ever can be used as platforms for influencers.
Closing Remarks
Influencer marketing can benefit a brand in many ways that aren’t possible to the same extent with more traditional marketing strategies.
Partnering with an influencer to promote your brand can increase your credibility and relatability, help you reach people that would never have been exposed to your brand otherwise, and keep you in touch with the younger generations.
The very first step to creating a successful partnership is finding influencers that align with your brand and genuinely try to affect positive change in their communities.
