Influencer marketing is a relatively new strategy that businesses are practicing for their marketing. Influencer marketing has gained popularity in the past few years as it is not just cost-effective but has a strong impact as well. Influencer marketing helps brands capture the attention of the real and targeted audience through a trusted and well-known resource.
What is B2B Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing involves hiring and involving market influencers to promote your brand or product. The brands utilize the reach and audience of an existing influencer by making them endorse your product or brand with an aim to increase brand awareness and redirect traffic.
Influencer marketing provides brands to establish a connection with a real audience through influencer involvement. A few reasons why brands are preferring influencer marketing are:
- Reach a bigger audience through the influencer’s following
- Trust building
- Growing social following
- Increase website traffic
- Generating more leads
- Increase sales
10 Ways to Benefit from This Influencer Marketing
Influencers spend time, energy, and create dedicated content to establish a niche audience where people can relate to them and when they see them endorsing the product they are likely to get influenced to try the product for themselves. It also helps in brand credibility when people see them getting endorsed by their favorite Influencer.
Although all social media influencers are popular, Instagram influencers are a class apart. These micro to macro influencers share a unique bond with their followers which results in higher engagement and higher conversion. Let’s see how Instagram influencers can benefit B2B brands:
1. Engagement over Reach
Influencer marketing is a rather unconventional way to get your product marketed and it focuses more on increasing the engagement with your brand while their reach may be limited. For brands, it’s becoming more important that the audience remains engaged with their presence rather than how many people “view” the content, and with the influencer’s involved you can enhance your engagements.
2. Trust
The influencers have an authentic audience who have developed their trust and loyalty with them and that is of benefit for the brands. The brands hire such influencers to gain the trust of a real audience via the influencer’s word. There are people who religiously follow and practice what these influencers promote and when they promote a product or your brands, their audience would be interested in what you are selling.
3. Brand Awareness
If you are a new brand it will take you a lot of time to build brand awareness and for the audience to recognize your brand’s name. However, with influencer marketing, you can get famous in a relatively lesser time.
When an established content creator and influencer endorses your product or brand on the internet and brief the audience about your products, people are most likely to recognize your brand when they see it elsewhere by referring it from the influencer’s endorsements.
4. Content Strategy
It is also of benefit to add content creator and influencer’s content on your social platforms which can help you fill the gaps and can help you relax when it comes to content creation and posting.
You can use and also reuse the content made by these creators and even send that on emails or newsletters to your audience. This way the content strategy is expanded and the burden of content creation is also shared depending on how many influencers are involved.
5. Effectively Reaches Your Target Audience
To reach your specific audience that would be interested in purchasing your products is one of the most challenging goals for businesses. Influencer marketing helps you in reaching the target audience directly and also monitors the results immediately.
For example, if you started a campaign with 5 influencers and got the maximum number of views and sales from only 2 influencers then you know which of the influencers are directly involved with your target audience.
Similarly, if you’re business is about carpet cleaning then you must involve home-based influencers who promote home cleaning and maintenance so you can directly reach your audience who would be interested in getting your services.
6. Value to Your Audience
Providing valuable content to your audience is also important to make it relatable for them and influencers are already doing that. The influencers create relatable content for their audience and incorporating relevant brands can create a good partnership for both the viewers and the brands.
7. Authenticity
The consumer today is much more aware and educated than before so it is important for brands to have a solid reputation in online marketing. If your products/ services are endorsed by well-known influencers you are more likely to be trusted by a new customer.
When consumers search for products online they look for reviews, feedbacks, User-generated content, and influencer endorsement to verify the authenticity. Influencer marketing helps consumers gain reputation and authenticity.
8. Winning Partnerships
Influencer marketing is beneficial for both influencers as well as the brand and creates a win-win deal. These partnerships help in networking and establishing new potential grounds on which both the parties can play and gain benefit from.
The possibilities are endless and brands are now interested in involving these influencers to reach directly towards their target niche. The influencers put the effort into creating their name and credibility online and are then approached by well-known brands to work for them.
9. Community Building through the Influence
Another benefit of influencer marketing is to create communities based on the influence where people can share their experiences and ideas. These communities include industry-specific experts, employees, and brand advocates/customers.
There is an information overload for the audience and they are becoming numb to the content that is shared on an everyday basis which is why influencer-driven content is appreciated as it creates more impact.
10. Video and Audio
Now that the mode of communications and marketing is evolving, through influencer marketing, we are expecting a rise of audio and video content that wasn’t previously widespread. Companies are now using video, podcasts, and long-form content including blogs reach new audiences.
It is important that the influencers you’re getting on-board must align with the brand’s vision and endorse products in the correct way that is beneficial for the brand. However, you cannot tell the content creator what to do and allow them to freely think of how they want to endorse organically.