Is Influencer Marketing Really Effective?

From Instagram to TikTok, and multiple social platforms in between, users with large followings are being tapped by businesses to help market their products or services. Called “influencer marketing”, this practice has taken off in the last few years, but is it truly effective? Is it worth your time and money? Let’s take a deeper look.

What Is Influencer Marketing All About?

At its deepest level, influencer marketing taps into two well-known human traits – our need for social proof and our unconscious desire to follow the advice of someone we like or admire. The process relies on employing niche content creators to enhance brand awareness, make product recommendations, and increase traffic to your preferred destination. It’s not always about getting people to buy something. You might launch a campaign to drive traffic to your own social accounts, for instance.

Does Influencer Marketing Work?

The short answer is, yes, influencer marketing works. Harvard Business Review conducted a deep dive in 2022 and found that “a 1% increase in influencer marketing spend led to an increase in engagement of 0.46%, suggesting that the strategy can in fact yield positive ROI”.

However, the study also found that many businesses failed to leverage these arrangements to their fullest potential. With better influencer marketing spending allocation, businesses could have achieved an engagement increase of up to 16.6%.

Creating an Influencer Campaign

While influencer marketing is undeniably effective, it’s important to go about it the right way. You must make many decisions here, beginning with the type(s) of influencer you want to partner with. You’ll find micro-influencers, celebrity influencers, blog influencers, social media influencers, and key opinion leaders out there, and they’re not the same.

For instance, micro-influencers are very niche content creators with modest but highly engaged, loyal followings, often centered around a very specific industry or activity. Celebrity influencers, on the other hand, have very broad audiences that ebb and flow. Social media influencers don’t have a specific area of focus but boast large audiences usually centered on a specific social platform.

In addition to learning how to work with these various influencers, you also need to create your campaign, including setting goals, defining your audience, setting a budget, and developing effective messaging that ties in with your chosen influencer’s platform.

In Conclusion

Can influencer marketing be successful? Yes, it can. However, successfully harnessing its capabilities usually requires a significant degree of expertise and knowledge not available to in-house teams, so plan to work with an experienced partner. If you should have any questions, please contact Search SEO Chicago today!