The Importance of Building Relationships With Influencers

Have you ever purchased a product after watching a YouTuber review it? If yes, it simply proves how impactful an influencer is.

Influencers are individuals with a massive number of followers on social media. With a significant online presence, they can easily drive people to make purchase decisions.

That’s why more and more brands are investing their money in working with influencers. But the big question is, ‘will the price be worth it?’ 

Let’s discover the importance of building relationships with influencers for businesses of all scales. Keep reading!

A Sneak Peak into Influencer Marketing

Social media marketing, including influencer marketing, has become more popular than ever now. Influencers are excellent marketing agents as they have massive followers on major social platforms.

Typically influencers have a specific niche focus, such as fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle, food, and fitness. They also come from various backgrounds, including celebrities, bloggers, and industry experts. If you just launched a brand, you can consider working with influencers and leveraging AI tools to speed up your business growth. In fact, many businesses have seen positive results thanks to influencers.

You can expect to gain $6.50 in profit for every dollar you invest in influencer marketing. Moreover, you can pull in more Gen Z and Millennials, as 72% of them follow influencers on social media.

The Importance of Building Relationships with Influencers

As influencer marketing is becoming more relevant today, brands must know the significant benefits of it to their businesses.

From expanding audience reach to generating referrals, below we’ve rounded up six benefits of why building relationships with influencers is essential today.

#1. Expand Audience Reach

With many followers, an influencer can leverage their fame to promote your product or service. This way, you can tap into their existing audiences and expose your brand to more people.

Ensure that the influencer you choose has the capability and enough knowledge about your brand niche. Relevant and knowledgeable influencers can bring relevant target audiences and potential customers to your sales funnel.

For example, if you run a clothing store, you can work with fashion influencers. Or, if you want to promote a high-protein and low-calorie bar, you can connect with gym-goers or fitness experts.

#2. Meet the Targeted Audience Effectively

Influencers can also help you to build credibility and trust with the target audience and potential buyers. But to achieve that, you must ensure that the influencers you choose have similar niche expertise as your brand.

Audiences follow specific influencers because of their authentic and relatable content. It means that influencers and their audiences share the same pain points.

At the same time, influencers also provide solutions to their audiences. They can share tips and recommend products or services to help audiences overcome their problems.

Simply put, many value influencers’ content as valuable and informative. So, if you promote your product through them, you can target 

#3. Improve Brand Awareness

Influencers can help you improve brand awareness in several ways. You can try sponsored content, product review, collaborations, and takeovers. Here is a brief discussion of each:

• Sponsored content: You can pay influencers to create a designated post on their social media aiming to promote your product. This type of content can help you improve visibility.
• Product reviews: This post gives a more in-depth elaboration of your product. Good reviews from influencers can make your brand trustable and drive them to make purchasing decisions.
• Collaborations: You can make a collaboration project or event with influencers to pull in potential buyers. This can include co-branded content or product launches.
• Takeovers: If you decide to do takeovers, you allow influencers to control your brand’s social media account for a specific period. For example, you can do live videos with influencers to build stronger connections with the target audience.

#4. Cost-Effective Marketing

Every business needs a robust and effective marketing strategy to succeed in its campaigns. Influencer marketing, with its long list of benefits, is worth trying.

If your business is still paving the way toward the industry, you still have several options to run influencer marketing.

You can choose between four types of influencers, which vary on the number of followers and service rates. Here are the four types of influencers based on their followers.

• Nano-influencers: less than 1,000 followers
• Micro-influencers: 1,000 to 100,000 followers
• Macro-influencers: 100,000 to 1 million followers
• Mega-influencers: over 1 million followers

The more followers they have, the higher their engagement rates will be. Therefore, Macro and Mega-influencers have higher service rates.

#5. Boost Sales and Revenue

Influencers are tailored to your target customers. If your influencer marketing strategy works well, you can quickly boost sales, resulting in higher revenue.

You can create various content according to your needs, budget, and target audiences. However, different content may cost you differently.

For instance,you can create a buzz by creating sponsored content for your upcoming campaign. So you have more people to anticipate the launch date.

However, your product or service has a learning curve, creating a product review is a great option. You can help audiences learn about your product better and drive them to look more into it.

#6. Generate Referrals

Another benefit of building relationships with influencers is that you can generate quality referrals. They have a strong sense of community with their audiences, which can benefit a referral program.

You can create a referral project with influencers. They can spread the news to their followers. As a brand, you can provide referral points, discounts, or other win-win offers if audiences can recruit other people to buy your product.

A referral program can encourage audiences to refer their friends and family to see your brand and purchase the product. Not only can you generate more sales, but you can also boost brand awareness along the way.

Takeaway

As influencers can help significantly escalate your brand performance, there’s no reason not to join the marketing trend. To start off, you can start by working with nano or micro-influencers.

You can see whether the effort is showing results and is worth continuing. Also, you can learn as you go to decide what to fix and adjust while working with influencers.

All in all, building relationships with influencers can help you grow your business effectively. You can get long-term benefits like raising brand awareness and building credibility.