Influencer marketing is a type of marketing whereby you use key leaders to convey your brand’s message to potential customers. The key leaders are influencers that you hire to market your brand on your behalf. Key leaders are influencers who have gained the trust of your target audience.They are called influencers since they are respected by people. The social media influencers open ways for brands to connect with consumers who have greatly shifted to social media.

Why it is set to dominate in 2017

1. They value quality over quantity

Influencer marketing experts believe that the best influencer should have a range of 10 to 100 thousand followers. This will allow for quality engagement and broad reach with high rates of comments and likes. This is in comparison to those with a higher number of followers. Studies show that the rate of engagement of influencers with followers decreases with the increase in a number of their follower. It is important to ensure that you team up with the right influencer for improved business results.

2. Powerful way of conveying your information

Sales are more driven by a word of mouth recommendation more efficiently than sales of paid advertising. Influencers are in a position of winning more audience to your brand than other marketing strategies. This is because they integrate and create unique stories from your brand’s information without skipping any detail. They treat your every post with care since they are aware that their audiences are fickle and can quickly leave. Customers acquired through word of mouth have a higher retention rate. Influencers offer you an opportunity to leverage word of mouth through personalities who are followed and admired by many.

3. They carry out the targeting work for you

Influencer marketing has the ability to do the targeting work for you. The influencers have the ability for the audience to have been highly targeted self-selected already. You do not have to create audience profiles for campaigns within social media, reach out with traditional media tools, or comb a database for a target group. They establish the outreach channels for you. Thus it is necessary to ensure that the influencer has the desired reach and relevance before hiring them. Ensure that you are aware of how and why they communicate and also their tone of voice and style.

4. Influencer outreach strategy

This is a strategy that is beneficial for link building, content promotion, and relationship development. You can increase your response rate by 80% for your top Influencers outreach campaign. You can achieve this by outreaching your blog or post to several top influencers in marketing. For you to achieve the best, you can engage them by sharing their blogs and commenting on their blogs before outreaching your campaign. You can feature them as experts on your blog and let them know via email or other means.Leave it upon them to share, ignore or link to it. A high chance is that they will not ignore. However, the challenge is that most of the top influencers are flooded with many requests and message which can disadvantage you.

5. It is trackable and targetable

The new strategy allows you to store and analyze every social like, picture posted online, and website visit. This helps to yield data, which turns into valuable insights about your advertising performance and target market.

6. The influencer marketing technique is more social

The social influencers exist in all primary social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. They hold the attention of most of the potential customers. This helps to convey your information about your services and products to a large group of the audience on social media. This also benefits consumers in that they are in a position to share with others via social media. This leads to better purchasing decision as their share their experiences with the service or product.Traditionally, most of the customers made their purchase decisions following the advertisement they heard or saw.

7. Consumers are tired of Paid Ads

Consumers are exposed to too many ads to a point that they are unconsciously tuning them out. Only a few number of customers who are concerned with the ads and what is being promoted.People will tend to opt for influencer marketers such as Netflix, AdBlock, and Spotify Premium, where there are no advertisements to interrupt them.

8. Influencer marketing is native advertising

Native advertising places products and brands within the organic content. This helps to create a more powerful marketing solution for brands. It also creates a pleasurable experience for consumers. Traditional advertising, on the other hand, interrupts the consumer experience. A high percent of internet users prefer to learn about a product through content. This will raise the purchase intent with over 50 percent.

9. Influencer marketing helps you SEO

This technique contributes greatly to your search engine ranking. Thus it does not only improve your sales number and build your brand name. The more people comment about your product or brand on the social media the more relevant and popular you will be on the search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc.

10. Prices are rising faster in influencer marketing

Currently, the strategy is an arbitrage due to high numbers of influencers and few entrepreneurs running the influencer campaigns. This means that the influencer promotion is below its real value. The arbitrages will not last long as many people are learning about them. As a result, people will invest in that good closing the arbitrage and raising the prices thus increasing your profit.

Conclusion

The mentioned information shows why influencer marketing has high chances of dominating in the year 2017. However, it being new, many entrepreneurs are still hesitant of employing the strategy. The marketing strategy has numerous benefits to your business such harnessing online narrative to boost influence, cultivate trust among your target customers, and spread positive words about your brand. It has an impact on the customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue. There is need to embrace the new strategy which has a great impact on your business. It requires investment and time but it is worthy. However, before approaching an influencer, it is important to carry out more research to ensure that they have the desired relevance and reach.
 
Author Bio:

Vivian Michaels is a huge tech enthusiast, who likes to write articles on evolving technology. He is a Computer Science graduate from East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania, and has written for various website like ProvenSEO, VentureBeat, etc.