Did you know that Influencer Marketing has drastically increased in popularity recently? According to Google Trends, searches for “influencer marketing” have increased by 400% within the last couple of years. It’s no wonder why it’s coming up. Influencers can efficiently build your brand.

What is influencer marketing?

To put it simply, it’s a marketing strategy that focuses on targeting key leaders (influencers) that match your desired demographic. From there, you can begin to create user-generated content to build your brand while tackling your company’s digital and social media goals. You can:

• Capture your target audience
• Market your business to this audience
• Increase your network to include social influencers’ network
• Create positive brand sentiment

Why does influencer marketing work?

I’m glad you asked. Let’s begin with some statistics.

• 84% of brands expect to resort to influencer engagement
• 63% of marketers increased their budgets for influencer marketing in 2017
• Only 21% plan to reduce spending on social influencers

Here’s basically how influencer marketing works:

1. Boost your brand’s image: Positive recommendations and favorable reviews will instantly promote the brand to customers.
2. Social influencer outreach: Giving the brand immediate access to a huge group of potential customers.
3. Building credibility: Social influencers provide a more authentic story around your brand that customers can relate to.

Businesses are clearly leaning towards this strategy, statistically speaking. Because influencers usually use social media to promote themselves, this can be a way to have content creation for your business. These posts also drive audience engagement within the social media platform. Think about this:

Engagement = posts being pushed to the top of the feed = more brand exposure

What can influencer marketing build for consumers? Trust and brand credibility.

Here are some statistics that make more sense:

• 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals
• 49% of consumers relied on social media influencers when searching for product recommendations

If that didn’t sweeten the pot, this next piece of information will. Social media platforms have been upping the ante with advertising on their sites. Facebook recently changed their newsfeed algorithm to favor:

• Posts from your friends or family
• Posts that have more comment engagement

Businesses now have to PAY to PLAY.

If history is any indication, other social media platforms will follow suit. You see how Google’s PPC ads get expensive really quick. That is why you use influencer marketing as a strategy that goes around this.

Influencer marketing in practice

We decided to use this strategy for one of our recent projects with Shoeland. We chose influencers based on Shoeland’s target audience. The biggest influencer we contacted was Miss Geminii. Miss Geminii was the perfect match for Shoeland; her following matched Shoeland’s target demographic and with 191k followers, her posts were able to reach a large audience.

She went to the Emmy’s and MTV events with Ready Artwork to help promote Shoeland.

Our contact with Miss Geminii extended to weekly posts and stories on Instagram where she would promote Shoeland exclusively on her account. She was also in photoshoots featured in Shoeland’s Instagram account.

We also have other influencers for Shoeland, each having their own coupon codes for tracking purposes. With the addition of Instagram Product Tags, it makes shopping much easier for the consumer.

Influencer Marketing For Your Business:

While influencer marketing is really effective for clothing related brands (people can see how it looks on actual people) it’s also helpful for other industries. The key is to humanize these interactions as much as possible. If you had a nickel for every time “influencer” appeared on this post you’d be rich. So get creative with all the imaginary money you just earned and look to find your company’s biggest influencers!

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