How Social Media Influencers Can Help You to Grow Your Business

Have you ever wondered how social media influencers can help you to grow your business?

In this information age, everybody is a businessperson. We don’t need to own a product or a service to start our own business.

The savviest business owners understand that people don’t buy products/services. Instead, they buy a brand name, convenience, solution or feel-good stuff.

Everyone on the internet wants to feel truly valued and special. If you can make them feel special with your offering, you’ve won the battle already. You don’t need to put any extra effort into marketing or selling the offers.

This is what the social media influencers do.

They can easily put your offer in that feel-good zone for readers. Today, more than 57% of the beauty and fashion companies hire influencers for their marketing strategies!

So if you’re still skeptical about how social media influencers can boost your business, here are 9 reasons why you should use their skills to target your customer’s psyche.

1. Target Fine-Tuned Demographics

The biggest problem with marketing strategies is effective targeting. Even professional digital marketers face difficulties in tuning their campaigns for an effective reach on the multiple social media platforms.

Creating filters on the platforms to reach the target demographic is tricky, since you can’t always rely on the data presented by the platform.

With social media influencers, you can completely avoid this problem. You can easily target the right audience with a simple short video and the relevant hashtags.

The social media share and search algorithms will automatically suggest your content to the followers of the influencer.

In case the post receives a decent amount of likes, it will automatically pop up on the search results of people who are not the direct followers of the influencer. The algorithms work flawlessly by taking the end customer’s like/dislike patterns into account.

So, if you keep liking posts on F1 and sports cars, you will most likely see similar posts instead of posts on lipsticks, vacations and makeup tutorials.

2. Subtle Ways for Promotional Marketing

Heavy promotional marketing often ruins your chances of growth on the internet. While you may see an initial surge of increased clicks and conversions, the effect will fade away very soon.

This is why most bloggers and digital marketing specialists focus on providing true value to the customers. They know how to balance the informational and promotional aspects of the content effectively.

The social media influencers have devised a way to create a perfect mix of this balance. Instead of asking their followers to go out and purchase a particular service/product, they showcase small video-clips or pictures which shows them actively using the service/product.

This triggers an emotional response in the minds of the followers of the social media influencer.

These followers aspire to be close to these influencers and often end up following their activities. They will eventually buy the product involuntarily.

“Perhaps the biggest benefit of social influencer marketing is its inherent property of not being pushy. Social influencer marketing is radically different from traditional marketing strategies. There’s no denying that advertisements are the most popular weapon for marketers using traditional strategies. However, consumers are tired and frustrated with these advertisements being displayed to them time and again.” — Shane Barker

3. Use Video/Graphical Posts to Capture Attention

The influencers have the best means of marketing available to them. They use the power of media-based content to showcase your product/service in the limelight.

Instead of using words, they show the world how your product benefits them in their day to day lives.

This kind of depiction is extremely powerful for companies that want to target the active users of social media platforms. The marketing strategy is ideal for anyone who is constantly using their smartphones to regularly check social media feeds.

You can leverage this attention of the target audience with the influencer.

4. Extremely Affordable Means of Marketing

Today, you can hire a social media influencer for very affordable prices. You don’t need to spend a large amount of money creating an ad for your product anymore. Instead of spending money on TV ads and billboards, you can spend a fraction of the money on hiring these influencers.

With TV ads and billboards, you have a hit or miss chance of appealing to the right audience. On the other hand, the social media influencer will help you reach the target audience in a more effective manner.

5. Target Multiple Social Media Platforms

Most influencers have active accounts on multiple social media platforms. The influencer with several million followers on Instagram will most likely have a dedicated YouTube channel or Facebook page as well.

Moreover, this influencer’s followers will also have fan pages for the influencer on those other platforms.

The post that the social media influencer shares can spread like wildfire. It can be adopted by the fan pages to increase your online reach even further.

Some of these fans are also active bloggers and influencers themselves. So the ripple effect that you get by hiring one influencer can last for several weeks throughout the entire social media network.

6. High ROI

The low capital investment is the main reason why you get an excellent ROI with all your marketing ventures involving social media influencers.

Other factors that boost the ROI include a targeted approach, high click to conversion ratio and the ripple effect. You can safely assume that an influencer with several thousand followers will directly influence other smaller influencers as well.

This way, you can target the psyche of a larger customer base.

7. Create an Online Brand Identity

You can choose one of three ways to establish a partnership with a prominent social media influencer. 

A. Run a Campaign

You can hire the influencer to run a long chain of posts correlated to each other. This type of partnership is ideal for businesses that have a huge line-up of linked products.

For example, if you’re selling a complete array of makeup products, the influencer can post separate images/video-clips for different items on the list.

B. Hire for a Post

You can also hire the influencer for a single post. This kind of partnership is ideal for businesses just getting started with a social media identity, and one that now wants to gauge the response of the market first.

C. Hire a Niche of Influencers

Larger companies often bring several social media influencers together for a single campaign. These companies ask several top influencers from a particular niche to sell their products.

This creates a hammer-down effect on the minds of the people who are following two or more of these influencers simultaneously.

8. Working from Remote Locations

The best part about working with social media influencers is that you don’t need to waste your time meeting them in the first place. You can establish the entire business deal over emails and phone calls.

This helps you save a ton of money that you can invest in other marketing campaigns.

Some influencers create their own content and posts without any kind of assistance. These practices can help you save a considerable amount of time as well as money.

You don’t need to cover their travel expenses or invest funds to help them get a post ready. The professional influencers have their own contacts in the industry to help them shoot a video-clip or click a picture to promote your product.

9. Create Meaningful Content for a Target Audience

It’s often said that the best marketers know the product through and through. On the other hand, the best salespeople know the audience in the same manner.

They also say the top salesperson can sell a comb to a bald man.

Just as you understand the benefits of your product/service, the social media influencer knows their target audience extremely well.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re trying to sell a new type of edible lipstick.

You know the lipstick is harmless, colorful, and stays intact for a long period. You can list the product’s features in the blink of an eye.

Now you need to know if prospective customers care about those features.

They do care about having a solution. So the social media influencer can create three short video clips to get the attention of the user.

In the first clip, the influencer may bite on the lipstick by mistake and show that it’s edible and harmless.

In the second clip, the influencer can showcase the various shades of lipstick by trying them on one by one.

In the final clip, the influencer can create a time-lapse video of a full day of activity to show the retention power of the lipstick.
See how that’s more effective than just listing what features the product has?

“The term ‘influencer marketing’ increased by 325% in Google searches over 2017. Making this the fastest-growing online acquisition method of the year. This trend is likely to continue in the future, as roughly two-thirds of marketing departments are looking to increase their budget for influencer marketing over the next year … Generally, their money is well spent. For each dollar spent on influencer marketing, marketers see an average of $7.65 in earned media value returned.” — Jelle Fastenau

Conclusion

The best time to hire a social media influencer is when the individual is still in a growing phase.

By extrapolating their growth prospects, you can easily calculate the amount of reach that they will have, including from 3 to 6 months down the road.