Influencer marketing is the buzzword that all marketers are talking about. It has helped big brands, as well as small-scale businesses, reach new heights. Wondering why everyone is lining up to work with influencers? That’s because it gives great ROI.
According to a study, influencer marketing could give 11 times more ROI than banner ads. And that is only based on revenue. But there are other factors that can help with your ROI as well. Here is what you need to look at while calculating ROI from influencer marketing:
1. Brand Awareness And Visibility
You can easily increase your brand’s reach and visibility either by collaborating with a few influencers with a large follower base or a large group of micro-influencers. In either case, you will be able to reach a much wider audience than you could have reached on your own.
2. Positive Brand Image
Most influencers have genuine relationships with their followers. So their reviews and suggestions are largely trusted. They don’t come across as promotional. If an influencer backs your brand, you can definitely catch the attention of their audience. If they’re praising your product, your brand gains more credibility.
It can make a huge difference in your approval ratings as well. Frozen food retailer, Iceland Foods, saw a jump of 70% in their approval ratings after collaborating with influencers.
Influencer marketing can also help you build a specific brand image and help you position your brand a certain way.
For example, if you have a cosmetics brand and you want to market it as an organic, all-natural products brand, influencers can help with that. You just need to find niche influencers in this field and ask them to mention your brand and provide product reviews. If multiple influencers do that, it will help establish your brand in that niche.
3. Increased Engagement And Traffic
Influencers often use affiliate links and social media tags along with their posts. These can provide a way to redirect followers to your brand’s website. So you can also expect an increase in website traffic and engagement.
To understand the ROI from website traffic, metrics like page views and referral traffic can help. To see the ROI of engagement on social media, keep a track of comment, likes, and shares.
4. Diversity In Content
Influencers create content for a living. They know what resonates with their audience and what doesn’t. So you can trust them to come with creative content ideas to market your product. From blog posts to tutorials, social media takeovers to reviews, there are a lot of opportunities to experiment.
By collaborating with influencers, you can create a diverse mix of content. You can also use influencer testimonials or repost influencer posts for added mileage.
5. Niche Audience Targeting
Influencer marketing is an effective way, not just to reach more people, but to reach the right people. If you select your influencers carefully, you can target a specific set of a niche target market that is most relevant for your brand.
For selecting the right influencers, make sure that you look at relevance for your brand and industry niche as the key selection criteria. If you have a local business, add location-specific keywords while searching for influencers. The more curated your list of influencers is, the more precise your audience targeting will be.
6. Boost SEO
Influencers, especially those with their own blogs, are a good means of getting backlinks from websites with good domain authority. Getting backlinks from such influencers’ websites can boost your website’s SEO and help it rank higher in search results.
Also, these backlinks also boost the referral traffic to your website and increase the number of referring domains. Both of which are also important factors in search engine rankings.
Another way in which influencer marketing can boost your SEO is by posting influencer content on your website. Good quality and relevant content can enhance your website’s domain authority and help it rank better in search results.
Influencer marketing is an effective marketing strategy for brands and has a myriad of benefits. From increasing your reach, to boosting your SEO, influencer marketing’s ROI is multifaceted.
To find out more about ins and outs of influencer marketing ROI, take a look at the infographic below.
Brian Mechem is COO and Co-Founder of Grin, a software solution for companies who run influencer marketing programs. Grin’s software powers some of the best influencer programs in the world, providing insights on ROI and adding efficiency to the influencer marketing process.