Why you should incorporate influencer marketing into your marketing strategy

A common question we receive when speaking to marketing managers is: “Do you have any advice on how I can present the value of influencer marketing to my higher ups?” We talk through all the benefits, such as building consumer awareness, reaching a new target demographic, amplifying social media engagement and driving website traffic. But we thought it would be beneficial to breakdown these benefits to help you present the opportunity to others. That way, this blog can be a resource to persuade colleagues why investing in this powerful marketing tool can positively affect more than just your Instagram following. Or, perhaps you still need some persuading. Either way, we hope by reading this article you’ll feel more confident about incorporating influencer marketing into your scope.

In many cases, companies in the home industry feel they lack the knowledge on how to effectively run goal-driven influencer campaigns that receive a high return on their investment, however want to reap the same results they see industries like fashion and beauty are receiving.

For home brands in particular, there’s a great deal of potential to be leveraged on social media. Influencers provide an opportunity for real connections and powerful influence over niche markets that otherwise would be harder to engage in an organic way. Home, food, family, wellness, lifestyle, and design influencers provide plenty of niche, pre-existing networks to tap into as a brand through collaborations. To learn more about finding the right influencers for your brand, check out this blog post.

From our experience, founders and senior executives see influencer marketing as a marketing activity they want to explore, but they don’t quite understand the direct relation to their bottom line. And when there are so many different marketing initiatives to consider within one budget, it’s often hard to see how this one tool can support multiple marketing objectives. Plenty of consumer companies are thriving with influencer marketing, and despite the value of influencer marketing being difficult to define, the data says otherwise:

• 63% of millennials trust influencers more than brand advertising. Influencer marketing gets you a 520% return on what you invest in earned media value.
• Eight out of every ten consumers have purchased something after having seen it as a recommendation by an influencer.
• As a result, 67% of marketers increased their influencer marketing budget last year.

So, what kind of results can brands in the home industry expect from influencer marketing?

The direct benefits of influencer marketing:

Effectively reach target audiences through influencer established networks:

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing where instead of you reaching your target customer directly, you collaborate with influencers to drive your brand message to your target audience. Unlike other forms of content marketing, influencer marketing can allow you to reach your target customers “instantly” by tapping into already established and trusted influencer networks. Influencers have already spent the time building up their highly engaged audiences. You can leverage these audiences of potential consumers by working with influencers to create unique, authentic content that showcases your products. Companies on social media in 2020 need to incorporate influencer marketing into their overall marketing initiatives to bring a sense of authenticity and trustworthiness to their brand. Only 15% of consumers trust content created and shared by companies (Forrester), however, 88% say they find online reviews as trustworthy as personal recommendations. Influencer marketing has the power to greatly improve brand recognition and sway consumer purchasing decisions even on high ticket items. Many home brands are already taking advantage of the variety of social media platforms available to them: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest being the most powerful and relevant for home brands.

Grow social following and brand awareness:

When we speak to potential clients about their social media and influencer marketing objectives, growing brand awareness is always a top goal mentioned. Understandably, as there is great value in building brand awareness and a social following of your own. Home brands are particularly conscious about establishing their tone and brand voice. Consumers in 2020 find new products on social media and base their opinions of companies on their social media presence. In fact, 54% of social users utilize social media to research products (GlobalWebIndex). Building brand and consumer awareness takes consistent work and investment but, similar to SEO, has long term ROI for home brands. Building quality content that enhances your brand’s story, builds trust, and engages customers helps you attract the right customers organically. When consumers follow a brand on social media, 77% say they are more likely to buy from that brand over another (Sprout Social). Influencer marketing can help accelerate the result by having influencers introduce and share your profile and brand with their already engaged audiences. When trying to build an audience in the home industry, leveraging key leaders’ pages to grow your number of loyal followers is key.

Backlink building and SEO:

In addition to reaching new customers, influencer marketing can help teams in other parts of the digital marketing equation. Two important strategies to consider are how influencer marketing can improve brand’s SEO and increase website traffic. Social media marketing has become a great source of traffic for company websites as well as converting customers. Influencer posts can generate hundreds of thousands of page views by directing their followings to links across multiple platforms. Pinterest and Facebook are easiest to share links on. Instagram is limited to links in bios but Instagram Story “swipe-up” links are a very quick, relevant opportunity to drive direct traffic to a specific landing page from content. There is also a sense of urgency with stories that boosts engagement because it disappears after 24 hours. Many influencers, particularly in the home and related industries, have blogs and websites of their own. By cross promoting content and your website on their blogs, you can build powerfully strong backlinks to drive long term, targeted traffic that converts to sales, and boost search rank overtime. The more backlinks, the better for search rank. Google also considers a strong social following as an indicator of authority, and will reward you SEO-wise.

Effective, authentic content generation:

In order to continue to build brand awareness, social teams need to consistently be creating content and come up with authentic concepts to present your brand in a way that resonates with your target customers. Here is where influencers can really help. Influencers in the home industry are experts at creating engaging, high-quality content loved by their audiences. Through influencer collaborations, you can build a library of quality content to use on your own social media accounts and digital ads. Additionally, influencers can incorporate your products in ways that are exciting and authentic and create assets that can be used on your website and marketing materials. This saves you considerable time and money rather than creating this content yourself. In terms of content quality, producing, styling, shooting, and editing is a strength home influencers bring to the table. Design-driven influencers know what excites and drives their audiences to engage with their posts. Plus, having influencers add their own style can help make your content more effective. You can collaborate with influencers to create real-life , lifestyle photography that would otherwise require more planning and budget from your team. Think of influencers as your outsourced creative and production team.

To summarize, influencer marketing has the ability to boost your entire digital marketing strategy in a variety of different ways. There is massive potential to revamp your brand strategy and scale your marketing efforts through influencer marketing. By incorporating influencer marketing into your overall marketing strategy, you’ll find there are infinite opportunities to present your brand and products in a way that is authentic and engaging, which results in higher short-term and long-term ROI. Discover more on how to track influencer marketing success on our blog.