Are you considering an influencer marketing strategy for your business? Or maybe you’re already using influencer marketing but aren’t’ getting the return you want.
Either way, this article is exactly what you need. In it, we share influencer marketing benefits for those of you who are on the fence as well as the influencer marketing statistics you need to understand to get the most from your influencer marketing strategy.
The influencer marketing statistics below can guide your influencer strategy and help you understand how your own influencer marketing strategy measures up.
First things first, let’s take a look at what influencer marketing is so we’re all on the same page.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from people who have a dedicated platform and are seen as experts within a certain niche.
Most influencer marketing is done on social media, but it’s not limited to social media. In fact, even television ads featuring celebrities could be considered influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing relies on the trust that influencers have amassed from their followers and is a very powerful form of social proof, along the same lines as reviews and testimonials.
What Are the Benefits of Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a great way to build your brand online and grow a loyal following. According to Forbes, influencer marketing is growing faster even than digital ads!
It’s pretty straightforward to get started with influencer marketing; your audience is already on the platform you’re targeting, so all you need to do is build a relationship with a trusted voice in your niche and you’re off and running.
But, if you’re not super familiar with influencer marketing you may be wondering if it’s worth it. Here are ten benefits to using influencer marketing.
1. Builds Credibility and Trust in Your Brand
Think about the people you follow on social media. Why do you follow them?
Likely, you follow them because they’re industry leaders and experts whose opinions and recommendations you trust. This is exactly why influencer marketing helps you build credibility and trust.
Influencers who have put in the work to cultivate a loyal following are seen as authorities within their niches. When these people then recommend to their followers that your brand is one they themselves trust, that authority becomes shared by your brand.
Studies show that social media posts from influencers, when coupled with social media posts from brands, can increase purchase intent 5.2X. And, a mind-boggling 80% of people say they’ve made a purchase based on posts from influencers.
2. Provides Value to Your Target Audience
Influencer marketing gives you the chance to provide additional value to your target market through influencer reviews.
Many YouTube influencers share product videos and reviews on their channels that offer valuable information about your products and services and how they can benefit your ideal customer.
Remember that reviews and product videos are only beneficial if they’re honest. Don’t ask influencers to lie about your product to make it seem better than it actually is.
Many influencers won’t do this, anyway, since it’s a breach of trust between them and their audience.
3. Boosts Your SEO
Influencer marketing may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you’re talking about SEO, but it actually can give you an SEO boost.
This boost is most often due to backlinks.
If you’re working with an influencer who has a high domain authority and they’re giving you backlinks from their high-authority site, search engines are going to use that information as a signal that your site is to be trusted.
Getting more high-quality backlinks increases the chance that your site will rank higher in search results.
4. Highly Focused and Relevant Targeting
When you partner with the right influencers, you can create highly targeted messaging that reaches just the right audience.
Who are the right influencers?
That depends on your niche. You want to find influencers who share your niche or overlap your niche in some way.
So, if you’re a cosmetics company, you might want to find an influencer who does makeup tutorials and ask if they’d be willing to promote your products to their network. Or, if you sell sports apparel, you’d want to find a fitness influencer to partner with.
This gives you a better chance to get your message and your product in front of people who are very interested in it. Once your message reaches the right audience, it’s much more likely to be reflected in increased conversions.
5. Increases Brand Awareness and Reach
Along with trust and credibility, influencer marketing can help you increase brand awareness and reach. It’s particularly effective for reaching new audiences who you know are already engaged and interested in your product because you partnered with an influencer within your niche.
Influencer marketing acts to amplify your brand, increasing awareness and recall among people already familiar with your brand, as well as introducing your brand to people who aren’t yet familiar with you.
6. It’s a Natural Approach
Influencers have followers who want to know what products, services, and brands they’re using. This provides influencers a natural opening to share their experiences with your brand.
This is different from paid advertising that hits your target audience, potentially out of nowhere.
And, according to an IAB study, influencer marketing is more effective than ads at reaching your target audience than ads.
7. Supports Your Content Strategy
Partnering with an influencer can look like whatever you and the influencer agree to. This might mean that your influencer helps you create high-quality content.
Many of the most popular influencers have a great aesthetic that makes them a great choice for creating eye-catching content.
8. Drives Customer Acquisition
When you partner with an influencer within your niche, their audience and your target audience are likely to overlap quite a bit. This means that the audience you’re reaching is already interested in what you have to offer.
Because of this, you’ll not only get more conversions as we mentioned earlier, but you’ll also get new customers faster.
9. It’s Budget-Friendly
Unless you’re trying to get Kylie Jenner or Sofía Vergara to talk about your makeup line, influencer marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. And, since celebrities have such broad appeal, a celebrity influencer might not even get you the results you want.
We recommend looking at micro-influencers. These are influencers with follower numbers of 1,000–1,000,000. Many micro-influencers charge under $500 for a sponsored post. Some may even work in exchange for free products or on an affiliate marketing basis.
Pro Tip: Before choosing a micro-influencer, check out their audience to see how engaged they are.
10. Works for Businesses of Any Size or Industry
Influencer marketing works for any size business across industries. As long as there’s a person within your niche who has a loyal fanbase, you can approach them for influencer marketing.
5 Influencer Marketing Statistics
Influencer marketing isn’t new. Santa Claus could even be considered an influencer for the character’s work with Coca-Cola.
Granted, Coca-Cola invented that image of Santa Claus, but the point stands: Coca-Cola used the influence of a beloved character, Santa Claus, to make their brand more appealing.
However influencer marketing started, it’s only been growing since.
Searches for terms related to influencer marketing have increased 90X over the past several years and the number of marketers using influencers has risen exponentially.
While influencer marketing can be reduced to a partnership between brands and popular people, it’s important to recognize the importance of influencer marketing. It goes beyond just a popular person hawking your wares on your behalf.
Instead, influencer marketing has become a conversation between influencers and their followers—and your products and services are the topic.
To better understand how you can leverage influencer marketing for your own business, let’s take a look at 5 of the most interesting influencer marketing statistics we’ve found.
1. 93% of Marketers Use Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing isn’t new—Coca-Cola started using Santa Claus in the 1930s.
Over the past several years, though, the number of marketers using influencer marketing has skyrocketed to 93% (SocialPubli, 2019).
And marketers use it regularly. 25% of marketers say they use influencer marketing “frequently” while almost a third of marketers use it as an ongoing digital marketing strategy.
Many marketers are jumping onto the influencer marketing bandwagon. While almost 30% of marketers have been using influencer marketing for more than three years, 21% of marketers just started with influencer marketing in the past year or so.
2. 63% of People Trust Influencer Messages More Than Brand Messages
Influencer marketing is highly effective because it relies on the power of social proof.
People trust people and that plays out in the research. Almost two-thirds of consumers say they trust influencer marketing messages about a brand or product more than they trust the company’s advertising about their own brand.
Influencer marketing can help you leverage that trust people have of people over businesses.
3. Influencer Marketing Has a Return of $5.20 for Every $1 Spent
According to a 2019 survey by The Influencer Marketing Hub (with Viral National and NeoReach), influencer marketing can be incredibly profitable.
The top 13% of businesses earn $20 or more for every dollar they spend on influencer marketing, with the average return at $5.20.
75% of the businesses that use influencer marketing generate revenue from their efforts.
Of course, this means that 25% of businesses don’t generate anything from influencer marketing.
To make sure that you’re one of the 75%, take your time to choose the right influencer for your brand. You’ll want to pick an influencer in your niche who has followers that are similar to your own.
4. 80% of People Have Made a Purchase Because of Influencer Marketing
Many marketers use influencer marketing as a way to boost brand awareness, but generating more sales is definitely a nice side effect.
80% of consumers say they’ve made a purchase after seeing a product recommended by an influencer (Rakuten Marketing, 2019).
And, there’s not a significant distinction in purchasing behavior between those who identify as men (83%) compared to those who identify as women (89%). Interestingly, those who identify as women tend to spend less than their male-identifying counterparts on products recommended by influencers.
5. Micro-Influencers Have 41.7% Higher Engagement Than Larger Influencers
We’ve talked already about micro-influencers, but they deserve a little more attention since they get 41.7% higher engagement rates than macro-influencers.
This applies to micro-influencers averaging 10,000–50,000 followers when compared to macro-influencers with 500,000–1 million followers.
Why do micro-influencers get so much more engagement?
Because the people who follow them are following them because they respect their opinions and recommendations. A macro-influencer, on the other hand, might have enormous reach, but it’s likely a much less targeted audience.
Wrapping Up
Bottom line: influencer marketing is a vital piece of the marketing puzzle for many brands.
Since many influencers have built their following on social media, partnering with an influencer can give your brand another, easy way to reach the younger end of your target audience.
Plus, influencer marketing is a win-win with influencers getting paid and brands showing off their products to an audience they may not have otherwise been able to breach.
There’s money to be made with influencer marketing, both for influencers and the brands that sponsor them. If you want to get the most bang for your influencer marketing buck, find the best influencer marketing company to handle this important marketing tactic for you.
