Within the years, the rise in popularity of social media like Instagram or TikTok has significantly increased. By passing more time on their screen, consumers are now more prone to be targeted directly on digital media. Thus, company had to change their marketing techniques and look at ways to influence the consumer in a more efficient way.
What is Influencer Marketing?
This phenomenon has led to the apparition of social media influencers or more often called influencer marketing. Influencer marketing happens when there is a collaboration between brands and popular social-media users, also called influencers, to promote these brands’ products or services. (McKinsey & Company, 2023)In definition, an influencer is a person who as a decent amount of followers on a given social media platform and who can influence their followers’ behavior as customers through their own consuming habits, lifestyle and more. (McKinsey & Company, 2023)There are many kinds of influencers depending on the number of followers they have. It goes from nano (around 10 000 followers) to mega influencers (more than 1M followers).
How can Influencers Work With Brands ?
These influencers make deals with company to promote a certain product or service. There are two main deal models that could happen between a brand and an influencer. First, there is the brand deal where the influencer is paid a fixed amount per post to feature the product or the service. Second, the influencer can earn a commission if the deal consists of a link shared on their account. By doing so, every time a consumer clicks on the link and buy the product or use a certain promo code, the influencer will receive this commission. Apart from those deals, brands could also send public relations (PR) package, which“(…)is a curated and personalized collection of your brand’s products that you send to social media influencers” (PackM, 2022), to encourage influencers to post about your brand and eventually reach a bigger audience.
These deals made with influencers all have the goal to reach more customers. The consumers who follow the influencers chosen by the brands will be more likely to buy a product that is recommended by someone they look up to and that they trust.
‘’Followers relate to the creators they subscribe to and, most importantly, they listen to them.’’ (Kastenholz, 2021)
Pros of Influencer Marketing
Advertising through influent and engaging people bring an advantage to the companies since they are directly involved with their potential customers. Moreover, influencer marketing brings a lot of benefits to the brands that use it correctly. For example, it can bring instant trust and credibility. These attributes are really hard to get in today’s market, but with influencers, consumers can see the product being used in real life added to the fact that it’s used by someone that they trust and admire. Influencer marketing also broaden the brand’s reach. With the tactics used in the social media marketing campaign, it is easy to reach a bigger number of potential customers.
This kind of digital marketing also allows brands to increase their sales. Indeed, “ (…)in 2019, influencer marketing benchmark report showed an average value of $5.20 for each $1 spent on influencer marketing.” (Dod, 2023) These datas show that influencer marketing can be beneficial to brands. There is also an effect of reduced sales cycles. Because customers have more trust towards the brands, they are less likely to do more research about the product and will make the purchase faster than they would have without being influenced by influencer marketing.
Cons of Influencer Marketing
However, this type of marketing also has its drawbacks. Indeed, sending a product that doesn’t necessarily had the best quality to an influencer could lead to damaging the brand’s reputation if the review of the product is negative. There could also be influencers who doesn’t respect the terms of the deal, and this could lead to incomplete posts. Finally, working with influencers can cost a lot of money. When working with mega influencers, the price of one post could go up to $6,000. Smaller brands don’t always have the budget, so they prefer to work with micro influencers where the price per post is much more interesting.
It is not always a less valuable thing to work with micro influencers since they often have a more attainable lifestyle to customer compared to mega influencers, who often promote an unattainable lifestyle to most of their followers. Depending on the product to promote, brands would choose an influencer that will fit most their customer target.
But how is influencer marketing related to SEO?
It is simple, influencer marketing allows a brand to build brand awareness, generate links and add high-quality content to their website. Thus, this kind of marketing is perfect to improve a brand SEO.
Indeed, by enhancing trust with their followers, working with influencers can be a great way to improve companies’ SEO. These influencers can help a company boost their search engine ranking by increasing their social popularity. By choosing the right influencers that is aligned with the business’s vision, the results will be higher. Also, by generating backlinks with the help of influencers, brands could make deals with influencers and make them post URL in some of their post which would directly attract the customer targeted to your website. A brand can also increase their SEO by reposting videos made by influencers on their own website which would entertain the customer and make them stay longer. Influencer marketing could also help bring traffic if the content posted becomes viral and a new customer segment is attracted to the brand’s product. In addition, there will be keywords research opportunities where influencers will be using keywords related to the brand and it will allow customer to easily find the brand on search engines. Most importantly, there will be an increase in brand awareness since advertising online will be accessible to a bigger audience. Each influencers have a different following base, and it allows brands to reach more customer segments without making a lot of effort.
Thus, if a brand wants to improve their SEO, making deals with influencers is a great way to do so. Instead of searching for brands, customers will make their purchasing decision based on what they saw online.
In conclusion, even though there are some drawbacks brought by influencer marketing, it is in the best interest that a company who seeks to increase their SEO uses influencers. Influencers are directly in touch with customers and can bring direct traffic source if they have a high level of trust with their audience. However, to get the best out of social media marketing, brands need to pay attention and chose the influencers that will best represents their product if they don’t want to deal with the drawbacks of bad advertising.
References
Conrad, S. (s.d.). Influencer Marketing SEO Best Practices to Send Your Web Traffic Through the Roof. Récupéré sur Grin: https://grin.co/blog/influencer-marketing-seo-best-practices/
Dod, R. (2023, January 5). The pros and cons of social media and influencer marketing campaigns. Récupéré sur Recharge: https://getrecharge.com/blog/the-pros-and-cons-of-social-media-and-influencer-marketing-campaigns/
Kastenholz, C. (2021, March 2). The Importance Of Influencer Marketing In The ‘New Normal’ Digital Sphere. Récupéré sur Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2021/03/02/the-importance-of-influencer-marketing-in-the-new-normal-digital-sphere/
McKinsey & Company. (2023, April 10). What is influencer marketing? Récupéré sur McKinsey & Company: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-influencer-marketing
PackM. (2022, October 31). How to Create PR Packages. Récupéré sur PackM: https://www.packm.com/blog/how-to-create-pr-packages#:~:text=The%20“PR”%20in%20a%20PR,products%20to%20a%20wider%20audience.