If your business has a website or you are running a blog that you want to profit from, then you already know just how important online marketing is. Without proper marketing, your website will not be seen by anyone and you will not be profiting at all. It is, after all, traffic that leads to leads, sales, and profit in the end. While SEO is often the preferred method for reaching your targeted online audience, it can take several months for SEO to take effect and deliver profitable results. For those who cannot wait several months for the effects of SEO to start showing, paid advertising used to be the traditional way of receiving short-term results. Paid advertising generally includes paying a website or advertising network to display your ads on their network. When someone clicks on your ad, you pay the website owner or advertising network a fee. In turn, they send a targeted visitor to your online property. Let’s consider the various benefits that influencer marketing has over the traditional paid advertising strategies.
1. Lower Costs Involved
According to Buffer App, Facebook ads can cost as much as $0.80 per click. Likes can cost you $0.58 and even more, depends on the country you are targeting. App Installs can calculate to as much as $2.74 per install. Wordstream reports that, while the average cost per click on Google AdWords ranges from $1 to $2, some keywords can cost over $50 per click. You obviously need thousands of clicks, so do the math and you’ll quickly realize that paid advertising is one of the more expensive marketing strategies that you can use. Curalate reports that most micro-influencers on Twitter charges less than $150 per post and on other platforms, you’re likely to pay less than $250 for a sponsored post as well. One such post could give you thousands of clicks and even a high conversion rate. Thus, influencer marketing can cost a lot less than paid advertising.
2. A Personal Connection
One of the best things that influencer marketing can offer you is something that traditional paid advertising would never be able to give you – that is the personal connection the influencer has with their audience. Influencers spend years building a personal relationship with their followers and the people that follow them on their blogs and social profiles learn to trust what they have to say. This also means that their followers will be more likely to trust a service or product that the specific influencer recommends to them.
3. Builds Brand Authority
Apart from the personal connection that an influencer forms with their followers, they also have a lot of authority in a specific niche. When the influencer recommends a product or service that your brand offers, or simply mentions your brand in general, then it will automatically build up authority for your brand among the individuals who follow the advice of the specific influencer. In other words, their authority helps to build your authority. In turn, this can help boost your social media marketing campaign and even your content marketing efforts.
4. Boosts SEO
With paid advertising, your SEO does not benefit in any way. This means that you are paying a certain fee for a specific function and nothing else. The opposite is true with influencer marketing. Convince & Convert explains that influencer marketing helps you build a strong and diverse set of links to your online properties, and the content that is produced by influencers are usually high-quality and in-depth content. Since the content share by the influencer is also more likely to be shared among other blogs and social profiles, you will start to receive extra backlinks that point to your online properties for free.
5. Tested (And Proven) Target Audience
When an influencer has authority in a specific niche, it means that they have perfected the technique of attracting followers that are perfectly targeted toward the particular niche that they specialize in. This also has numerous benefits for you. By tapping into the audience that the influencer has built, you gain access to a specific audience that is very much interested in what you have to offer them.
6. No Worries About Ad Blockers
Adblock Plus has a download count of 500 million and the count continues to grow daily. More and more people are starting to use ad blockers to block ads from displaying on websites. When you pay thousands of dollars for paid advertising and most people have ad blockers installed, it means your ads are not seen by potential customers. Influencer marketing, on the other hand, is not an advert that is displayed on a website or even a search engine, but rather a post on a social profile or blog. Whether you are utilizing social influencers or individuals with a popular blog, the content they post will not be blocked by an ad blocker.
7. Content Can Be Shared
Since influencer marketing involves a post on an influencer’s blog or social media profiles, it also means that the people who follow their online properties are able to share the post they make about your brand, products, and services. When people start to share these posts, then the exposure you receive through the influencer marketing campaign is also increased considerably. Now, compare this to paid advertising, which does not have any type of sharing mechanisms in place, and you’ll see that influencer marketing is much more powerful for gaining additional exposure for “free”.
8. Target Any Platform At A Reduced Cost
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat, Instagram and most other social networks already have paid advertising solutions available for marketers, brands and even bloggers that would like to expand their reach. Unfortunately, these paid advertising solutions can cost a lot of money and results may not always be what the marketer expect it to be – especially since many of these platforms constantly change how they serve ads. Influencer marketing, on the other hand, can help you gain a lot of exposure on almost any platform without costing as much as paid advertising solutions.
9. It Simply Works
Linqia reports that a recent study found that a mere 15% of Americans with internet access trust recommendations from the official social media accounts of brands. They also report that recent studies have shown that about 92% of online consumers would rather trust a recommendation from a friend or someone with authority in an industry that they personally follow. Thus, by utilizing an influencer instead of only relying on your own branded profiles, you may be able to increase brand exposure and gain a significant increase in the number of customers that trust in your brand.
Final Words
Paid advertising might be the traditional way of attracting visitors and potential customers to your online properties, but more people are starting to utilize influencer marketing as a short term advertising solution instead. This type of marketing strategy has various advantages of traditional advertising, and results are often better when using influencer marketing when compared to advertising on platforms like Google AdWords and privately owned blogs.
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