How Influencer Marketing Can Make Your Business Profitable

The best form of marketing is word-of-mouth marketing- any seasoned marketer will agree to this. If you need a product or service you know nothing about, you would go to someone who has used it, right? That person or ‘influencer’ would guide you in choosing the right product based on your requirements.

Before the internet age- influencers used to be our elders or contacts who worked in similar professions. These days, an influencer could be anyone- a young college student, a middle-aged housewife, or even a 70-year old retired army man helping his peers exercise. These influencers generally get their clout by organically increasing their followers on social media. As many of these influencers target a particular niche audience, it makes perfect sense for brands to approach them to suggest their products to their followers. For example, a young college student who gives fashion tips to his peers on social media can be a great influencer for a fashion label whose products are targeted towards teenagers and college students.

If you do your homework well, influencer marketing can be all you need to increase sales and book great profits.

In this article, we’ll see how this is possible.

Growing Your Business using Influencer marketing

Advertisements with no means of tracking the increase in sales like TV ads, radio ads, or print media ads do not work anymore. Paid social media ads, PPC ads, and influencer marketing campaigns are what matter these days.

An influencer marketing campaign is now seen as the best advertising medium to generate an increase in sales numbers and capture market share in any market.

When Gerber, a subsidiary of Nestle, wanted to market their newly-launched Lil’ Beanies product for toddlers in the market, they appointed more than 300 influencers across niches that had one aspect in common- they included children below two years of age. They used influencer marketplaces to find genuine influencers that could target their niche- parents of toddlers.

Each of the influencers created a unique and original blog post or social media post that had an engaging story of how toddlers loved the Lil’ Beanies product. These influencers encouraged their followers to visit the Gerber landing page for the product and gave them a discount coupon for this.

The result? 9,400 pieces of unique content that generated 2,60,000 engagements- social shares, clicks, comments, and likes which helped Gerber increase sales of the Lil’ Beanies by almost 5%.

Marketers agree that the most efficient way to increase sales is through influencer marketing. For a consistent increase in sales, marketers collaborate with influencers for the long term which gives them much better results than one-off promotions.

American candy major M&M ran a campaign where they asked for people’s votes to choose which new flavored peanut candy they would like to have- Chilly Nut, Honey Nut, and Coffee Nut.

They hired noted American actor Tony Hale as the ‘campaign manager’ for the vote while also getting nine influencers to support the campaign. An additional 20+ influencers encouraged people to taste the new flavors and vote for the ones they found best. For the whole campaign, M&M developed the #MMSFlavorVote hashtag to give an identity to the campaign.

Eventually, this long-term campaign saw more than 250 million public impressions, 216 influencer partner posts, and 1 million votes. This online campaign helped M&M to increase sales and brand awareness across the United States.

Would all of this be possible if M&M just paid a few influencers to post an image each on their feed? This well-thought-out campaign would not have been possible if they had not hired influencers for the entire campaign.

With the three flavors launched in the market for voting and the subsequent choice of Coffee Nut as the flavor everyone voted for, M&M was able to increase sales and market share for the long run.

Tips to Increase Conversion through Influencer marketing

If you aim to increase conversions through influencer marketing, the following tips can help you achieve your goal in a short time.

This prerequisite is easier said than done. Though the number of followers can be artificially increased, what matters is how the influencer engages with his audience and delivers content that interests them.

Most marketers do not have time to manually vet potential influencers they find online, what they do is use an influencer marketplace like quikplace.io which vets all the influencers and helps you choose the right one. Such websites also guide you throughout the influencer marketing process, if this is the first time you are doing it.

As a marketer, you need to show which pain points your product solves. Though you could create content yourself, it is better to get an influencer to do it as peer-based content is held in higher regard than branded content. For example, if you are a retailer of wallpapers, you could get an influencer to make content for DIY projects like applying wallpaper, choosing the right wallpaper, and other home improvement ideas. The influencer will mention your name as a content sponsor and will add links to the post so that interested people can visit and buy.

Informative content captures attention, but how do you get them to convert? Here is where you sweeten the deal with giveaways and contests. This provides the followers an incentive to buy your stuff. You could get your influencer to give free samples to those who share the post the most. Another option could be running a contest to see who knows the most about the product or how it is used.

What do you do when you want to try a new restaurant? You go through the reviews online, right? The same is true for your stuff too. When you get an influencer to review your product, people will trust them more rather than someone who just talks about the benefits of the product. The influencer will review all aspects of the product, including its limitations. This will make the review genuine and helps people make better decisions.

There is no shame in featuring your influencer’s content on your social media accounts or websites. Along with this, you could also add the influencer’s testimonials to attract attention and gain people’s trust. In fact, you could add these influencer testimonials to your website’s home page and even the promotional emails you send out.

Conclusion

There is no doubt influencer marketing can help you make huge profits. What matters is how you do it. Each influencer marketing campaign needs careful consideration, planning, and management. As we saw with the M&M and Gerber case studies, a well-thought-out strategy can help you get the most conversions.