by Jade Chehabeddine, Marketing Manager at eddress
Social media is something we cannot escape, but if you are a B2C organization looking to improve your marketing prowess, are you actually making the most of this tool? Social media provides a number of benefits to businesses but has given rise to other components of marketing on social media platforms, such as influencer marketing. So, how can influencer marketing on social media work together to benefit your business?
What can social media and influencer marketing do for your business?
Social media is an invaluable tool, but it is also home to a number of other resources that can help you, most notably, influencers, who can boost your business in a number of ways. Influencer marketing is a method where brands can promote their products through recommendations or endorsements from online influencers, and is typically part of a brand awareness campaign, which can make a big difference to the quality of your conversions.
In the online retail world, influencers have been used to great effect, for example, the YouTube influencer Devin Graham, who posted a video of him and his friends taking turns on a slip-and-slide as part of Subaru’s #MeetAnOwner campaign. Also, a group of influencers worked with PlayStation VR in Canada, sharing posts of themselves using the Sony PlayStation VR headset to great effect. But why is influencer marketing so compelling?
As influencers have a high number of followers, they have the social media power to increase brand exposure by reaching a huge number of people with one post. It has become a lucrative industry, reaching the princely sum of $16.4 billion in 2022, which is why your B2C company could benefit from a direct line to an influencer.
The topic of trust is critical in a B2C relationship, and as consumers will only tend to purchase from those they trust, influencer marketing can go a long way to cement this bond. Collaborating with influencers who are trustworthy strengthens your reputation.
If an influencer shares a link to your website in their content, this is a very major driver of traffic to your website, which will boost your rankings. How? By sharing a link to your website, influencers are providing backlinks that increase your relevance and authority in the eyes of search engines, hence improving your ranking.
How can businesses use social media more effectively?
In addition to utilizing influencer marketing by partnering with influencers, businesses can also use social media in the following ways:
Businesses can use paid advertising to increase their presence on social media by paying the selected platform and having their content shared with specific target audiences who may be interested. This is a different approach to organic social media and requires a financial investment to increase traffic, which can turn into conversions quickly.
Similar to paid advertising, a sponsored post is when an influencer is paid to post about a service on their page, thereby carrying extra weight due to the influencer part. If you have been on Instagram, you have most certainly seen at some point similar hashtags #sponsored, #sponsoredpost, or #ad. With the #ad hashtag featuring on 3.8 million posts on Instagram worldwide between 2020 and 2021, sponsored posts are a great way to harness influencer marketing.
The task of maintaining a strong presence on social media platforms is even more important in the modern day. With approximately 57% of the population active on social media, being a presence in your audience's lives is essential. As social media is one of the key drivers of engagement, you could benefit from doing some of the following to further improve your presence.
- Use different media, for example, photographs, videos, or even audio.
- Regular posting. It's important to post content regularly so you can keep your audience engaged, but do not post to the point where it becomes spammy.
- Interact with your audience. Social media is there to be social, and networking with people and listening to them is an amazing way for you to create a working relationship. It can even be a fantastic way for you to position yourself in the middle of a developing news story, such as the pizza firm that helped aid the arrest of Andrew Tate recently.
- Track and analyze your results, as this will help you to understand what is going right for your campaign and what needs to be optimized.
Why influencer marketing and social media will continue to grow
We've seen how social media has positioned itself at the forefront of the marketing world, but social media and influencer marketing will continue to grow. Why is this?
Any B2C business looking to market to its customers directly needs to be aware of how omnipresent the digital world is. We are in a new era of media consumption where consumers always have the power of choice. The marketplace is getting increasingly crowded, and influencer marketing is one type of exchange where you can cut through the noise.
There are many levels of influencers, such as nano-influencers, micro-influencer, all the way up to Mega-influencers, who have over 1,000,000 followers. With more than 50 million people around the world now considering themselves to be influencers, especially since the pandemic encouraging people to create online content at home, there are great Investments to be made into the influencer marketing world. The increase in influencers means businesses have a better chance of finding someone to build their bridge with a specific audience.
There is an increase in social media fatigue, with 24% of users using social media less frequently than when they first started, partly exacerbated by the lockdowns, resulting in influencers focusing on more authentic content. This is where a B2C company can work on that fundamental principle of eliciting an emotional response from its audience, by providing more transparent and trusted content to engage. This can definitely help differentiate businesses from their competitors.
Social media: with great influence comes great responsibility
We cannot underestimate the impact that social media and influencer marketing has in the modern world. If you are looking to improve your marketing strategies on social media, working with influencers will help your business build better relationships with your audience. The key to building your business is about repeat customers from dedicated followers, which is why building relationships is the most important thing to help them come back.
Social media is a tool that has been used in so many ways, but it can still be a force for impactful and influential results.
