How Does Influencer Marketing Affect the Way Consumers Make Decisions? – All-in-One Guide with FAQs, Tips, & More
Table of Contents
With over 3.6 billion social media users currently out there, influencer marketing is something that has gained a ton of traction over the past few years.
Social media influencers have really changed the landscape of how marketing works across social media platforms.
Quick Summary
In this post, we will discuss how influencer marketing works and whether or not it’s an effective technique to find and retain customers.
We will look at some statistics and also discuss the major platforms that are typically utilized by these influencers.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What is Influencer Marketing?
In its truest form, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing.
It involves individuals that already have a dedicated following on different social media platforms endorsing and/or promoting a product or service.
Quick tip: While it may seem like “influencer marketing” is new since it’s only done through social media these days, the concept itself is old as time.
A person with perceivable “power” and “influence” is hired by a brand to promote their product or service. It would hold more weight coming from an “influencer” since they are perceived to have status, power, and authority.
Essentially, influencer marketing serves some of our core motives, such as “feeling like a part of a tribe” and “attaining power and status”.
If you’ve been following an influencer for a long time and are a fan of them, of course, you will be much more likely to buy a product or service that they endorse.
This helps you build a sense of affiliation, power, and belonging within that influencer’s community.
Remember that consumer buying behavior has not changed. In the past, the “influencers” were only big celebrities and sports stars. Now, it can be anyone that has a large enough social media following.
Now that you have some understanding of what influencer marketing is and how it works let’s look at whether or not it’s actually effective or not…
How Does Influencer Marketing Affect Consumer Buying Behavior?
Many people and even marketing experts are still skeptical about the power of influencer marketing and how much sway it really has over consumers.
In this section, we’ll discuss how influencer marketing has changed the online marketing landscape.
We’ll also discuss how you can tell whether or not influencer marketing could be a good option for you to try for your brand as well.
The different ways that influencer marketing affects consumer buying behavior include:
It Helps to Improve Brand Awareness
The important fact to acknowledge about influencers on specific social media platforms is the fact that they’ve spent years building their audience.
In most cases, an experienced influencer will be aware of the techniques and tactics involved to build an audience on their specific platform. As a result, they will also know what type of content will be most impactful for the audience present on that platform.
As a result of this knowledge, they will have a much better idea of how to market your brand on that specific social media platform than you would.
They will know how to create engaging relationships with their followers. They’ve already proven that with the size of their following. Hence, they will know how to market your brand in a way that seems organic and natural.
Examples of these could be a Youtube video or an Instagram story that goes into more detail about the niche features of your product. This will help your audience understand how one or more of their unmet needs could be met with your brand’s products.
More experienced influencers will also know how to insert your brand’s message into their own content seamlessly. This will increase your chances of converting more people who experience the influencer’s content.
Oftentimes, these influencer campaigns can end up securing as many, if not more, customers than traditional marketing methods.
Quick fact: A study by BigCommerce stated that the Return on Investment (ROI) for influencer marketing is easily comparable to most other marketing techniques. This is according to 89% of marketing experts.
It Improves Customer Relations
The relationship you have with your customers plays a crucial role when it comes to the longevity of your brand.
Will your brand be sustainable with a slowly increasing customer base along with repeating customers? Or will you just sell your product once, and then no one will buy from your brand again?
This is highly dependent on the relationships that you build with your customers.
Quick fact: According to a study, 77% of consumers said that they’ve had strong relationships with certain brands for a decade or more. Along with that, 61% of consumers said that they go out of their way to shop from the brands they’re loyal to.
What these statistics tell us is that in order to have a healthy brand with a strong customer base, you’ll need to build strong relationships. However, in order to build this strong relationship, you first need to introduce your brand to consumers.
The strength of the relationship a consumer has with a brand can be heavily affected by who recommends it to them.
For example, if you get recommended a brand by a friend whose opinion you trust, you’re much more likely to become loyal to that brand. This is specially reinforced if you actually like the product offered by that brand as well.
However, on the other hand, if you get recommended a brand by somebody you don’t like, you may not like the brand they recommend either.
As you can imagine, influencers fulfill the role of trustworthy friend perfectly to their followers. Remember that they have spent years building their following, and they know the type of content to post that is authentic and reliable.
Hence, influencers can be the perfect vessel to deliver your brand’s message to a significant number of people. Additionally, your brand’s message will be delivered by a person that holds a lot more sway than any regular person would.
If a product or service is promoted or complimented within an influencer’s circle, it can immediately become respected within that community. Your brand will achieve that affiliated status which will result in a number of loyal customers.
It Helps Build Trust with Unbiased Opinions
One reason why influencers have such huge influence over their followers is the fact that they’re great at storytelling on their specific social media platforms.
For example, if they’re on TikTok, they know how to deliver their message in a short format with all the important details.
If they’re on Youtube, they know how to create properly segmented, engaging videos that expertly answer questions about your brand’s product.
One great reason why social media influencers have risen so much in popularity is that they can connect to audiences on a personal level. They can market your brand to audiences seamlessly without sounding salesy.
Additionally, consumers trust influencers to not just start brand partnerships with every brand that approaches them.
For example, if an influencer is reputed to only build partnerships with brands that are environmentally friendly, you can use this to your advantage.
Assuming that your brand is environmentally friendly as well, you can approach the influencer for a partnership.
If the influencer endorses your brand, their followers will know that your brand cares about the environment.
This will help build a much stronger connection between you and the influencer’s audience than any traditional marketing method would.
Lastly, influencers don’t perform digital marketing for your product or service just by putting up an ad on their page or something. Instead, they make appropriately-sized content where they answer questions about your brand.
They’ll tell their followers how to use your product, whether it’s worth the money, what they specifically use it for, etc. In short, they will communicate to social media users the most commonly asked questions about your product.
They’ll cover most of the bases for you so that many of the common doubts that consumers have will already be cleared out.
Utilizing the trust and influence of the influencer will help you find loyal customers and increase your brand’s reputation tenfold.
Most Popular Platforms for Social Media Marketing
In this section, we’ll discuss what platforms are utilized by influencers to promote themselves as well as the brands they have partnerships with.
So without further ado, let’s get into it:
Despite its fair share of scandals and controversies over the last few years, Facebook still remains the largest social media platform out there currently.
While Facebook used to be a platform for the youth about a decade ago, it’s now mostly used by individuals in the 35 – 54 and 55+ age groups.
Hence, if you have a product or service that you want to advertise to people within those age groups, then Facebook might be the better social media platform for you.
In this case, you would try to find and contact influencers that are present on Facebook rather than on other platforms.
Twitter is not really a primary platform for influencers. However, most influencers that have primary profiles on other platforms still have Twitter profiles as well.
Hence, if you enter into a brand partnership with a certain influencer, they might advertise your brand on Twitter as well.
Twitter can actually be an unexpectedly great platform to advertise your product or service thanks to its short, quick nature.
According to SproutSocial, 53% of consumers tend to recommend products on Twitter while 43% follow through with purchases of products they got recommended on Twitter.
With Twitter, it can be difficult to link to your landing page or other important pages because it has a character limit.
You can’t write more than 280 characters on Twitter, and this can be extremely limiting for influencers. They want to answer as many questions about your product to influence purchase decisions. At the same time, they also want to share the link to your landing page.
One way to fix this is to use a link shortener to shorten the link to your landing page. This can help the influencer out a lot as they’ll have a lot more room to work with for their message.
To shorten your link through Pixelfy, you must first register yourself and log in.
Step 1: After you log in, you can use the URL shortener as well as look at analytics from the previous links you shortened as well.
Step 2: Copy and paste the URL you want to shorten into the box indicated below and click on the “Shorten” button.
Step 3: On the next page, you will receive the shortened link. You can copy this shortened link and send it to the influencer that you are working with.
They can then include that link within whatever social media posts they want to make.
Instagram is an extremely versatile platform since content can be shared in a number of ways such as through photos, videos, stories, live streams, and galleries.
The influencer you work with can also promote your brand by including a link to your page within their bio.
It’s also a platform that is used by young adults and teenagers.
While influencer marketing is fruitful, many fail at it. We have compiled a list of reasons why marketers fail at influencer marketing. Check out the guide here.
Wrapping Things Up…
As you can see, influencers have really changed the landscape of how products are advertised online.
They can be an extremely powerful source to find and strengthen customer relations. Hence, definitely keep them in mind when you are considering how to market your brand.
If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out to us in the comments section below.
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