When modern brands try to find powerful, cost-effective marketing solutions, they inevitably decide that social media influencers are the key to furthering their message authentically and successfully. Influencer marketing isn’t new – for years, brands have had spokespersons they use to market their products and services, but in today’s world where social media influence on society is stronger than ever, brands can greatly benefit from using the reputation of the top social media influencers in their niche market.

How Does Influencer Marketing Work?

Influencer marketing is when a brand selects an individual to deliver their message to that individual’s followers. For example, an exercise clothing line may hire a fitness guru to post an Instagram photo that includes the influencer wearing their products. Their followers trust the guru’s opinion, so they’re more likely to trust the brand as well, perhaps even making a purchase after seeing the Instagram post.

Why do modern brands (and why should your brand) depend on social media influencer marketing to make their business a success?

Establish Your Credibility When you have influencers to speak for you, you’re verifying your credibility within your target demographic. Word of mouth endorsements are so powerful; it’s estimated that they are the motivation behind 20 to 50 percent of purchasing decisions. If you’re going to procure future customers, you first need someone to vouch for you. With the influence of social media, you can depend on one person to vouch for you to hundreds, thousands or even millions of people at the same time.

You won’t be able to use traditional advertising to achieve credibility, especially with millennials. Only one percent of millennials reported that an ad would increase their trust of a brand. On the other hand, 62 percent of millennials report that when brands engage them on social media, they’re more likely to become a customer.

What better way to establish your brand’s reputation than by partnering with a real person that your target consumer base trusts, then meeting those consumers where they’re at, which is on social media? Social media influence marketing hits both targets.

Increase SEO Rankings Even if you’re an SEO novice, this simple fact should make sense: when links to your site are shared multiple times by other reputable sites, search engines rank you higher. Influencer marketing creates high-quality backlinks, which is exactly what you want when you’re trying to establish your credibility not just with your target consume base, but with search engines also. Increasing your SEO rankings is a great way to position yourself ahead of your competitors and influencer marketing helps you reach this goal as well. The power of social media influences how sites like Google and Bing perceive your brand as well.

‍Create Conversions You want to catch potential customers in the moment where they’re most likely to buy. This means you have to not only implement social media influencer marketing, but create a channel where they can quickly and easily act on their impulse to buy.

Besides effective tactics like creating shoppable Instagram pages, you can also create offers and coupon codes that your social media influencer can share with their followers. This will encourage followers to spend who otherwise may not, and can also help you track the return on investment from each social media influencer. Ultimately, the measure of a marketing tactic’s effectiveness is conversion rate, and you want to make sure you do everything you can to streamline the conversion process and assist in the social media influencer campaign success.

Go Where Traditional Advertising Can’t All advertisers admit that there is a negative influence of social media affecting leads and conversions at times, but overall the influence of social media on society can help advertising, especially influencer marketing, succeed when traditional methods fail.

For example, blogging on your own site about your products is seen as a necessary activity for brands, but it’s only going to reach the readers you’re targeting if someone clicks on the right link or expressly searches for it.

Your digital banner ads may be effective, but again, only if they’re seen. Today, consumers typically block a large percentage of ads that run on web pages, so you have no way of knowing if your target demographic is actually being exposed to the ads you’re running.

On the other hand, influencer marketing is different. A social media influencer’s followers can follow and unfollow them at any time – they’re voluntarily exposing themselves to the influencer’s posts. Your message is definitely going to be seen by these followers: no links must be clicked and no ad-blockers must be turned off.

Recent studies show that influencer marketing delivers 11 times the return on investment of digital marketing campaigns. Better yet, the return continued over time, since influencer posts stay active whereas digital marketing ads cease to run eventually.

‍Who Are Your Influencers? Are you sold on influencer marketing? It’s clearly the only choice for brands who want to make their marketing budgets go farther and deliver a higher ROI without sacrificing core values like authenticity – a trait their loyal customers value highly.

Your next step is to find the influencers your brand needs and begin forming the partnership that will be the cornerstone of your future advertising efforts. Who are these influencers? How can you find them?

Using Pixlee, you can identify the customers who are the most passionate about your brand and who also have a high social media influence score, just what you need to expand your brand’s reach within the right demographic.