According to the statistics of 2019, there are 2.41 billion monthly active users on Facebook, with most of them using Instagram and Twitter. Such popularity of social media platforms encourages marketers to use them for advertising purposes. Thousands of innovations and opportunities step on the stage, including influencer marketing. And no wonder – buyers are more likely to follow the advice of other buyers rather than marketers.
Word-of-mouth generates significant sales because this marketing method evokes more credibility. When potential buyers see that someone they admire uses a particular product, they naturally want it as well. Identification and trust make influencer marketing a powerful tool. Today, we will discuss some key pros and cons of this method.
Pros of influencer marketing
1. Customers’ trust
Building trustful relationships with your buyers is a long and tedious process. However, you can skip it! When influencers say that they like your products, customers believe them.
Direct advertising methods are always a bit suspicious – your customers know that you need to sell the goods. It doesn’t mean that they have no idea that influencers promote your product. What is more, influencers must inform them about this. However, the grade of flogging gets lower.
2. Target audience
When choosing influencers carefully, you have a chance to reach your target audience. It is crucial to pick someone who is relevant to your industry. Find beauty bloggers to promote cosmetics, food bloggers to advertise cafeterias, and travelers to recommend hostels.
3. Less work to do
First, even small influencers in marketing already have their audience. This means that you don’t have to build yours. Second, there is no need to worry about making your content eye-catching. Influencers know the best way to make amazing photos and write engaging texts that work with their followers. Again, this will make your brand look more reliable. As such, you get perfect promotional materials without a necessity to spend your time to create them.
Cons of influencer marketing
1. Mistakes can be fatal
Considering the fact that influencer advertisement is a fresh marketing method, most marketers have to move by touch. The method can be risky because you entrust your brand’s reputation to someone else in some sense. You cannot be sure that an influencer creates unique content and uses a similarity checker before posting it. You cannot be sure that he/she won’t present the information in the wrong light. Sometimes, influencers misunderstand the idea of promotion and promise something you didn’t mean to. All in all, they can simply create a poor promoting post or use bots to get more likes and followers.
2. A wrong person
Another danger for your reputation is the wrong choice of an influencer. Most brands devote time to find a relevant person, which might be a really complicated task. It is hard to identify the right one and ensure that his/her audience might be interested in your offers.
3. Results are hard to evaluate
Any marketer wants to know that his/her strategies bring revenue. You spend your time looking for the right influencer, pay money for promoted posts, and put a lot of effort into the project. The problem is that you won’t have a chance to track and analyze the results. Logically, if your influencer doesn’t meet your expectations, you should stop working with him/her. However, measuring the productivity of your cooperation is nearly impossible.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are pros and cons of marketing campaigns that take advantage of social media influencers. On the one hand, this method can help you reach a broader audience and increase the reliability of your brand. However, this will happen only in case you find the right influencer, which is a pretty uneasy task. On the other hand, entrusting your reputation to someone else can be dangerous. Influencers can make mistakes, and these mistakes can be fatal. Tracking the campaign and analyzing results is complicated when you run an influencer marketing campaign.
Remember that people with a large number of followers and likes are not necessary influencers. Numbers don’t matter if they don’t have any particular authority and cannot shape the audience’s opinion. Implementing new methods in your marketing campaign is a great idea, just make sure that you approach this smartly and choose the right people! Good luck!
