Influ­encer mar­ket­ing has always been a top­ic of broad scope. For any giv­en brand, influ­encers – and there are many dif­fer­ent kinds – oper­ate across a range of chan­nels, types of media, and mar­ket­ing dis­ci­plines, engag­ing con­sumers and ful­fill­ing sought-after touch­points all along the user jour­ney. In oth­er words, every­thing a brand should be doing. How­ev­er, as opposed to paid media chan­nels such as PPC or adver­tis­ing, it’s not often that we hear talk of influ­encer mar­ket­ing strate­gies or bud­gets. Per­haps it’s time mar­keters took a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive? Those who do could gain a fresh under­stand­ing of what, and when, con­sumers are look­ing for guid­ance.

A key char­ac­ter­is­tic that defines influ­encer mar­ket­ing in all its forms is that influ­encers oper­ate nat­u­ral­ly with­in earned media.Influencers them­selves must be earned by brands, as by def­i­n­i­tion their advo­ca­cy orig­i­nates from a posi­tion as a third par­ty. The posi­tion influ­encers reside with­in is an impor­tant point; the fact that they pro­mote media that is not owned by a brand, ful­fils a touch­point that con­sumers look for by pro­vid­ing a lev­el of impar­tial­i­ty that gives their opin­ions pow­er, or even bet­ter, influ­ence.

Influencer Marketing In Organic Search, Social Media

Influ­encers have a spe­cial rela­tion­ship with con­sumers. The val­ue of this rela­tion­ship has been quan­ti­fied in var­i­ous stud­ies:

• Accord­ing to Nielsen, 90 per­cent of con­sumers trust peer rec­om­men­da­tions over just 33 per­cent trust ads.
• Stud­ies by McK­in­sey have indi­cat­ed that word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tions may be the pri­ma­ry rea­son for pur­chas­es in as many as 50 per­cent of buy­ing deci­sions.
• Research by For­rester has sug­gest­ed that for 80 per­cent of all pur­chas­es, there is some form of word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tion influ­enc­ing deci­sions dur­ing the pur­chase cycle.

The find­ings tal­ly with more recent data. We know for exam­ple that an incred­i­ble 85 per­cent of British con­sumers aged 25–34 won’t buy some­thing with­out pos­i­tive reviews, and that blogs have a huge impact on con­sumer pur­chase deci­sions.

On oth­er chan­nels, such as social media, the con­ver­sa­tion and diver­si­ty of inter­ac­tions have made it a rich are­na for influ­encer mar­ket­ing. With pow­er­ful influ­encers (e.g., celebri­ties and sports stars) engag­ing fans and con­sumers on a day to day basis, often activ­i­ty makes for high­ly con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­ac­tions, and ones that can influ­ence con­sumers very nat­u­ral­ly.

Stopped by the 501 Club at @LevisStadium. I think i could rock the ’47s. Which retro #Levis would you wear? pic.twitter.com/qF7yHz7qin — Ver­non Davis (@VernonDavis85) Decem­ber 2, 2014

And there are many dif­fer­ent kinds of influ­encers, each oper­at­ing mak­ing an impact online in their own unique way:

Image Cred­it: Traackr

5 Reasons Influencer Marketing Should Be At The Heart Of Your Marketing Strategy

1. Influencer Marketing Is More Powerful Than Paid Media

When you con­sid­er the sum val­ue of a mar­ket­ing chan­nel across the entire pur­chase fun­nel, influ­encer mar­ket­ing stands out as a dis­ci­pline that adds val­ue across whole con­sumer jour­neys. To illus­trate this exam­ple, as an HBR study revealed, few­er than 10 per­cent of shop­pers actu­al­ly vis­it man­u­fac­tur­ers’ sites when research­ing a pur­chase, some­thing that is clear­ly at odds with com­pa­nies who still invest a major­i­ty of their dig­i­tal spend on owned media.

The study fur­ther revealed that dis­play ads, typ­i­cal­ly per­ceived to be valu­able at the con­sid­er­a­tion stage, were only clicked if they dis­played a dis­count offer. Instead, con­sumers nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tate to con­tent and reviews pro­duced by influ­encers when research­ing and eval­u­at­ing their pur­chase deci­sions.

2. Influencer Reviews Are The First Port Of Call In The Evaluation Stage

When eval­u­at­ing pur­chas­es, click-stream analy­sis revealed that of all the online retail­ers, Ama­zon was prob­a­bly the most influ­en­tial touch point for the company’s prod­ucts dur­ing the eval­u­a­tion stage. The HBR study also con­firmed that con­sumers went direct­ly to Amazon.com and oth­er retail sites that offered user-gen­er­at­ed reviews and prod­uct infor­ma­tion, rather than brand or oth­er owned media sites.

When con­sumers are com­ing to con­clu­sions about whether they are look­ing at the right prod­ucts, above all they val­ue the opin­ions of oth­er con­sumers and cat­e­go­ry experts to look for reas­sur­ance in their deci­sions.

3. Influencer Marketing Shouldn’t Just Be A Lead Generation Exercise

There is no doubt that influ­encer mar­ket­ing enables valu­able moments for brands to build rela­tion­ships and lev­els of engage­ment with con­sumers. How­ev­er there is a cer­tain lev­el of mis­un­der­stand­ing among some brands that the val­ue of influ­encer mar­ket­ing lies in its abil­i­ty to change con­sumers minds; to change or move the opin­ion of a con­sumer who is not yet inter­est­ed, into one that is.

While this is true, it does­n’t por­tray how influ­encer mar­ket­ing has become rel­e­vant to the whole con­sumer jour­ney. More specif­i­cal­ly, that influ­encer mar­ket­ing can be used to raise aware­ness, enable con­sumers to con­sid­er, eval­u­ate, and trans­act, and help to build loy­al­ty and rep­u­ta­tion for brands post con­sumer pur­chas­es. Those who lim­it their influ­encer mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties to a mere exer­cise in lead gen­er­a­tion, are miss­ing out on the oppor­tu­ni­ty to used the most trust­ed earned media chan­nel to devel­op nur­ture paths and improve user jour­neys.

4. Influencers Are Already Impacting Your Consumers And Your Brand

Con­sumers are inter­act­ing with hun­dreds, or even thou­sands, of pow­er­ful online influ­encers at all the stages of the pur­chase jour­ney.

The chal­lenge for brands is to work out who to tar­get, and engage amongst those influ­encers. After all, for any giv­en brand, a spe­cif­ic indi­vid­ual or group of influ­encers can oper­ate on very dif­fer­ent chan­nels, and per­form very dif­fer­ent func­tions.

5. Influencer Marketing Helps You Really Understand Your Consumers

It’s a huge chal­lenge for brands to under­stand the diverse, com­plex can­vas in which their con­sumers and those they look to are oper­at­ing. But tack­ling these chal­lenges is the way to real­ly under­stand con­sumers, includ­ing what they are look­ing for from brands, and when.

Who are your con­sumers look­ing to for guid­ance? Where are they spend­ing their time online? To shop, to research, to relax? Who do they trust? Who do they real­ly trust?

And ulti­mate­ly it gives rise to per­haps the biggest ques­tion of all: if you’re a brand, how do you man­age that influ­ence?