Influencer marketing is a strategy in which brands collaborate with people who have a large audience and significant online influence power. These influencers promote or recommend the brand’s products or services to their audience through different forms of content on social media. Because of the power that these personalities have on social media, companies can leverage influencer marketing to generate leads.
By leveraging the popularity and trust of influencers, brands can reach out to their loyal audience to increase brand awareness and engagement. Ultimately, these leads can become customers.
Let’s see how this works.
How influencer marketing generates leads and increases sales
With social media, anyone can be an influencer, and brands are seeing the benefits of leveraging influencer-driven marketing campaigns.
A whopping 90% of brands surveyed believe that influencer partnerships are an effective form of marketing. This is easy to understand: 82% of consumers have researched, purchased, or considered purchasing a product or service after seeing posts from friends, family, or influencers.
How exactly does this modern marketing strategy influence sales?
- Authenticity: Influencer marketing is successful for the same reason as content marketing. Recommendations are not intrusive ads. Most influencers have built a large audience based on trust and genuine interest, so their followers perceive product recommendations as authentic.
- Virality: Social media has made sharing content easier than ever before. It only takes one click to spread your message, increase brand awareness, and reach a large audience with the potential to go viral.
- ROI: Not only is influencer marketing a cost-effective strategy, but the return on investment (ROI) is easy to measure. Brands can view real-time metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of live campaigns while collecting influencer-created assets to use in other marketing initiatives.
Best practices for generating leads with influencer marketing
Here are 10 best practices for generating leads with influencer marketing:
1. Choose an influencer that aligns with your brand
Alignment between your brand and each influencer you work with ensures that your message reaches the desired audience and maintains the highest level of credibility.
For example, if a brand promotes a healthy lifestyle, it will want to avoid working with influencers who are shown using chemical-laden products, as the association would appear inauthentic.
2. Identify industry experts
If possible, try to find an industry expert to promote your products. Their informed recommendation will have much more credibility than that of a casual user of your brand.
Experts may have fewer followers than other entertainment influencers, but their audience is usually highly engaged and trusts their recommendations. Therefore, you are likely to get higher-quality leads from these influencers.
3. Create an authentic brand with micro-influencers
Micro-influencers are creators with between 10K and 100K followers on social media. They can be an effective source of quality leads if their smaller audience is highly engaged.
Again, micro-influencers tend to have a close-knit audience of potential customers who really trust their recommendations. Tapping into this user base can provide you with a loyal customer base.
4. Identify influencers with legitimate followers
Many people know Jay Alvarrez as one of the most popular stars on Instagram, however, it is believed that 2.5 million of his 6.8 million followers are fake. Sadly, this is not an isolated example. There are many services that sell fake followers to help aspiring celebrities artificially boost their numbers.
You can measure the authenticity of an influencer’s followers with the help of an influencer marketing platform, which will assess several signs of potential fraud. Engagement rate, for example, tends to be a reliable metric for assessing audience quality, as influencers with real followers typically receive a higher percentage of comments, reactions, and shares.
5. Give your influencers creative freedom
If you want your ads to be authentic, you need to trust your chosen influencers to create content that resonates with their followers, not something that feels like a traditional TV commercial. This creative flexibility allows influencers to add their personal touch, so audiences don’t feel like the content is just paid promotion. If the brand message is integrated naturally, consumers are more likely to trust the influencer’s recommendation and consider your product.
6. Foster brand loyalty with influencers
You don’t want your influencers to come across as too “salesy” in their product promotions, as that could be poorly received by their audience. Instead, you should invest in your relationships with influencers and develop long-term partnerships that encourage them to promote your products as something they actually use and believe in.
7. Exchange products for reviews and testimonials
About 36% of brands pay influencers with free products or discounts on more expensive products. For full-time content creators, however, you should expect to compensate them not only with free products, but also by paying for their time.
8. Offer discounts and promotions
Consumers tend to respond more favorably to discounts and special offers. So when you share a discount code with an influencer, you increase the chances of generating more leads to your website or online shopping pages.
9. Use a multi-channel approach
Don’t limit yourself to just one social platform to generate leads. Influencers are present on a variety of platforms, formats, and types of content, so it’s essential to create a comprehensive strategy that leverages multiple online channels to capture new leads.
With the growth of new platforms and the diversification of social media, it is increasingly important to use a multi-channel approach in influencer marketing strategies to achieve a broader and more effective reach.
10. Track performance and optimize for results
Above all, make sure to track the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaigns and continually optimize performance. With the help of influencer marketing software, you can measure which sponsored content drives the most traffic and which leads are most likely to convert into customers. From there, you can remove underperforming influencers and reallocate budget or recruit new influencers who can deliver a higher ROI.
