The idea of being an influencer may seem to be a relatively new concept for a job description, but actually influencers have been around much longer than one would expect. Socialites within communities have always been the individuals to watch and strive to be like. Instagram influencers are the socialites but now have the leverage of reaching an audience far beyond their close community. The major difference between 2019 and 1919 is the technological tools businesses now have to market.
It’s no wonder why influencers are becoming a key asset for increasing brand awareness and sales. With the endless variety of niches that influencers fall under, brands can control their message by being ultra specific with what audience they want to target. The power that these digital identities hold is quite outstanding. So much, in fact, they are turning how we perceive shopping upside down, possibly becoming the new form of retailers.
TRUSTED VOICE
Consumers are more likely to trust the opinion of friends and family far before any business, especially if they are not familiar with it. Influencers share just about every aspect of their lives with their followers, so they are seen as real human beings. Their career is solely based on connecting with individuals and created relationships. A retail company can come across genuine through their marketing efforts but will most likely never be as vulnerable as an influencer.
EXPONENTIAL EXPOSURE
With your product stock sitting in brick and mortar retail locations, you are in some ways at the mercy of that store’s foot traffic. Let alone, hoping they find your product amongst all the others. When working with influencers, investing a small amount of the budget is well worth it as they have the ability to showcase your product in multiple forms. Whether its an image post, video, or Instagram story, all are effective in getting in front of the right potential buyers.
GENERATE SALES
The beginning of the sales funnel begins with a potential customer seeing the product. Influencers convey products in ways that their followers can visualize how it could look in their personal life. The clearer imagery of how a product would be implemented into an everyday lifestyle is far more effective than only seeing it on a shelf in a store. The interest then progresses within the comment section. Many of the influencer’s advocates are likely to comment “I need that” or “I want that”.
CREATIVE AND UNIQUE CONTENT
An influencer’s top priority is to stand out from the crowd, especially with the ever-growing amount of competition on social platforms. Many come from creative and visuals backgrounds already, so they strive to think outside of the box when it comes to creating original content. One way influencers are growing engagement is through interactive content on their blogs.
Jonas De Cooman is Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Spott.ai, a content marketing SaaS platform that allows users to make any content (pictures and videos) interactive, enriched and shoppable. By processing it once, it becomes interactive across all platforms: your own websites, social media channels, third party websites, interactive video player platforms and even physical assets, such as paper magazines and boarding. The Spott.ai dashboard benchmarks performance of every unit of content on all platforms based on views, clicks and baskets. User profiling is available on request.
