What are the Pros and Cons of Using Influencer Marketing For Your Brand?

Brands want to reach out to their customers using the most innovative ways possible. It helps improve brand recall.

Influencer marketing is now a well-known strategy that many brands leverage to reach out to their customers and engage them.

More and more brands are choosing to incorporate influencers into their marketing mixes. In fact, 71% of marketers feel that influencer marketing is more effective at driving quality traffic and leads.

But still, there are experts who feel that influencer marketing is at a downturn. A major setback of influencer marketing is the irrevocable damage that it does to a brand if it is not done right. It becomes difficult to recover from the damage caused by bad influencer marketing.

A survey predicted that the influencer marketing industry will become a $5-$10 billion market by 2020. And there has already been a substantial growth in influencer marketing ad spend from 2018, when it was somewhere between $3.2-$6.3 billion.

Image via Mediakix

The attitude of companies towards using this strategy has changed phenomenally. Big companies with huge budgets are opting to work with celebrity influencers. However, micro-influencers can be equally effective.

Image Via: Whosay

Like every coin, this strategy also has two sides to it, both good and bad.

So before you invest your time and money into influencer marketing, it is important to learn about the pros and cons of influencer marketing.

In this post, I’ll discuss some of the major pros and cons of using influencer marketing for your brand.

Let’s take a look at the pros first.

The Pros of Influencer Marketing

1. It Helps You Reach a Relevant Audience

Collaborating with the right influencers for your brand can help you reach relevant audiences.

You need to carefully choose influencers who are relevant to your niche and industry. You can approach influencers who endorse brands similar to yours. This makes it easier for you to identify influencers who have an audience that you are trying to target.

For example, if you want to promote your hotel or restaurant, then you need to look for a successful travel or food blogger respectively. Popular travel or food bloggers can help you engage their followers using beautiful images backed by genuine recommendations.

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2. It Helps You Build Trust and Credibility

Trust takes time to develop and people trust the influencers they follow. So, if an influencer talks positively about a brand, then their followers are more likely to believe them.

Therefore, one of the biggest pros of influencer marketing is that it helps you build people’s trust in your brand and enhance your brand’s credibility.

The post below is an example of how influencers get their audiences to trust a brand through positive endorsements. Posts like these can help you get their followers to try your product as the influencer vouches for it.

Image via Instagram

3. It Broadens Your Brand’s Reach

You can reach thousands, even millions of the followers of influencers, whom you could not have reached on your own. According to a survey conducted in 2016, which polled 22,000 women, 45% of women will buy a product recommended by an influencer.

Regardless of the social media platform you choose, influencers can help you add new potential customers to your basket. Consumers today consider influencers as people they can trust, and they really value the opinions of the influencers they follow.

Influencers often post questions and engage their followers to forge friend-like relationships. This makes it easier for them to influence the buying decisions of their followers.

The post displayed below shows how a customer asked for an opinion from the influencer.

Image via Instagram

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4. It is Comparatively Less Expensive

If you are targeting micro-influencers, you don’t need a huge budget. Micro-influencer collaborations are economical when compared to collaborations with celebrity influencers.

Sometimes, influencers new to the industry also agree to work for free products or services.

Though the standard cost of a sponsored post on Instagram is $250, you can also find micro-influencers who charge even less.

Working with a number of relevant micro-influencers can be an effective way to promote a recently-launched brand or other niche-specific business.

Continue reading this article on Shane Barker's blog.