The Power of Social Media Influencers: How they affect your marketing mix

Marketing channels do not behave as if they are in a silo. A good marketing team works together and understands the implications of each other’s responsibilities. The email marketer, PPC specialist, SEO analyst, along with the influencer marketing lead, all need to move as a coherent unit. Here are three ways that the power of social media influencers can dramatically improve other aspects of your digital marketing mix.

The Power of Social Media Influencer Audiences

Influencer marketing is a top of funnel initiative, which means it will typically address a cold audience, rather than a warm middle funnel audience. However, the traffic that influencers drive does not act like cold audiences. They don’t bounce off your website at an alarming rate, they often spend more time on your web pages, and feel more comfortable trusting you than they would from regular paid advertising.

An influencer providing an introduction to your brand is the best form of cold traffic – banner ads, look-a-like audiences, and affinity audiences are forceful and often an interruption to the user’s day. A brand (on their own) can only cultivate trust after multiple touchpoints with a consumer. Influencers, on the other hand, have spent time gaining trust, providing value and building rapport with their audiences. You can build relationships with influencers in your industry so that you may leverage their trusting audiences. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship because if you do your job right, and select the right influencers, your product or service will be seen as valuable to their audience.

Influencer marketing strategy tip

Influencer campaigns impact all the rest of your marketing mix – act accordingly. Strategize with other marketing managers, and find innovative ways to support one another.

The success of your middle funnel digital campaigns is largely dependant on the quality of traffic that you’ve poured in at the top of the funnel. The power social media influencers have is that they can feed your funnel from the beginning with higher qualified traffic, you can expect to see a higher ROI throughout the rest of your retargeting campaigns as you flow lower into your funnel.

Nano Influencers & Content that Converts

Among many digital marketers, it’s widely believed that for every 10 pieces of content a brand implements, roughly one will be a winner. The rest fall to the side in search of something better. A campaign of nano-influencers doesn’t just provide you with overqualified top funnel traffic – it’s an ever-evolving, low cost library of unique content. Traditionally, it requires a lot of time and resources to create the volume of content that a nano-influencer campaign would.

Once you have a collection of content to review, you can evaluate it. Content that received high levels of engagement has already proven itself worthy to one audience, so there’s a good chance it will perform well again in other parts of your marketing mix.

Take the best engaging content from your influencer marketing campaign and repurpose it to your middle and lower funnel PPC campaigns. Many nano-influencers create their sponsored posts in such a fashion that it looks like a regular product review. You can take the exact copy and image from one of your nano-influencer’s posts and replicate it lower in the retargeting funnel where you would typically see testimonials and other reviews.

Help Creating Backlinks

Many influencers choose one platform as their main focus for building an audience. Instagram has quickly become one of the most popular social platforms for influencers over the last year. However, more and more influencers are diversifying themselves with a personal blog. When building relationships with influencers, you’ll want to engage them on more than one channel. Instead of having a transactional relationship where you simply pay for individual posts, establish more of an ambassador relationship where they feel empowered to create content that resonates with their audience.

If you’re in regular contact with your influencers, ask them to write a short 600-word blurb on how they enjoyed your product. Have them tell their audience about how it’s affected, improved, or altered their life, and provide a link in the blog back to your website.

Influencers generally won’t have incredible domain authority, but they will help you on the volume side of things when it comes to backlinks. You can provide your influencers with an affiliate link to encourage regular blog updates or posting across even more of their social channels.

Be a True Team

Explore all kinds of ideas with your marketing team to find new and better ways that each department can help each other out. Acting in silos will make your brand’s overall marketing incoherent and chunky. Meet regularly with other team members to discuss how different aspects of each person’s responsibilities can help other parts of your overall marketing strategy. Make sure that the entire team understands the power of social media influencers and utilise it across the entire marketing mix.

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