The Convergence of Influencer and Content Marketing

Social media platforms are top avenues for influencing consumer purchasing decisions. With their ascendance, influencer marketing has also become a vital part of an overall marketing strategy. Teaming up with the right influencers can have a wide range of positive effects on your brand’s business. What – or who – is an influencer? Simply put, an influencer is someone who has an online audience’s attention. They have followers who listen when they blog, tweet, or speak, and they often influence their audience to purchase the products and services they recommend.

Why You Need to Adopt Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is all about targeting someone else’s existing audience to extend your brand’s reach. As influencers already have a huge following, they offer a valuable way for you to potentially leverage their audience and attract new fans. Think of influencers as the celebrity spokespeople of more traditional advertising. A major difference is that real-life influencers are truly passionate about the products and services they recommend, and that translates into high conversions and loyal customers. Research has shown that consumers are more likely to trust and act on an influencer’s recommendations.

Where Influencer and Content Marketing Converge

Most people tend to trust their friends and family for word-of-mouth recommendations on purchases they’re contemplating. Smart brands know it’s important to tap into this influence. In years past, companies have paid celebrities big money for their product endorsements. Today, that money is spread over more outlets, and the celebrities are more likely to be online influencers who bring with them their dedicated fan bases.

Not every influencer relationship is paid for, but brands have slowly shifted their marketing spends toward tapping into those people who influence their target audience the most. Where does content fit into all this? Not only do most people trust their friends and family for buying advice, over half of consumers trust authoritative content.

Content is King, Influence is Queen

Influencer marketing is extremely flexible. While sponsored content is still at the heart of many influencer marketing strategies, the many shapes and forms of content in general give you a multitude of ways to incorporate influencers into your own content marketing plan. Partnering with influencers will boost your content creating power and amplify your message to the right audience. Influencers bring two main benefits to your overall marketing strategy:

  • They excel at creating great content around their niche.
  • They know how to manage their online communities.

Influencers – also known as content creators – use a variety of digital marketing techniques available to consistently share and talk about interesting topics that their readers want and need. They are the bloggers, YouTubers, Viners, Instagrammers, and publishers that people love to follow. Their fans love them because they entertain and teach at the same time. Marketers have everything to gain by tapping into this ready-made audience, as great content that generates high engagement is where the best ROI stems from.

How Influencer Marketing Aids SEO Content Marketing

Influence marketing allows your brand to leverage a pre-existing targeted audience for your own benefit:

  • You can increase content reach by becoming more visible to potentially thousands of new followers.
  • You’ll gain a wider audience growth, which translates into more links, shares, and traffic.
  • You will attract more authoritative inbound links, a nice shortcut to earning links from high-profile publishers.
  • Additional content opportunities appear when influencers offer to share their content on your brand’s blog.

If your brand engages in content marketing, influencer marketing is a must. Find the right influencers to partner with and you’ll soon find that it’s time well spent in extending your content strategy for greater impact and increased brand awareness.

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