5 Reasons Why Influencer Marketing Should Be At the Heart of Your Marketing Strategy

Do you know who your con­sumers look to for guid­ance? Where do they spend their time online? To shop, to research, to relax? Who do they trust?

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Influ­encer mar­ket­ing has always been a top­ic of broad scope. For any giv­en brand, influ­encers – and there are many dif­fer­ent kinds – oper­ate across a range of chan­nels, types of media, and mar­ket­ing dis­ci­plines, engag­ing con­sumers and ful­fill­ing sought-after touch­points all along the user jour­ney. In oth­er words, every­thing a brand should be doing. How­ev­er, as opposed to paid media chan­nels such as PPC or adver­tis­ing, it’s not often that we hear talk of influ­encer mar­ket­ing strate­gies or bud­gets. Per­haps it’s time mar­keters took a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive? Those who do could gain a fresh under­stand­ing of what, and when, con­sumers are look­ing for guid­ance.


A key char­ac­ter­is­tic that defines influ­encer mar­ket­ing in all its forms is that influ­encers oper­ate nat­u­ral­ly with­in earned media.Influencers them­selves must be earned by brands, as by def­i­n­i­tion their advo­ca­cy orig­i­nates from a posi­tion as a third par­ty. The posi­tion influ­encers reside with­in is an impor­tant point; the fact that they pro­mote media that is not owned by a brand, ful­fils a touch­point that con­sumers look for by pro­vid­ing a lev­el of impar­tial­i­ty that gives their opin­ions pow­er, or even bet­ter, influ­ence.

Influencer Marketing In Organic Search, Social Media

Influ­encers have a spe­cial rela­tion­ship with con­sumers. The val­ue of this rela­tion­ship has been quan­ti­fied in var­i­ous stud­ies:

  • Accord­ing to Nielsen, 90 per­cent of con­sumers trust peer rec­om­men­da­tions over just 33 per­cent trust ads.
  • Stud­ies by McK­in­sey have indi­cat­ed that word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tions may be the pri­ma­ry rea­son for pur­chas­es in as many as 50 per­cent of buy­ing deci­sions.
  • Research by For­rester has sug­gest­ed that for 80 per­cent of all pur­chas­es, there is some form of word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tion influ­enc­ing deci­sions dur­ing the pur­chase cycle.

The find­ings tal­ly with more recent data. We know for exam­ple that an incred­i­ble 85 per­cent of British con­sumers aged 25–34 won’t buy some­thing with­out pos­i­tive reviews, and that blogs have a huge impact on con­sumer pur­chase deci­sions.

On oth­er chan­nels, such as social media, the con­ver­sa­tion and diver­si­ty of inter­ac­tions have made it a rich are­na for influ­encer mar­ket­ing. With pow­er­ful influ­encers (e.g., celebri­ties and sports stars) engag­ing fans and con­sumers on a day to day basis, often activ­i­ty makes for high­ly con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­ac­tions, and ones that can influ­ence con­sumers very nat­u­ral­ly.

And there are many dif­fer­ent kinds of influ­encers, each oper­at­ing mak­ing an impact online in their own unique way: Different-types-influencers

Image Cred­it: Traackr

5 Reasons Influencer Marketing Should Be At The Heart Of Your Marketing Strategy

1. Influencer Marketing Is More Powerful Than Paid Media

When you con­sid­er the sum val­ue of a mar­ket­ing chan­nel across the entire pur­chase fun­nel, influ­encer mar­ket­ing stands out as a dis­ci­pline that adds val­ue across whole con­sumer jour­neys. To illus­trate this exam­ple, as an HBR study revealed, few­er than 10 per­cent of shop­pers actu­al­ly vis­it man­u­fac­tur­ers’ sites when research­ing a pur­chase, some­thing that is clear­ly at odds with com­pa­nies who still invest a major­i­ty of their dig­i­tal spend on owned media.

The study fur­ther revealed that dis­play ads, typ­i­cal­ly per­ceived to be valu­able at the con­sid­er­a­tion stage, were only clicked if they dis­played a dis­count offer. Instead, con­sumers nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tate to con­tent and reviews pro­duced by influ­encers when research­ing and eval­u­at­ing their pur­chase deci­sions.

2. Influencer Reviews Are The First Port Of Call In The Evaluation Stage

When eval­u­at­ing pur­chas­es, click-stream analy­sis revealed that of all the online retail­ers, Ama­zon was prob­a­bly the most influ­en­tial touch point for the company’s prod­ucts dur­ing the eval­u­a­tion stage. The HBR study also con­firmed that con­sumers went direct­ly to Amazon.com and oth­er retail sites that offered user-gen­er­at­ed reviews and prod­uct infor­ma­tion, rather than brand or oth­er owned media sites.

When con­sumers are com­ing to con­clu­sions about whether they are look­ing at the right prod­ucts, above all they val­ue the opin­ions of oth­er con­sumers and cat­e­go­ry experts to look for reas­sur­ance in their deci­sions.

3. Influencer Marketing Shouldn’t Just Be A Lead Generation Exercise

There is no doubt that influ­encer mar­ket­ing enables valu­able moments for brands to build rela­tion­ships and lev­els of engage­ment with con­sumers. How­ev­er there is a cer­tain lev­el of mis­un­der­stand­ing among some brands that the val­ue of influ­encer mar­ket­ing lies in its abil­i­ty to change con­sumers minds; to change or move the opin­ion of a con­sumer who is not yet inter­est­ed, into one that is.

While this is true, it does­n’t por­tray how influ­encer mar­ket­ing has become rel­e­vant to the whole con­sumer jour­ney. More specif­i­cal­ly, that influ­encer mar­ket­ing can be used to raise aware­ness, enable con­sumers to con­sid­er, eval­u­ate, and trans­act, and help to build loy­al­ty and rep­u­ta­tion for brands post con­sumer pur­chas­es. Those who lim­it their influ­encer mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties to a mere exer­cise in lead gen­er­a­tion, are miss­ing out on the oppor­tu­ni­ty to used the most trust­ed earned media chan­nel to devel­op nur­ture paths and improve user jour­neys.

4. Influencers Are Already Impacting Your Consumers And Your Brand

Con­sumers are inter­act­ing with hun­dreds, or even thou­sands, of pow­er­ful online influ­encers at all the stages of the pur­chase jour­ney.

The chal­lenge for brands is to work out who to tar­get, and engage amongst those influ­encers. After all, for any giv­en brand, a spe­cif­ic indi­vid­ual or group of influ­encers can oper­ate on very dif­fer­ent chan­nels, and per­form very dif­fer­ent func­tions.

5. Influencer Marketing Helps You Really Understand Your Consumers

It’s a huge chal­lenge for brands to under­stand the diverse, com­plex can­vas in which their con­sumers and those they look to are oper­at­ing. But tack­ling these chal­lenges is the way to real­ly under­stand con­sumers, includ­ing what they are look­ing for from brands, and when.

Who are your con­sumers look­ing to for guid­ance? Where are they spend­ing their time online? To shop, to research, to relax? Who do they trust? Who do they real­ly trust?

And ulti­mate­ly it gives rise to per­haps the biggest ques­tion of all: if you’re a brand, how do you man­age that influ­ence?

Entity Banner Momentology

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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