4 Ways Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your Content Strategy
Content marketing is integral to a successful inbound marketing strategy. Especially with the rising cost of paid acquisition channels like Facebook and the increased in use of ad blockers. At the same time, as a brand marketer the bottom line is almost always commercial. Tactics are judged by the percentage of leads pushed through the funnel. This is especially true when it comes to influencer marketing. Working with influencers can be expensive, so in order to justify our investment, influencers are treated as ‘conversion tools’. However another lucrative way of working with influencers is to enlist their expertise as content creators, giving a little boost to your overall content strategy.
Here are four benefits of working with influencers to underpin a winning content strategy:
1. Cost Savings Of Influencer Generated Content
The amount of thought, work and money that goes into content generated by influencers is phenomenal. Elena Sandor elaborates on this in her recent interview with ZINE. She explains that good quality work takes time and resources. For that perfect shot influencers put in a great deal of work including: contacting venues for filming permissions, booking a photographer, organising the wardrobe, editing the images and so on. Doing the same thing in-house (assuming you have an internal creative director already) taps into a greater deal of money and resources, including hiring the model, photographer, clothes etc. Working with talented influencers cuts out a great deal of the leg work – and often will produce far more authentic, inspiring content at a fraction of the cost.
2. Ensuring Reach To New Audiences
Using influencers as content creators has the obvious benefit of additional reach in comparison to self-generated content. This can be especially beneficial if you are trying to reach a new audience. For this to work well it’s really important to have a good understanding of who follows your influencers across their social media channels. This is where influencer marketing platforms like ZINE really come into their own. With advanced demographics including average age, gender, top cities, top interests and top brand affinities, you can carefully select your influencer based on their talent as a content creator, and the new audience you’d like to reach.
Free Resource: Framework For A Profitable Influencer Marketing Strategy
3. Relevance & Relatability For Your Target Audience
Facebook and Instagram ads are taking customer targeting to a new level in terms of granularity. Having carefully selected your target audience(s) according to your customer profile(s), brands need to come up with the right message to entice those new potential customers. Influencers, who have a following similar to your target audience, will produce content that is relatable. They have amassed a significant following through their content, making it far more powerful than plain vanilla advertising content, or stock photos. Instagram and facebook ads are also most effective if their content is changed frequently. No one wants to see the same ad over and over again, repackaging it and making it relevant to the audience can greatly improve your paid social ad performance.
4. Amplification Effect & SEO
Content and SEO go hand in hand, and also an area influencers who are popular amongst other influencers can really help with. Now, we know Google says that links from social media platforms do not impact their ranking algorithms. However there is no hesitation that they help, as Searchmetrics explains in their white paper on web rankings
“The correlation between social signals and ranking position is extremely high and the number of social signals per landing page has remained constant when compared to with the values from last year’s whitepaper. ”
If you can then further isolate influencers who are well followed by other influencers and get them to share your content, this effect is amplified. This is exactly why ZINE incorporated the ‘Most Influential Followers’ tab into the advanced analytics – to help you get more from your influencer marketing collaborations.
Speak to ZINE to discover how you can give your content strategy a boost with highly targeted influencer marketing campaigns.
Our powerful technology gives you the most audience insights across different social media channels for you to create highly targeted campaigns at scale.
Arrange a demo to see ZINE in action.
Maeve Sugrue
I’m Head of Marketing at ZINE where I am helping peers and customers who want to revolutionise their influencer marketing strategy. I love food, fitness and Min Pins.