Influencer Marketing Trends: a complete 2022 guide

Influencer marketing has become one of the top digital marketing strategies to achieve a solid leadership for your brand, engage with a broad audience and reach new customers. There’s no doubt that Influencers know how to play their cards to become a reference that consumers trust and follow at every step of their way.

Studies reveal that up to 92% of consumers find influencers more trustworthy than celebrities, and 33% of them make purchasing decisions based on influencer recommendations. By contrast, a mere 17% of consumers considered friends and family the most trustworthy when making a purchase.

These figures turn influencers into your best ally to boost your brand awareness and sales.

However, some people still mistake it for just asking a bunch of cool people to give you a shoutout. But, here is what you need to know to be successful. ‍

What Influencer Marketing is in Digital Marketing‍

Influencer marketing is collaborating with content creators to achieve and build relationships of mutual benefit.

While brands find in Influencers their allies to boost their brand awareness, become leader brands or empower their sales; Influencers are usually compensated with free products, cash or both.

Such compensation is arranged between both parties considering the brand's goals, the amount of work involved, the influencer’s number of followers and their social network.‍

What an Influencer marketing strategy should include

• Brand awareness: By adding a pinch of their personality, Influencers can help you boost your brand awareness by creating a very personal promotion of your product that will connect to consumers in a way that no other generic approach can match it.
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• Build a following: Influencers are a safe bet to increase the number of consumers that keep track of your brand. The most common following types are social media followers and email subscribers. 

A very common way to drive followers from the influencer’s followers to your own brand is by triggering some contest where your brand must be followed to participate.

If your business is looking for an increase of your email subscribers, influencers can simply mention your website or show themselves browsing it and send their followers there. 

• Generate engagement for your content: There’s no doubt that engagement improves your brand position in most social media algorithms, if your content is part of influencer’s content you’ll significantly improve its distribution.
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• ‍Content creation: Content created by Influencers is powerful, but this is not the only way that they can help you. The content created as the result of their fans creating from their prompts is an expansive wave of content that will empower your brand.
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• Generate Leads: Landing pages from affiliate links and other tools can get lots of leads with a great value.
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• Increase sales: Once again, contest and discounts codes are a great way to increase your sales. Depending on how strong your Influencer’s presence is, you can decide how big your discount will be and for how long will last.

How can an Influencer help your brand?

• Reach a new and often a bigger audience: followers can be outside from your specific niche and thanks to influencers they learn about your product and become interested in it.
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• Build trust for your product or service: as we mentioned before, consumers quite often consider more trustworthy influencers than relatives and friends. The words of someone who consumers find reliable carries much more weight.
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• Empower your following on social media: People who connect with your brand as part of an influencer marketing strategy will also frequently follow your brand on social media., especially if you build a long-term relationship between your brand and influencers.
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• Increase traffic to your website: Consumers know that if they want to discover further information about what their favourite influencers are talking about, your website is the right place to go and they’ll do so.
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• Boost lead generation: Part of the influencer's creativity is to find the way to increase sales, do contests and talk about discounts. Nothing more effective than checking on someone that you trust excitedly by consuming something and helping you to get some benefits for yourself
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• Growth your sales: Remember, recommendations are powerful. And that’s true even if you aren’t also offering promotions through the influencers. For this reason many companies are willing to send products to influencers for free and a present. 

There’s a lot more to an influencer marketing strategy than just asking a bunch of cool people to give you a shoutout.

The mindset for successful influencer marketing is fostering a long-term, collaborative, win-win relationship. Working with many of the same influencers long term allows them to know and represent your brand better.

If you have a great influencer marketing strategy, then you’ll attract quality people to work with you and therefore, achieve leads with a great value.