In recent years, influencer marketing has successfully caused a radical shift in the marketing industry by emerging as a promising investment segment for brands to explore new-age promotional strategies. Apart from the traditional forms of marketing such as advertising and PR, influencer marketing has become one of the key pillars to planning an effective brand campaign across various sectors.

The most effective form of communication that really spurs a consumer to act is word-of-mouth recommendations by someone he/she strongly connect with, and this is where influencer marketing has a distinct edge. Influencer marketing can alternatively be termed as the social word-of-mouth communication strategy which identifies with the appropriate brand advocates to carry out appropriate campaigns.

Influencers are your brand’s best advocates. They are social media users who have established credibility in a particular category. Influencers have the power to affect consumer purchasing decisions with their authority as opinion leaders. Influencers typically have a large number of followers who read their content often and are influenced very subtly by it. That is why leveraging influencer-generated content to promote your brand can help your business grow quickly. Let’s take a look at 7 of the best ways influencer-generated content helps grow your business and brand.

1. Influencers promote your brand without being promotional.

Influencers generally talk about themselves in their content, including their surroundings and their ideas. They are not selling a brand directly when promoting it. Their content will strategically place your brand in the conversation so that consumers don’t even notice the fact that something is being sold to them on a subconscious level.

Every day, consumers get bombarded with hundreds of pieces of promotional content. It makes them tired, confused and indifferent about an ad. Eventually, they start to ignore those ads. Influencer content, on the contrary, entertains consumers or solves their problem. It does so by including your products or services, making them relevant as well as believable in the context. Your job is done.

2. Hashtags improve discoverability.

When you search for a hashtag on social media, the search results display the most popular content using that hashtag first. Influencers generate a lot of engagement with their content. There’s a good chance the content they create for you will easily be discovered when someone searches for a relevant hashtag. This improves your chances of reaching out to a larger audience. You can come up with a unique branded hashtag that the influencers can promote for you. Or you can encourage them to participate in trending conversations by discovering relevant and popular hashtags.

3. Influencers improve your SEO.

Content created by influencers gives you lot of mentions in the online space, and these mentions generally include a link back to your website. You already know quality backlinks can improve your rankings. These links help your website perform better in organic search and thus, you will get more organic visitors. However, you need to be careful with mentions, as not all mentions will be relevant, and not all mentions are right for your brand.

4. They help your business earn consumer trust and loyalty.

Do you want trust and loyalty from your customers? Of course you do. Well, guess what? Influencers have already acquired both from their followers. In fact, that is why they have thousands of followers. When an influencer endorses you strategically, consumers associate the influencer’s trustworthiness with your brand. Eventually, they may also become loyal to your brand if they get what they expected.

5. 
   Influencers boost your chances of going viral.

This doesn’t happen every day. But chances are that with the help of influencer-generated content, you could go viral. This can flood your website with visitors and may increase your customer base. At the very least, it will definitely increase your visibility. Apart from a smart and powerful influencer, you also need strategic content for it to go viral.

6. They help maintain your brand’s reputation.

Influencer-generated content can help you deal with any negative publicity surrounding your brand. The process can be lengthy, but with constant strategic effort, an influencer can change the negative perception to a positive one, or at least help bring it back to neutral.

7. Influencer marketing makes you a content-rich brand.

With influencer marketing, you or influencers (or both of you) will create quality content for your brand. The more consistent you are about posting quality content, the more consumers associate your brand with great content.

Influencer campaigns can lead to many perks for your business, aside from just the financial benefits. This could be an increase in your social following, better social content published on your behalf or an increase in sales or web traffic.

Not only do they drive traffic to your website, Influencers drive traffic to all of your social accounts. This may not result in an overnight takeover of Instagram’s most followed brand, but certainly over time your social networks will begin to boom. The more people your brand is exposed to, the more potential consumers you can target in the market!

Source:
https://yourstory.com/2018/08/influencer-marketing-improve-brand-effectiveness/
https://blog.scrunch.com/5-reasons-influencer-marketing-is-great-for-big-brands