How Influencers Are Changing The Affiliate Marketing Game

As brands and marketers are looking to augment their affiliate marketing game, more and more of them are bringing influencers on-board.

Influencers have the ability to lend integrity and authority to any brand. They can boost brand awareness and reach by engaging with the desired target audience.   

Also known as influencer marketing, this affiliate marketing technique employs social media and social influencers to help brands and marketers achieve their marketing and business needs.

It recognizes and takes advantage of the fact that as your potential customers make their purchasing decision, they are influenced by various circles of people. This influence can either have a positive or negative effect on their purchasing decision.

Why Are Influencers So Important for Brands?

Why Are Influencers So Important for Brands

Brands can ride on the popularity of an influencer’s brand to get a push for developing a preference for their own brand in the market.

According to Deloitte, customers referred by other customers have a 37% higher retention rate. This is possible because:

  1. Influencers have a pre-established audience (which includes your target audience) who are already receptive to their ideas and endorsements.
  2. Influencers have a built-in level of trust & credibility with their audience. They are able to forge strong, personal connections with them.  
  3. They have the experience and perspective to help brands create the right content and message that meets their consumer’s needs.
  4. They are able to disseminate the brand messages out at the right time and to the right people.

How To Identify the Goals of Your Influencer Marketing Strategy?

How To Identify the Goals of Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

Before bringing any influencer on-board, brands need to identify what they want to accomplish from their influencer marketing campaign.

The goals of an influencer marketing campaign can be classified into the following categories:  

  1. Brand awareness
  2. Engagement
  3. Lead generation
  4. Lead nurturing
  5. Sales/conversions
  6. Customer retention/loyalty
  7. Upsell/cross-sell

How Can You Identify the Right Influencers? 

How Can You Identify the Right Influencers

Once brands know what they want to achieve from their influencer marketing efforts, influencers who are experts in that particular category can be engaged.

For example, if your aim is brand awareness and engagement you can opt for bloggers. However, if you are looking to upsell/cross-sell your products, it is better to use existing customers as influencers.

Influencers can be classified into the following types:

  1. Bloggers
  2. Customers
  3. Members of a purchasing group
  4. Industry experts and analysts
  5. Business partners
  6. Internal team members or experts

Primary Influencer Platforms for Brands

Primary Influencer Platforms for Brands

While there is a slew of social platforms that can be leveraged, the most established, scalable and marketing-friendly ones have been identified below.

  1. Blogs: The most popular and preferred user engagement platforms are blogs. They attract true, measurable & engaged audiences and ensure that the end-goal of the influencer marketing campaign is almost always met.
  2. Instagram: Photos are a great way for advertisers to bring their product to life, for others to see it in action. Instagram is a great engagement platform for brands that want to create a visual impact on its audience. Its potential advertising reach is 849.3 million users.
  3. Twitter: Twitter is a social media platform that has changed the way people consume news. It is where users go to find out and share what’s happening around the globe. It is a great platform for brands who want to actively engage with users.
  4. Facebook: Facebook is the most used social platform with nearly 2.45 billion active users per month. It is an incredibly powerful platform for sharing brief, to-the-point messages and branded images or videos.
  5. Pinterest: Pinterest is a great source to drive traffic to eCommerce websites. More than 335 million people use it every month. It is the perfect platform to target women audience since more than two-thirds of Pinterest’s audience base is women. And because pins are able to be directly linked out to another page, the content can easily translate to sales and brand engagement.
  6. Video: Video influencers are the holy grail of social media influencers. According to HubSpot, video content can increase conversion rates by 80%. That’s because the video is the perfect way to build trust and credibility for your brand.  

Final Thoughts

Influencer marketing is all about human interaction.

A brand can work with influencers to build awareness for the brand, get people excited about their product, reach the brand’s ideal customers where they want to be reached, and ultimately drive a brand’s success.

Vaibhav Lall

With more than 12 years of experience in digital marketing and consulting, Vaibhav is passionate about helping businesses grow through the strategic use of digital marketing best practices. When he's not busy advising startups, Vaibhav takes delight in listening to Jazz or John Mayer and Coldplay songs. He is also an avid proponent of the practice of mindfulness and starts his day with a calming meditation session. In his free time, Vaibhav can be found in quite corner, reading a Simon Sinek or Ben Horowitz book.