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Influencer Marketing Pros and Cons

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Influencer marketing capitalizes on influence, which in today’s case is measured through audience reach and relationship. The best brand influencers are those with sizable following, expertise, and marked influence on their followers. But does relying on influencers actually work? Let’s look at the benefits and downsides.

Pros

  1. The concept is easy to understand. You simply have to let influencers (e.g. professionals, experts, and reliable key persons) do the marketing for you. In other words, you have to inspire or hire them to market your brand to their audience.
  1. Results are immediate. When done correctly, influencer marketing can bring quick results. When you tap reputable people with solid rapport with their followers, you should be able to see fast conversion, especially if they get your message right across.
  1. Influencer marketing is essentially a part of a larger marketing scheme and therefore should fit into the larger strategy. In fact, you can incorporate social media marketing and content marketing into it.
  1. You’re better off having key people talk about your brand. Unfortunately, people will view you as the least trustworthy person when it comes to marketing your products, because they know you’re motivated by increasing your revenue. However, their regard for your brand changes when someone else talks about it, especially if that someone else is a person they follow and trust.
  1. This type of marketing leverages on already established organic relationship or connection between the influencers and their followers. While you may have to work to gain following, your influencers already have following for you to tap into through them. Soon these people will also become your audience.

 

Cons

Just like all types of marketing strategies, influencer marketing doesn’t come without potential pitfalls. It’s not a perfect scheme, but these possible downsides should help you fine-tune your plan.

  1. It can be difficult to find people you can inspire to market your brand for you. Obviously, you need to have a compelling brand and an attention-grabbing campaign. If you want organic influence on your potential influencers, you’ll have work to do, and it’s a challenging one. You have to position your campaigns in such a way that your target influencers will see them and soon introduce your brand to their own audience.
  2. It can be costly. If you cannot inspire influencers, you’ll have to hire them to work for you. Basically, it’s like hiring a product endorser. It’s like paying for advertisement, but one that uses an influencer and not a celebrity endorser, whose fee is obviously bigger.
  3. You may fail to include other strategies. This isn’t necessarily a fault of influencer marketing per se, but an error in judgment on the part of the marketing team. A good marketing team should leverage on a multifaceted program.

Should you try influencer marketing? We think you should. After all, a carefully planned and placed influencer marketing with Expaus guarantees the success of your overall marketing campaign.