With the rise of social media, influencer advertising has become one of the most powerful tools for businesses of all sizes. Influencer marketing allows you to create meaningful relationships with your followers and customers, increase sales and engagement, and drive more traffic to your website.
However, incorporating influencer partnerships into your advertising and marketing strategy might not be the most effective solution for every type of business. If you’re considering whether to invest in influencer marketing—or to what extent—consider the following benefits and drawbacks:
Pros
- Increase your reach. One of the most notable benefits of influencer marketing is its ability to extend your reach and open you up to a larger audience. Working with an influencer can drastically increase the number of people who will see and be exposed to your brand and message. Wide-reaching social platforms allow you to share your message, products, or services with new audiences who may not have been aware of them before.
- Establish brand credibility. Establishing credibility and trustworthiness is essential to having successful marketing campaigns. When influencers promote your brand, this provides you with a powerful endorsement that can influence how their followers perceive your brand. This provides you with a way to build relationships with customers and strengthen your relationship with them while also increasing awareness of your product, service or cause.
- Diversify your content strategy. Utilizing influencer marketing can open up your content strategies to new ideas, making them more diverse and appealing to a larger audience. Influencers often need to create innovative content that resonates with their followers, so by teaming up with them you can leverage their creativity and knowledge to come up with interesting content angles which may appeal to other audiences.
Cons
- Expense. One of the drawbacks of investing in an influencer marketing campaign is its high cost. On average, it can cost several thousand dollars to gain the endorsements of even mid-tier influencers. Some platforms also require higher pay for more engagement and being featured on stories or live streams. Although returns can be high, it’s important to measure ROI to ensure you’re getting a good return on your investment.
- Risk of negative publicity. One of the inherent risks of influencer marketing is that it can make your brand more susceptible to negative publicity. Unfortunately, you don’t have complete control over the content that influencers post, and there’s always a possibility that their message won’t align with yours in some way. This could lead to negative feedback from their followers which can damage your reputation and diminish the value of your investment in an influencer campaign.
- Measurement challenges. Measuring the success of an influencer campaign can be difficult, as it relies heavily on vanity metrics (like engagement rate) or making assumptions about past and future customer behavior. It can also be difficult to distinguish the activities that led to a sale since influencer marketing is often one part of a larger strategy. Having reliable data on your influencers’ outcomes is essential to effectively evaluating their performance.
