Influencer marketing is a tactic in which people with expert knowledge or social influence endorse your brand, product, or service. They can create promotional content, write a review, encourage their audience to buy, etc.
Influencers give you access to a larger audience who trust and look up to them for recommendations. They can help you raise brand awareness, boost sales, and drive engagement.
But, like with any other campaign, influencer marketing can go wrong.
Yes, influencer marketing does have its downsides. Knowing them can prepare you to avoid any pitfalls and run successful influencer campaigns.
In this post, we discuss some of the benefits and downsides of influencer marketing.
Influencer Marketing Benefits
When you hire an influencer, they can help you build trust, gain credibility, and drive traffic to your site. They can also help you:
Target the Right Audience
One of the benefits of hiring the right influencer to promote your products is that they help you reach your target audience. Most influencers are experts in a specific niche and have followers who consider them an authority on the subject.
Partnering with them lets you promote your products to people interested in what you have to offer.
Boost Sales
The right influencer can make their followers notice your brand and even make a purchase. When they see an influencer using or recommending your product, they are likely to want it for themselves.
If you give the influencer a discount code or link, they can share it with their followers and direct them to your product or service page. If they use shoppable images or videos, your target audience can purchase directly from the social media platforms.
Influencer Marketing Drawbacks
Although influencer marketing has many benefits, there are some drawbacks as well. These include:
Dishonest Influencers
Some influencers use bots to inflate their follower count and engagement rates. Hiring them helps you reach a large audience, but one that does not match your target audience. This is sheer waste of time and resources.
One way to make sure that you work with trustworthy influencers is to hire one of the many agencies to find and vet influencers for you.
It Takes Time
It takes time to formulate a winning influencer marketing strategy, find suitable influencers, vet them, negotiate terms, launch the campaign, and run it to completion.
It’s difficult to measure how much your influencer campaign has contributed to your sales growth. It may take time before you can track conversions accurately and measure the overall campaign performance.
Still not sure if you should invest in influencer marketing?
The infographic below can help you decide. It offers a detailed comparison of positive and negative factors that you should consider before hiring an influencer.
