How Influencer Marketing Can Help Improve Your SEO

It’s near the end of the year now, and it’s time to start considering your content marketing strategy and SEO strategy for the next year, and, with any luck, that will include influencer marketing.

We hear what you’re thinking, is influencer marketing really worth it? Has it run its course? Does anyone even believe influencers anymore?

The answers? Yes, no, and it depends… but let’s expand.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

In very simple terms, influencer marketing is using people with a certain amount of clout in your industry to speak about your products or services, show them off, and advertise for you.

Influencer marketing might come in the form of an unofficial influencer or a more official arrangement between you as a small business and an influencer agency who will pair you with the right influencers to work with.

Unofficial influencers can be a hard one to manage because their very charm relies on their reviews being authentic. However, they are some of the best influencers in the industry. You may find there is an influencer out there already who is creating great content and sharing content about your products and has a large following. By reaching out to them, you’ll be able to thank them for their hard work and perhaps give them a few incentives to continue.

This is exactly what happened to Wick from Xiaomify, a huge Xiaomi fan who became the number one reviewer for Xiaomi products, helping to propel the brand forward to a bigger audience in the West. Wick’s story is one of many influencer marketing examples that benefitted both the influencer and the brand.

The beauty of using influencers who genuinely love your product is that their natural enthusiasm shines through, and their audience will have grown by watching their unbiased reviews.

Therein lies the problem with influencers though, as soon as an audience begins to feel like the paid promotion is only positive because the influencer is being paid (or compensated in some other way), they could lose their appeal. This can happen very fast, and it’s worth factoring in the possible loss into your strategy.

For the most part, outreach such as Instagram influencer marketing is a legitimate and lucrative way to leverage an audience you may not have been able to reach, but it must be done properly.

Why You Should Invest In Influencer Marketing

The bottom line for all marketing managers is always the ROI, and influencer marketing done right will bring a great return for your business in both audience and engagement as well as search engine optimisation.

There are three main reasons why we think that more brands should be investing in their influencer marketing strategy: For the content, for the engagement, and for the authority building.

We’re going to take a quick dive into each area to give you an overview of what to look for in your influencer campaign outreach, but for best results, we would recommend a chat with our social media marketing strategy team, who can help you put your plans into action and build your business in 2021 and beyond.

For The Content

Influencers get where they are because they are already great content creators. Now, it depends what kind of influencer you are working with and what your relationship is going to be, but if they’ve built a fanbase of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers, they must be doing something right.

Have a conversation with your influencer about expectations around your social media marketing plan and how their type of content fits in with that, but be sure to give them a certain amount of creative freedom so that their content still feels very much like ‘theirs’.

For The Engagement

Their content needs to feel like theirs to keep the engagement up. An influencer builds an audience because the audience likes their personality and the way they interact.

This is true for any kind of product or service, but especially true in niche markets. Taking Wick as a great example, he was one of the few creators who showed the products being used and spoke clearly about their positives and negatives. He did it all in English when most of the user guides were in Chinese, which led to a huge engaged audience hungry for information that just wasn’t out there.

Great influencers build rapport with their audience, and, in turn, that means your products or services gain new fans and followers.

For The Authority

Here’s where the SEO strategy really comes into play. To build authority for you with Google, you need to demonstrate that other credible sources see you as trustworthy.

This is possibly one of the most difficult aspects of good SEO because it relies on more than just link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs..

The advantages of social media marketing with influencers are that the influencer themselves becomes a trusted authority in your niche and a trusted authority who will recommend your products and services to their audience. This increases your trustworthiness and improves your rankings on Google search and other social media platforms.

Summing Up

Influencer marketing has had a bit of a negative ride in the mainstream media in the last year or so due to a few negative stories which usually centre around bad relationships with influencers, but the truth of the matter is, from a marketing perspective, influencer engagement is only growing.

If you’re considering adding influencer marketing into your social media marketing strategy, we really recommend working with a reputable influencer marketing platform, an agency that can help foster good relationships between you and the influencer, and experts in campaign management.

The most important thing to remember is that you are leveraging their audience, but it needs to be an arrangement that is built on mutual respect. Discuss with your influencer what you expect to get in return, perhaps content creation for your Facebook ads, a boost in brand awareness, social media posts, or maybe a simple blog post.

Ensuring that your influencer has the right target audience and audience demographics for your business and that you’re working with the right type of influencers will really help you to see the benefits of a social media marketing campaign.