Working with influencers can be highly beneficial for your brand when you seek to expand your reach, enhance credibility, and engage with a specific target audience. Influencers often have loyal followings that trust their opinions and recommendations. This trust can translate into increased brand awareness and customer engagement, especially if the influencer's niche aligns well with your products or services. For example, a fitness brand partnering with a popular fitness influencer can effectively tap into a ready-made audience that is already interested in health and wellness. Additionally, influencer marketing can be cost-effective compared to traditional advertising, providing a high return on investment when executed properly.
However, working with influencers is not always the right choice for every brand. If your brand is in a highly regulated industry, such as pharmaceuticals or finance, the stringent advertising guidelines can make influencer collaborations risky and potentially harmful if not managed carefully. Moreover, if your target audience does not engage heavily with social media or follow influencers, this strategy might not yield the desired results. It's also crucial to ensure that any influencer you partner with genuinely aligns with your brand values and image; otherwise, the partnership can appear inauthentic and even damage your brand's reputation. In such cases, investing in other marketing strategies like content marketing, SEO, or direct customer engagement might be more effective.
Take the most recent ad campaign from popular skincare brand, The Ordinary. The entire concept of the brand is straight-forward, no-nonsense skincare with clear ingredients and chemical components. Given that the average celebrity or influencer does not have the educational background to adequately explain how to layer and use these products to achieve a person’s desired results, The Ordinary opted to focus on a science based campaign rather than celebrity endorsements. This was a clever approach not only due to it’s tongue in cheek nature, but it also gave the brand an opportunity to educate their consumer base on how each chemical compounds works and which products to purchase together for a custom skincare routine designed to target individual skincare issues.
So when deciding whether or not to work with influencers, ask yourself (and your team) what the goals are, what the strategy is, and who those key influencers for your brand actually ARE. You never know, you might just identify an advertising opportunity that you didn’t quite see before.
As always, if you need help creating an influencer strategy, LeBL Creative is here to help.