18 Incredible Benefits of Influencer Marketing for Brands

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Every day, countless creators face the challenge of getting sponsorships on YouTube. You may have some good ideas, but how to get sponsored on YouTube? If you're in this boat, you're not alone. Fortunately, influencer marketing can help you get sponsored and boost your YouTube presence. In this guide, we'll explore the benefits of influencer marketing and how it can help you get viral on YouTube.

Aha Creator's solution, brand partnership deals, is a valuable tool for boosting visibility and getting sponsored faster. With our services, you can connect with brands that align with your channel and get the resources you need to create impactful sponsored content that resonates with your audience.

18 Incredible Benefits of Influencer Marketing for Brands

1. Boost Your Brand Recognition with Influencer Marketing

When influencers generate content featuring your products, brand recognition grows among their followers. This benefit is especially crucial for new ecommerce businesses that need an audience. It’s also a fantastic way to create hype around a new product or collection launch. For instance, Athletic Greens used TikTok influencers to spread awareness of their nutritional supplements among health-conscious Gen Zers.

These social media influencers created content that showed how the supplement can become a part of their audience’s daily routines. The campaign’s success speaks for itself. The hashtags #athleticgreens and #athleticgreenspartner have over 90.6 million views and 39.5 million views, respectively.

2. Acquire Better Customers Thanks to Influencer Marketing

This strategy doesn't just attract any customer; it attracts those more aligned with the brand's values and offerings, leading to a higher quality of customer engagement. These customers, often nurtured through the trust and authenticity established by influencers, are not just making impulsive purchases but are forming a deeper connection with the brand. This connection significantly increases their likelihood of becoming recurring buyers, a crucial factor for sustainable business growth. Moreover, these customers tend to have a higher lifetime value. They're not only more likely to repurchase but also to become brand advocates. Their recommendations to friends and family can be compelling, essentially serving as unpaid, organic endorsements for the brand. This word-of-mouth marketing is invaluable, as it comes with a level of trust that can't be achieved through traditional advertising.

Here’s an example of how this might apply to the beauty industry: A skincare brand can collaborate with an influencer known for their expertise to attract customers genuinely interested in quality skincare products. Having followed the influencer's journey and trusted their recommendations, these customers are more likely to appreciate the product's value, continue using it, and recommend it within their circles. This influencer-brand alignment boosts immediate sales and builds a loyal customer base that believes in the brand's ethos and product efficacy, echoing its merits far and wide.

3. Expand Into New Markets with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing can help you find untapped markets and reach wider audiences. Take the food brand King's Hawaiian, which partnered with creators to create its #foodtok. They worked with 16 creators who produced slider recipes for 'Slider Sunday' using the brand's delicious sweet bread. They used hashtags like #mealinspo to reach new viewers. The key lesson here is to identify and collaborate with relevant influencers whose social following overlaps with the niche audiences you’re trying to achieve.

4. Increase Engagement Rates with Influencer Marketing

The benefits of influencer marketing also include increased engagement, an essential influencer marketing KPI. How? Because when influencers share or endorse your content, it reaches a broader audience and comes with a built-in level of trust and credibility. Their followers, who are already engaged and invested in the influencer's content, are more likely to interact with your brand, increasing likes, comments, and shares.

This heightened level of engagement is crucial for amplifying your brand’s message and increasing its online presence. Content shared by influencers often appears more authentic and relatable, making it more likely to resonate with their audience. This authenticity is vital in today's digital environment, where consumers are inundated with content and increasingly discerning about what they trust and engage with.

For example, a travel brand can partner with a well-known travel influencer to showcase a destination or experience and see a significant boost in engagement. This is because the influencer's followers, who are already interested in travel content, are more likely to engage with posts that feature genuine experiences and personal stories from someone they trust. This can lead to a ripple effect, where the engaged followers share the content within their networks, further amplifying the brand’s reach and potentially leading to viral content. This increased engagement raises brand awareness and helps build a community of interested and loyal followers.

The first step to encouraging sales through your social media? Build an engaged social following with influence marketing. As influencers talk about you and get their audience's interest in your brand, followers will likely follow you, too. This will significantly benefit your social media marketing efforts. Partner up on some giveaway campaigns with your social media influencers. The trick of asking people to follow your brand in return for a chance to win a gift will work a charm. After all, everyone loves a freebie.

6. Use Influencers to Get Feedback on Your Products

You can also use influencer marketing to source feedback on a new product, collection, or product feature. Because many influencers engage with specific niche audiences, they’ll have valuable insights into what your ideal buyers look for in a product. Plus, they can share detailed feedback by trying your products for themselves. Feminine hygiene company Thinx did just that. They invited 25 influencers for a slumber party event in Los Angeles to get feedback on their new athleisure line. Thinx used the information they gathered to launch clothing their consumers would be interested in and grew their sales by giving influencers unique discount codes. This led to $810,000 in revenue with a per-customer acquisition cost of $35.20.

7. Reinforce Trust and Loyalty with Influencer Marketing

Influencers who consistently provide their audience with authentic and valuable content create a foundation of trust and loyalty towards themselves and the brands they endorse. When you cultivate a robust and long-term relationship with an influencer, their genuine belief in your product or service becomes apparent to their audience. This authenticity is crucial in transferring their followers’ trust to your brand. The impact of this trust is profound. Followers of influencers are not just passive consumers; they are active participants who value the influencer's opinions. When an influencer they trust recommends a product or service, these followers are more likely to take that endorsement seriously, leading to higher conversion rates.

For instance, consider a health and wellness brand that partners with a fitness influencer known for their genuine passion for healthy living and honest product reviews. Over time, as the influencer incorporates the brand's products into their content meaningfully – perhaps by sharing their journey with the products – their followers associate the brand with authenticity and quality. This association builds a strong sense of trust and loyalty towards the influencer and the brand. As a result, the brand benefits from a loyal customer base that trusts their products due to the influencer's genuine and long-standing endorsement. Deep-seated loyalty is invaluable and often leads to sustained business growth through repeat purchases and word-of-mouth referrals.

8. Boost Sales and Repeat Orders with Influencer Marketing

Influencers can help increase sales directly as they share discount codes or recommend your product and indirectly as your brand awareness grows. Intimates brand KNIX collaborates with influencers for this reason — using custom discount codes to drive sales. For example, influencer Hilary Henderson promotes Knix's products via her Instagram page. You can grab her discount code, HILARYHCOMEDY_KNIXLOVE, by checking the post descriptions. Every influencer has a different code, so when someone uses it in their online store, it's easy for the team at Knix to know which influencer has had the most impact. Moreover, if your current customers see their favorite influencers share content about your products, they'll feel encouraged to place repeat orders.

9. Get Fresh Content for Your Brand from Influencers

Creating new and creative ideas is part of the job of a marketer. But it can get tiring having to continuously think of new ideas, especially if you're a small team. Experienced influencers can bring fresh, out-of-the-box marketing ideas to the table. They'll have a new perspective on your brand and can offer creative ways to promote your product - with little effort on your part. To find influencers or manage your campaigns, look at our list of influencer marketing tools ideal for small and growing brands.

10. Boost ROI with Influencer Marketing

This is the most fundamental of all the benefits of influencer marketing. After all, what’s the point in investing in an influencer marketing strategy if it doesn’t positively impact the bottom line of your business? Statistics have shown that influencer marketing delivers strong returns. On average, the ROI of influencer marketing is 11x greater than other types of digital marketing like banner ads. This makes it far more valuable than other, more traditional marketing tactics.

The high ROI from influencer marketing comes from various factors, including increased brand visibility, higher engagement rates, and the trust influencers cultivate with their audience. These elements contribute to more effective conversions, from increasing website traffic to boosting sales, which are crucial for a healthy bottom line. For example, consider a cosmetics brand that collaborates with beauty influencers to showcase their products. These influencers create tutorials, reviews, and other content that authentically incorporates the brand’s products.

Their followers, who trust their recommendations, are more likely to purchase these products, leading to direct sales. Additionally, influencer-generated content often has a longer lifespan than traditional ads and continues to influence purchases long after the initial post, providing sustained value. This extended impact, coupled with the initial sales boost, results in a substantial ROI for the brand, far exceeding what might be achieved through more conventional digital advertising strategies like banner ads.

11. Use Micro-Influencers to Keep Costs Down

Another benefit of influencer marketing - and one your boss will love - is that it can be cost-effective. Running influencer campaigns is 30% cheaper than most advertising and marketing strategies. For this very reason, Doe Lashes‘ founder, Jason Wong, chose influencer marketing over other paid ads for the first 4 months of his brand’s launch. Jason found that sending a shipment of lashes to micro-influencers would cost less than $10 per shipment. And if he made even one sale from an influencer, he’d break even. If he got 2-3 sales, he’d profit and slowly start gaining traction. This is precisely what happened. One month of influencer marketing led to $2.6K in daily sales by effectively reaching niche audiences!

12. Educate Buyers About Your Product with Influencers

A non-salesy way to market to potential customers is by educating them on how to use or style your product — depending on what you sell. By thoroughly briefing influencers about your product, you can allow them to create content that educates their target market about your product in an engaging manner. Not only does this help grow your sales, but it encourages customers to create user-generated content featuring your product. This, in turn, gives you more exposure and grows brand awareness.

Take a page from Supergoop's TikTok influencer marketing campaign. The sunscreen brand reached its ideal audience by pairing with influencers in fashion, lifestyle, and beauty niches. Their influencers made creative content that highlighted Supergoop sunscreen's features in a light-hearted and entertaining way. This aligned with the brand's voice and educated the influencers' followers on the importance of wearing sunscreen. They also showed how Supergoop's clear SPF50 differed from the traditional, white-cast sunscreen people are used to.

13. Enhance Brand Storytelling with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing can add a unique and personal touch to your brand's narrative. This is because influencers are storytellers at heart, and sharing your brand's story or message through their lens resonates more profoundly with their audience. This personalized storytelling approach often leads to a deeper emotional connection between the consumer and your brand, which can be instrumental in building a solid brand identity.

Moreover, this strategy is particularly effective in humanizing your brand, making it more relatable and memorable for potential customers. For example, a travel company partnering with travel bloggers or vloggers can dramatically enhance its brand storytelling. These influencers can share their travel experiences, integrating the company's services into their stories. Whether it’s a unique adventure they embarked on using the company’s travel package or a heartfelt narrative about how traveling has changed their life, the story is told from a personal perspective that resonates with the audience.

This makes the brand's offering more appealing and embeds the brand in memorable and emotionally engaging narratives. The audience doesn’t just see a travel service; they see a pathway to their potential experiences and adventures, helping them forge an intense, emotional connection with the brand.

14. Build a Bank of Content for Repurposing with Influencer Marketing

Finding time to create high-quality content can be challenging if you're a small or growing marketing team. You're already busy with product shots, banner ads, email campaigns, etc. Working with influencers means that content is created for you, and you can repurpose it across your campaigns and channels. Brands like Starface, for example, use pieces of content created by their customers to enhance their checkout. Using real people will add a personal touch to your brand's online store, which helps reduce friction when they're getting ready to buy.

However, you'll need to keep track of contracts and image usage rights. If you have content from last year's campaign, it is critical to determine if you have permission to reuse it the following year. Using content without permission can lead to some severe brand damage. Using a tool like Dash, you can set expiry dates for assets. This gives you and your team full control over your content and helps you maintain your brand's reputation.

15. Accelerate Market Feedback and Innovation with Influencer Marketing

Finally, engaging with influencers can accelerate the process of receiving market feedback. Influencers often have highly engaged audiences who are open about voicing their opinions. By collaborating with influencers, you can gain valuable insights into how your product or service is perceived in the market. This immediate feedback loop can be crucial for rapid innovation and improvement, allowing you to refine your offerings better to meet customer needs and expectations. Moreover, influencers can be pivotal in testing new concepts or products, providing a real-world testing ground to inform future business strategies and product developments.

For instance, a tech company launching a new gadget can partner with tech influencers to showcase the new product. These influencers, known for their expertise and following in the tech community, can provide hands-on reviews, unboxing experiences, and in-depth analysis. Their audience, who are tech-savvy and keen on the latest innovations, can, in turn, provide immediate reactions, suggestions, and critiques.

This feedback can be precious for the tech company, as it allows real-world insights into what features resonate with consumers, what needs improving, and what functionalities could be added. Ultimately, this direct and rapid feedback loop enables the company to make iterative improvements or pivot strategies more swiftly, ensuring that the final product better aligns with consumer expectations and market demands. This approach enhances product development and reinforces customer-centric innovation, a key driver in today’s fast-paced market environment.

16. Collect Data to Understand Your Audience Better

Next on the list of influencer marketing benefits is the advantage of collecting data about your niche audiences. As gathering third-party audience data becomes harder, working with influencers can help you source audience data. The more data you have, the easier it is to create better and more audience-relevant marketing content. Your influencer will have data on audience demographics. That’s age, gender, and location — broken up into the different social platforms they work on. They’ll also be able to tell you about the engagement, reach, and impressions their posts get. This will be useful in understanding how well your campaigns are going and whether they resonate with their audience.

For direct sales attribution, it’s worth setting up tracking codes to see who’s clicked through to your website and checkouts. You’ll need to give this to your influencer before they start the campaign. However, not all influencers are open to sharing their audience analytics. Building long-term relationships with influencers can often lead to them giving you access to their demographic data from social media platforms and any other tools they use. This, in turn, helps you make better-informed, data-driven decisions.

17. Work with Experts to Boost Brand Authority

If you’ve good brand authority, your customers view you as the subject-matter expert in your industry. Growing your brand authority will increase brand awareness and give you a better chance at helping prospects overcome objections. To increase brand authority and focus on enhancing brand awareness, you could interview experts as part of your content strategy, create a podcast, run webinars, and be a guest on other people’s platforms.

You could also enlist the help of an expert influencer. One of our customers, Forthglade, does well. As a dog food brand, they know their customers only want the best products for their furry friends. So, as well as providing lots of tips on their blog, they work with different types of influencers like Dr. James Greenwood on their social media platforms to provide accurate, expert advice on looking after and caring for your best friend.

18. Turn Influencers Into Brand Ambassadors

Another critical benefit of influencer marketing is the opportunity to build long-term partnerships with your content creators, leading to increased brand awareness. If they try out your products and genuinely love them, they’re more likely to post about them organically and recommend them to friends and people outside their following.

Just look at this case study from Grin, who helped the online brand Inkbox create an influencer campaign to build a community of brand ambassadors. They got 70+ creators to post about their products across different marketing channels. This, in turn, created a 40% uptick in unprompted creator posts. If you can cultivate genuine connections with your influencers, you can turn them into loyal brand ambassadors.

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11 Tips for Successful Influencer Marketing

1. Utilize Aha Creator for Seamless Brand Partnerships

Aha Creator simplifies establishing brand partnerships for YouTube creators and businesses alike. For content creators, we handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.

2. Target the Right Influencers with an Engaged Audience

Start by identifying the type of influencers who can help promote your brand. Look for influencers with an audience interested in your niche who can provide authentic content that resonates with your target audience. Consider their level of engagement and the size of their audience. Analyze their content to determine the topics their audiences are interested in and ensure they align with your brand values. Look at their past collaborations and assess how successful they were.

3. Set Clear Goals for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

Before you start working with influencers, set goals for what you want to accomplish with your influencer marketing efforts. Consider what type of results you want to achieve and what metrics you’ll use to measure success. Think about the objectives of your campaign, such as increasing brand awareness, building customer loyalty, or driving sales. Establish key performance indicators like post engagement, website traffic, or conversions. This will help you measure the success of your campaign and adjust your strategies accordingly.

4. Build Strong Relationships with Your Influencers

Once you’ve found influencers you want to work with, reach out to them and build solid relationships. Personalize your messages and show genuine interest in their work. Ask them questions about their audience and content, and explain why you think they would be an excellent fit for your brand. Invite them to exclusive events or offer them special discounts. Allow them to provide feedback, and make sure you listen to their suggestions. Show your appreciation for their work.

5. Provide Incentives to Encourage Collaboration

Offer influencers an incentive to work with you. This could be monetary, such as a commission or a free product or service. Consider what type of incentive would appeal to the influencer and ensure it aligns with your budget. Also, consider offering them a bonus for achieving specific goals or completing campaigns within a certain time frame. You can also give influencers special discounts or access to exclusive content.

Ensure you create engaging content that your influencers can share with their audiences. This should include images, videos, and written content that will capture attention. Ensure that your content is original and on-brand. Think about the type of content that will be most successful, and develop a content calendar that outlines when and how the content will be shared.

7. Track Campaign Performance and Metrics

Track the performance of your influencer campaigns to see which are most effective. Monitor post reach, engagement, website traffic, conversions, and followers. Analyze the data to determine which strategies are working and must be changed.

8. Keep Tabs on Influencer Engagement Rates

Monitor the engagement of your influencers’ content. Pay attention to the number of likes, comments, and shares they receive. Analyze the type of content that’s performing best, and use this information to guide your future campaigns. Also, keep track of any negative comments and address them promptly.

9. Reassess Strategies to Improve Future Campaigns

Monitor the performance of your campaigns to determine which strategies are most successful. Experiment with different types of content and campaigns to see what works best. Ensure you stay ahead of the curve and adapt to new trends.

10. Promote Influencer Content on Your Brand Channels

Share your influencers’ content on your channels and engage with their audiences. This will help you reach a larger audience and increase brand awareness.

11. Provide Feedback to Improve Influencer Content

Give your influencers honest feedback on the content they’re producing, and, if necessary, suggest ways to improve it. Constructive criticism of what’s working and what’s not can help them make their content more effective and their collaborations more successful.

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Map Your Goals and Requirements First

Before looking for influencers, outline your campaign goals and requirements. Detail your desired outcomes at this stage and create metrics to track your progress. For instance, to increase product sales, mention which product you want to promote and how many sales you want to achieve. Defining a timeframe for your campaign to create urgency is also helpful.

Find the Right Influencers for Your Campaign

Next, look for influencers who align with your goals and requirements. Start by analyzing their niche and reach. Understanding your audience demographics is crucial to picking influencers who align with your target age, sex, location, or purchase patterns.

Calculate Engagement Rates

Now, it’s time to get quantitative. Calculate the engagement rate of these influencers to assess the level of interaction you can expect from their audience. Select a bunch of their branded posts, add the total number of likes and comments under these posts, divide the total by the influencers’ number of followers, and multiply the result by 100. Do this for at least ten posts to understand the average engagement rate.

Assess Relevance First Before Moving on to Metrics

While engagement rate is essential, your post's relevance to its feed and audience should always be a priority. Ensure that these selected influencers are relevant to your brand’s offerings.

Prioritize Authenticity and Shared Values

Choose influencers who share values with you and are authentic. If you are an eco-conscious brand, you shouldn’t partner with an influencer who promotes fast fashion or is not environmentally conscious in their actions. The influencers you choose should become partners and advocate for your brand beyond formally posting about it. Good collaborations occur only when you are authentic and honest about working together. You can expect a positive ROI only when you align with the influencer's audience through their authenticity.

What is Aha Creator, and How Can It Help Me Get Sponsored on YouTube?

Aha Creators streamlines brand partnerships for YouTube creators and businesses alike. For content creators, we handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.

10 Influencer Marketing Examples for Inspiration

1. Dunkin’ Donuts and National Donut Day: Involving Influencers to Boost Sales

Dunkin’ Donuts collaborated with Snapchat influencers for National Donut Day. The campaign promoted special deals and encouraged customers to visit local Dunkin’ stores to celebrate. This short-and-sweet campaign utilized visually engaging content to boost foot traffic and engagement.

2. Sony PlayStation and the PS5 Launch: Partnering with the Right Influencer

Sony PlayStation partnered with tech influencer iJustine for the PS5 release. Her unboxing video highlighted the console’s features, aligning with her audience of tech enthusiasts and gamers. This created a naturally promotional content that benefitted both the influencer and the brand.

Watch brand Daniel Wellington is known for its influencer marketing strategy. For a recent discount campaign, they used influencers worldwide to promote their products via sponsored posts offering a 15% discount. This approach combines luxury branding with broad accessibility.

4. HelloFresh: Engaging Micro-Influencers to Promote Meal Kits

HelloFresh partnered with numerous micro-influencers to promote their meal kits. By tapping into niche audiences, they built trust and sustained visibility through authentic endorsements.

5. Pepsi: The #SayItWithPepsi Campaign

Pepsi’s influencer-driven campaign used limited-edition emoji packaging, targeting millennials with the slogan #SayItWithPepsi, encouraging them to incorporate Pepsi into summer activities.

6. Guess: Kickstarting the #InMyDenim Hashtag Challenge

Guess used influencers to kickstart the #InMyDenim hashtag on TikTok, inviting users to share transformation videos. The campaign creatively merged fashion with user-generated content, going viral.

7. Sun Peaks Resort: Collaborating with Influencers to Promote Travel

This Canadian ski resort collaborated with adventure photographer Callum Snape to highlight its attractions. The campaign targeted adventure-seekers with stunning visuals of the resort’s natural beauty.

8. Chipotle: Launching the #ChipotleLidFlip Challenge with Influencers

On TikTok, Chipotle used influencers to launch the #ChipotleLidFlip challenge, a fun and engaging trend that gained widespread participation and increased brand visibility.

9. Fenty Beauty: An Inclusive Influencer Strategy

Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty tapped into influencers across diverse skin tones and niches to showcase inclusivity, transforming beauty industry marketing.

Gymshark invited fitness influencers to take over their social media accounts, sharing workouts and personal stories creating an authentic connection with their audience.

Aha Creator streamlines brand partnerships for YouTube creators and businesses alike. For content creators, we handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.