What Is Influencer Marketing and How Does It Impact Your SEO?

With the rise of social media stars, influencer marketing has snowballed over the past few years. Many businesses don’t understand the power of influencer marketing, and in turn, don’t have an influencer marketing strategy in place.

Instead of thinking just in terms of likes, comments, or shares, think of influencer marketing as a customer recommending your products or services to thousands of their friends.

Can you think of any other channels that allow you to leverage this kind of audience? Additionally, ones that would actually trust what’s being said and are eager to try your products or services?

Influencer marketing is a critical digital marketing tool that has the potential to skyrocket your sales.

But who qualifies as an influencer? How does influencer marketing work? Who are micro-influencers? Which kind of influencer is right for your business? How can influencer marketing affect your SEO?

In this ultimate guide, we’ll answer all of these questions and some more. Let’s get right into it!

What is Influencer Marketing?

When people come across famous people they admire wearing or using particular products or services, it’ll make them much more likely to get it for themselves.

These celebrities or famous people are called influencers.

An influencer is an individual who has a degree of sway to affect the purchasing decisions of a sizable audience because of their authority, position, knowledge, or relationship with the people.

Influencer marketing strategy allows businesses to collaborate with industry influencers to promote their products and services to the most relevant audience. It’s a form of social media marketing and includes product affirmation by individuals or organizations that usually have a high social impact in the field of your preference.

According to Statista, the global influencer marketing market value has increased from $6.5 billion in 2019 to $13.8 billion in 2021.

Businesses use influencer marketing to market through social media influencers and drive their brand’s story or messages to their target audience.

While this form of marketing is highly similar to word-of-mouth marketing, it’s not really the same. Influencer marketing has the potential to create an impact on a more extensive audience than word-of-mouth marketing.

Using influencers to market to a massively engaged audience boosts your brand visibility, increases your brand engagement, and generates new leads for your sales funnel.

You could either build a standalone influencer marketing campaign or use it as a tool to boost your other marketing strategies.

Types of Influencers

Influencers are typically characterized by the size of their audience. Influencers of each size have their own set of advantages and disadvantages based on the goal of your marketing campaign.

These influencer types also vary significantly in terms of their cost of engagement. The top-tier influencers can demand hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single post; however, the ones at the bottom can promote your products or services for nominal fees or in exchange for a free sample.

But to ensure that you leverage influencer marketing for your business, you need to find the right ones to work with. And the first step towards that is identifying which type of influencer can deliver the results you are looking for.

Let’s take a look at the four main types of influencers.

1. Mega-influencers

Mega influencers usually have over 1 million followers or subscribers on social media. A majority of people who fall under this category are A-list celebrities who have gained fame in their real life and on social media.

These influencers are primarily actors, athletes, singers, and other famous and talented individuals.

Influencers like Cristiano Ronaldo, Selena Gomez, and Kevin Hart fall under this category.

A brand partnership with mega influencers will undoubtedly help you reach an enormous audience. Getting your products or services endorsed by celebrities has a huge potential to change the audience’s perception and purchasing decisions.

They are excellent options if you want to increase your brand awareness.

However, choosing mega influencers for your marketing campaign needs to be a careful decision.

Mega influencers usually have an extensive range of audiences. This makes it difficult for brands looking to target particular demographics.

Additionally, they don’t have an intimate relationship with their audience, and their celebrity status might make them seem inauthentic.

It is a universal opinion that when a celebrity endorses a product, they do so only because they’re paid big money. This makes them less trustworthy in building a partnership.

Mega influencers are the most expensive to work with, and if your influencer marketing strategy is not planned or executed correctly, they can also cause the most damage to your brand.

While they do have their disadvantages, they do have their advantages.

1. Diversity. Since they have a broad range of audiences, you can take advantage of this diverse psychography and demography if your products are suitable for varied audiences.

2. Brand awareness and credibility. If you simply want your brand to gain global visibility, mega influencers are the best option. Getting your brand endorsed by the right influencers will help you gain exposure and following from credible, international sources, increasing your brand awareness, engagement, and even sales.

3. Professionalism. Since mega influencers will have a wealth of experience working with renowned brands, they will know how to run an effective marketing campaign in a professional manner.

Factors to consider while hiring mega influencers:

1. Availability. Mega influencers are usually in high demand. Therefore, it may take a while for you to even secure a meeting with them. You must engage these influencers early enough in your marketing strategy to ensure your campaign runs smoothly and efficiently.

2. Cost. As we’ve already mentioned, mega influencers are expensive. Therefore, ensure you have the budget before you create an influencer marketing campaign involving mega influencers.

3. Risk. There is a considerable amount of risk involved in attaching your name to a celebrity influencer. If the influencer suffers a reputation risk, your brand could stand to risk a lot of damage, both capital, and image.

4. Trust. While celebrity influencers may have a huge following, people may not always trust their word. Therefore, find an influencer who blends naturally with the content of your influencer marketing campaign. For example, it makes sense to have Jennifer Lawrence or Taylor Swift endorse your make-up brand, but it’s not a smart decision to have them promote your crypto-based financial products.

   2. Macro-influencers

Macro influencers have followers ranging between 100,000 to 1 million. They may not be as big as celebrity influencers but they do have a vast and diverse following.

Macro-influencers typically gain their fame on social media with internet-based activities like vlogging, blogging, or creating other types of online content.

These influencers produce regular content and are regarded as authority figures in their niche. They grow their audience from scratch and have gained quality experience managing social media over the years.

They primarily focus on ensuring that their network stays strong; therefore, they usually only stick to promoting products and services relevant to their niche. This leads to their followers trusting their intentions much more than celebrity influencers.

Advantages of working with macro-influencers:

1. Expertise. Since they’ve built an audience on social media from zero, brands prefer their expertise. They have the skills to nurture and build a highly responsive audience.

2. Validity. Macro-influencers are an authority in their niche which means they have niche-specific followers. Collaborating with the right influencers will help you reach your target audience and boost your sales and conversions.

3. Reach. They may not have a close-knitted community (like the other influencers we’ll discuss later in the blog), but they’re an excellent option if you want to boost your brand visibility and awareness.

4. Professionalism. Their skill and experience will ensure they work with you to create high-quality content to promote your marketing campaign. They have the knowledge to craft engaging content that will really resonate with their audience and boost your brand awareness simultaneously.

   Factors to consider while hiring macro-influencers:

1. Cost. While they may not be as expensive as celebrity influencers, they don’t come cheap, primarily because many of them work with agents. It may cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a single social media post promoting your product or service.

2. Credibility. While their audience trusts them more than celebrity influencers, they still aren’t a great option if your marketing campaign focuses on gaining high-quality leads and conversions. If you still want to collaborate with a macro influencer, understand the nature of their audience before you do so.

3. Engagement. With a following of 1 million, it’s evident that macro-influencers can’t fully engage with their audience. This dilutes the intimacy of the relationship they share with them.

   3. Micro-influencers

Micro-influencers have between 10,000 to 100,000 followers. These influencers have gained their fame by being experts in their industry.

Including micro-influencers should be a go-to move for brands because collaborating with them gives brands a greater chance of reaching a highly engaged audience.

This allows businesses to develop a genuine following of people who are very interested in what they have to offer.

Advantages of working with micro-influencers.

1. Engaged audience. They are authority figures in their niche and are genuinely trusted by their network because they work to form a close and intimate connection with their followers. They have an extremely loyal and relevant fan base making them much more effective for marketing campaigns.

2. Credibility. They may have less reach than mega- and micro-influencers, but they invoke a powerful sense of credibility with their audience, given their focus on a particular niche.

3. Availability. Micro-influencers don’t usually work through influencer agencies, which makes it much easier to collaborate with them. Additionally, they’re capable of working with multiple brands simultaneously.

4. Cost-effective. Micro-influencers are significantly cheaper than celebrities and macro-influencers. However, those with a high engagement rate charge higher rates. Their rates are usually tallied per post, which may cause them to be expensive for some companies.

Factors to consider while working with micro-influencers.

1. Inconsistent. Micro-influencers don’t have a unified way of charging. While this may turn out to be a good thing for your business, that may not always be the case. It could also incur high advertising and marketing costs without any guarantee that your brand will gain returns in terms of leads and conversions.

2. Time. You may have to dedicate a lot more time and effort to drafting agreements and campaign strategies because micro-influencers don’t have enough experience working with brands.

3. Quality. Micro-influencers sometimes work with multiple businesses simultaneously, which may compromise the quality of content they deliver. Therefore, figure out a review and quality-checks system and ensure that it’s implemented.

4. Reach. If your focus is brand awareness, micro-influencers may not be the way to go for you.

5. Creativity. Micro-influencers don’t have rigid guidelines in place and are much more flexible about the kind of content they create. Therefore, while working with micro-influencers, outline your brand values, marketing campaign goals, and guidelines, and give them the freedom to be creative and create content that they think will resonate best with their audience.

   4. Nano-influencers

Nano-influencers are those with less than 10,000 followers.

These social media influencers typically include influential people within a local community. They may have a low reach, but they play a highly influential role within their small local community.

Nano-influencers are people who share content and experiences that their audiences can relate, connect, and empathize with. Brands working with them will gain a huge benefit due to their trusted, engaged, and relevant audience.

Advantages of working with nano-influencers:

1. Engagement and conversion. A huge following doesn’t always translate to an outstanding engagement rate. Nano-influencers usually know most, if not all, of their followers personally, which benefits their engagement and conversions. With their small but hyper-targeted and loyal audience base, these influencers can take your marketing campaign by storm.

2. Introduce new brands and products. With only a few thousand followers, these influencers can focus on certain interest groups, unlike the other influencers we’ve discussed. They are greatly trusted within their circle, which allows them to play a vital role in introducing new and effective content, products, and services in their niche to their audiences.

3. Cost. They are highly affordable. Therefore, if you’re a start-up with a limited marketing budget and want to mainly focus on something, nano-influencers are an excellent way for you to test your marketing strategies.

4. Relevance and credibility. Their audience knows them on a personal level which makes them trust nano-influencers much more than their counterparts.

5. Authenticity. Nano-influencers don’t make a living out of social media, which makes their content much more relatable and authentic to the audience.

6. Location. For brands looking to gain reach and leads locally, nano-influencers are the best bet. This is especially true for businesses with a physical location (brick-and-mortar).

Factors to consider while working with micro-influencers.

1. Reach. They have very limited reach, so don’t collaborate with nano-influencers if you want to leverage influencer marketing to boost brand awareness.

2. Experience. They don’t have experience working with established brands; therefore, they don’t have the skill to craft engaging marketing content.

3. Quality. They may be new to creating branded content, so you need to work with them to ensure the quality of their content is aligned with the goals of your campaign.

How influencer marketing can benefit your SEO

1. Builds inbound leads

When influencers partner with brands, they have to disclose the links as sponsored. If you want to use influencers more effectively for inbound links, there’s a way to bypass the need for disclosure — by building content-driven influencer campaigns.

When brands use influencers, they typically create “commercials” that are extremely sales-driven and focus directly on the brand or product.

This doesn’t create a huge impact on the conversion rate.

Instead of having influencers push your products or brand directly, you could strategize a campaign that focuses on certain issues in your niche.

Don’t get them to be an extension of your sales team; instead, have them create content on what they think of a particular topic and cite your website as a resource.

This subtle form of influencer marketing seems much more authentic rather than an influencer thrusting a product at your face. In turn, this has a higher potential of driving people to your website and generating inbound leads.

2. Influencer marketing boosts brand awareness and reach

One of the biggest challenges that businesses face is getting heard over the sea of competitors. With the fierce competition in the marketplace, engagement and traffic are one of the most important ranking factors.

The bottom line is that the more you can boost your brand awareness and reach, the more traffic you drive to your website.

Find influencers who have the attention of your target audience and enhance your brand’s visibility through blogs, vlogs, and other types of content on social media.

The traffic you gain through influencer marketing has a much better impact on your SEO rankings than paid ads.

3. Influencer marketing builds credibility and trust

Influencers are authority figures in their industry. They have a significant level of influence over their followers because of the type of relationship they’ve built with them. This makes their audience trust their reviews and recommendations.

If you work with nano- or micro-influencers, there is a high probability that your influencer marketing campaign won’t seem like an advertisement encouraging more people to be open about engaging with your brand and products.

These days, people prefer to gain reviews and recommendations from their favorite social media influencers rather than mainstream celebrities because they seem more genuine and relatable.

This trust will add to your E-A-T and help your brand gain more credibility in the eyes of Google.

4. Influencers can promote your keywords

Encourage influencers to use your keywords, especially branded keywords, on their social media posts and blogs. Influencers repeatedly mentioning your branded keywords will lead to a spike in search traffic and help boost your SERPs ranking.

You can ask them to include these keywords as hashtags, alt text on pictures and videos, and ensure they add them to the title tags and meta descriptions.

However, this is not the only way influencer marketing can help your SEO w.r.t. keywords.

SEO tools rely on historical data to help you understand your target audience and their queries. However, with Google becoming smarter every passing day, it has now become more efficient in understanding search intent rather than just relying on primary keywords.

Therefore, it’s an excellent strategy to include secondary and tertiary (LSI) keywords within your marketing campaigns. This encourages Google’s algorithm to show your pages on SERPs for users looking for what you have to offer.

This is also called semantic search.

LSI or Latent Semantic Keywords are words or phrases that are semantically linked to your primary keyword.

For example, with the primary keyword SEO, the LSI keywords are those that show up in the Related Searches section.

Incorporating these keywords within your marketing strategy will help Google index your blogs and other pages with much better accuracy.

Additionally, you can use influencers to gain feedback on relevant keywords and phrases your target audience uses with comments, survey responses, DMs, and other user-generated content.

5. Influencer marketing helps build a stronger brand profile

It’s common knowledge that your link profile has a massive impact on your SERPs ranking. This link profile includes both internal links and backlinks.

According to Google’s guidelines, the quality and authority of the websites that link back to you is a crucial search engine ranking factor.

This shows that you need to obtain links from high-profile domains relevant to your business. However, this is not an easy task.

Working with influencers is an excellent way for brands to gain organic backlinks.

When you’re collaborating with influencers, they’re likely to have a website of their own, or they may have access to other high-authority websites. Working with them will help you gain quality backlinks to your website.

Furthermore, when an influencer shares a link to your site or content, there’s a high potential for other people to pick up on it and share it with their network.

Of course, your content has to be exciting and valuable to them and not just promote your brand.

This increases the chances of high-profile domains picking it up and sharing it on their site.

Google will pick up on this, which will, in turn, help boost your organic search traffic.

While there are several ways to collaborate with influencers, here are a few strategies that you can implement if building backlinks is your primary objective.

1. Product or Site Reviews.

   The first step towards finding influencers who can review your brand or product is to check their domain authority. The thing is, most influencers who are open to providing reviews link back to a lot of different websites.
   This, in turn, can cause a lot of damage to their domain authority if they’re linking back to low-quality websites. Associating with such influencers will only harm your website’s SEO.
   The higher the domain authority of the influencer’s website, the more valuable they are for your SEO.
   There are several SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs that can help you gain insight into the domain authority of an influencer’s website.

2. Guest Posting.

   Guest posting is another excellent way to gain backlinks from high-authority websites.
   Sure, there are websites that charge for the same, but if you do your research, you can find a number of websites that allow you to publish a guest post for free.
   Here are a few search terms you can use to find websites accepting guest posts. 

   • (niche name) “submit a guest post”

   • (niche name) “guest post”

   • (niche name) “write for us”

   • (niche name) “become a contributor”

   • (niche name) “contributor guidelines”
     It’s critical to make sure that the websites you choose allow a dofollow link back to your site.

3. Discount Code for Their Readers.

   If you don’t have a marketing budget or can’t give away free products to multiple influencers to promote your product, you can share a coupon code specifically for their audience to get started.

4. Mention the Influencer.

   People love sharing blogs or content pieces that feature them. You can regularly create and share posts that mention or quote other influencers. You could also share their brand or product while doing so.
   After publishing your content, simply drop an email letting them know they have been mentioned in your latest blog and provide the link. More often than not, influencers will share the link with their audience.

5. Contribute Your Expertise.

   This is a very common way for influencers to leverage each other’s audiences. Collaboration between industry experts is an excellent way to build backlinks. Therefore, if you have something substantial to offer through this strategy, do leverage it.

You can implement these strategies to boost your backlink health and improve your domain authority on Google.

Despite how powerful influencer marketing is, many SEOs and businesses fail to utilize it to its utmost potential with a strategic marketing campaign.

You can use the tactics mentioned in this blog to boost your SEO strategy and have your web pages ranking on Google’s first page!

If you’d like some help building a dedicated SEO campaign for your business that can help you make the most of your influencer marketing efforts, feel free to book a no-strings-attached discovery call with Teranga, and we’ll be happy to help you out:)