Why Brands Pay Influencers

Welcome to The Spark Show! In this episode, I’ll be talking about WHY BRANDS PAY INFLUENCERS THE BIG BUCKS including:

• The 3 brand goals and the reason behind influencer marketing
• The #1 reasons brands want to work with influencers
• What brands are actually paying for when working with influencers

If this is the first time you’re connecting with me, my name is Gwen Lane. I help digital influencers get sponsored by brands. And I’m so passionate about sharing my experience and knowledge of digital marketing and more specifically influencer marketing since I’ve been running my own travel and lifestyle brand for the last 5 years. I’ve also been in the corporate side of digital marketing for over 10 years before I started my brand so I know what happens behind-the-scenes. 

So let’s dive in! First I wanna talk about the 3 brand goals and WHY brands use influencer marketing for their business. Their three goals are brand awareness, subscribers, sales. 

Brand Awareness

Most brands want people to know about their products and services. Some brands are new and no one knows about them yet. And some brands are already established but they have a new product line or offering and they want people to know about it. Sometimes this is the first connection or time that a person might be hearing of a brand so they want a way to introduce people to them. 

Subscribers

Another goal a brand may have is to get subscribers or leads. They want to grow their potential customer database and they want them to either subscribe to their mailing list or opt-in to something so that the brand can continue to connect and market to them. 

Sales

And lastly, a brand wants sales. Most brands have the end goal to increase their revenue. The bottom line is that brands need and want to make money. The brand is a business and revenue is a MUST. 

Some brands understand that sales takes time to nurture a customer and that’s why they start with brand awareness, but some don’t understand the customer journey. As a marketer, I’ve learned that it takes time to warm up your customer to go from not being aware of the product to wanting to buy a product. 

So brands have different options to market their products and services including advertising. They can do a TV ad, radio ad, print ad, billboards, ads on social media - Facebook, Instagram, there’s a lot of options out there now. And one of those options is influencer marketing. 

As influencers, you can think of yourself as a channel just like TV or radio and they’re buying a spot to get in front of your viewers or listeners that you are already creating content for. That’s how media works, how advertising works. 

Why brands want to work with influencers 

The #1 reason brands want to work with influencers is because they already have a connection with their audience that they’ve been engaging with consistently and it’s like having them give your brand an endorsement. 

If you think about influencer marketing, it’s just a form of celebrity endorsement. Just like when you see a celebrity driving a car or wearing clothes or a watch, it’s because they have fans and when their fans see that, they wanna be like that and have that too. 

So influencer marketing is similar but it’s not because of celebrity, but because they are content creators who have built a community and their audience knows, likes and trusts them. 

For a new brand, it would be like tapping into someone’s network/audience instead of starting from scratch. So when they hire influencers, it would be for content creation and the pre-built audience connection. 

What brands are actually paying influencers for

Brands use content marketing on their own channels to promote their products and services. And they can also run ads. But the thing is, people trust people - they don’t trust companies. 

So when brands pay influencers for advertising and sponsorships, they’re getting an entire production company to develop the content, create the content, shoot the content (so the photographer is built in), be the talent, edit the content and then write the copy and then they also are paying for the audience that you’ve been building, connecting and nurturing, and you’re also endorsing the product saying you believe in it and trust it. And since your audience trusts you, you are extending that trust to the brand. 

So that’s why brands are willing to pay influencers the big bucks because they’re actually getting all of this with an influencer marketing campaign. I’m not saying you’re going to make big bucks right away because it also depends on your audience, how many followers you have, how engaged they are, how niched down they are - a variety of factors. 

But I want you to understand why influencers charge what they charge. There’s actually a lot of work involved. 

When I was working in advertising, brands would hire production companies with producers, camera crew, models, editors for thousands and thousands of dollars to create content for a brand. But now a lot of them are realizing that it’s more effective to put that money towards influencer marketing because the production company doesn’t have a built-in audience. 

They’re creating the content but they’re not endorsing the brand or are providing a connection to an audience. 
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That’s it for today’s episode of The Spark Show! In the next episode, I’ll be talking to you about how to be more confident on camera. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you in the next one.

Listen the full episode here: 

Listen to Previous Episodes: 

Your Two Customers

Make Money as an Influencer with Less than 10k Followers

How Much Money You Can Make as an Influencer

What Brands Look For

How to Attract Brands and Get Noticed featuring Amy Tangerine

How to Build and Influencer Portfolio (and why you NEED one)

How to Get a Brand Deal

                         Connect with Gwen Lane

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