It’s a Catch 22 Situation While Choosing between Influencer and Content Marketing

26th April, 2020

Influencer and Content Marketing

Resources are allocated for the marketing budget for any kind of marketing campaign that deals with a particular product or service. Before the campaign is designed we must decide upon the needs and before answering the ‘how’, the ‘who’ has to be decided. 

If the marketing managers from the B2B companies are targeted then using an influencer on Instagram may not be a suitable option to shoot up your brand value and may not be feasible either. However, buyers who are fashion savvy can get around by sending them downloadable whitepapers.

 

Collecting Information for Personas

1. Trends can be uncovered by glancing carefully through your database. This would give a clear knowledge about how the customers and followers are consuming the content.

2. Persona information can be captured while creating forms for your websites. Suppose the persona changes according to the company size so you can fetch information from the leads on the forms regarding the company size. 

3. The feedback of the sales team is very important regarding the most interacted leads. They can give you a generalized view bout the customer types who are best served. 

4. Prospects and customers are interviewed by calling them or in-person to know about their likability about the product and services.

 

Influencer Marketing

It is a combination of the marketing tools which are both old and new as celebrity advocacy is given primary importance in the modern context of a marketing campaign that is forced by content. 

 

Advantages:

1. Brand Awareness: Conversation with the customer is crucial abstaining from lousy advertising language or sales strategies. Conversion takes a backseat promoting brand awareness.

 

2. Authority Building: The audiences are engaged in a meaningful and relevant way and this done by the influencers in building the authority for the brand. 

 

3. Brand Reach: The focus on building awareness for the brand can be increased with the brand reach. One needs to be smart and choosy about the various types of engagement with the audience of a particular influencer.

 

4. Customer Trust: The brand gets an authoritative voice bestowed to them by the influencer marketing as a result of which the customer trust is strengthened for the messaging part and conclusively for the brand. 

 

5. SEO is Helpful: A lot of backlinks can be generated as you stretch out for important influencers. Conversations can be started regarding your content. The latest SEO algorithms are dependent heavily on conversations similar to the direct backlinks done for page rankings. An influencer can reblog, retweet and can fetch top rankings in SERP through boosting and endorsing the content. 

 

Disadvantages

1. New Transparencies are Demanded: Influencers are appealed to enhance the messages for your brand. But it could fail because individual brands are scrutinized to a higher degree by the consumers. Endorsements by celebrities are a no longer fad. The brands are measured up against the influencers as it decides upon the choice of the consumers irrespective of the fact that whether the celebrities are endorsing the brand or not. 

 

2. Engagement of Followers: There is an increase in awareness among innumerable people who closely follow brands. A major hoard of followers is very much aware of the reliability and credibility of brands. Engagement must be driven with meaningful conversations and relationships must be nurtured with followers. This can be done by the influencers to resolve the lacunae. 

 

3. Cost: Brands get a leap by joining the marketing bandwagon of influencers. This might shoot up the cost. Some brands are even spending more than a billion dollars on Instagram platforms on the influencers back in the year 2018. Cost-effective options must be considered as micro-influencers.

 

Content Marketing

There are both pros and cons regarding content marketing efforts that can be weighed upon various benchmarks.

 

3 major content marketing types are followed:

• Earned Media: Reviews, shares, mentions.

• Owned Media: Mobile site, social media, blog, and website.

• Paid Media: Social media ads, pay per click, display ads. 

Content marketing generally uses premium content and video content. There are used by B2B companies. 

 

Premium Content has four major types:

• Research Reports:

• Longform content:

• Live Presentations and Webinars

• Tools and Templates:

 

Visual content also has four major heads.

• SlideShares

• Infographics

• Lookbooks

• Videos:

 

Advantages:

1. Brand Credibility: Your brand can be positioned with authority with very good content. The purpose of the brand is also demonstrated and engages people to increase the credibility of the brand. 

2. Customer Relationships: Good content creates an ample effect on the brand’s customer perception and helps in building loyalty and nurture trust.

3. Brand Positioning: A brand will stand out because of unique content if it wants to serve a large established market. The content has to be authoritative as well. 

4. Generating Traffic: Website traffic can be generated with good practices in SEO as new customers will be attracted to your brand. A unique content that is 100% fresh will be able to utilize to its maximum potential the relevant trends in SEO that are available. 

 

Disadvantages

1. Entry Barriers: Brand messaging is becoming very difficult to insert into other platforms. There are very few marketers who are using guest blogging as winning strategies. This implements off-page strategies very hard. 

2. Authenticity: A writing service with a professional edge has to be consulted where the niche contents are specialized in subject areas that have specific relevance. So authenticity is demanded that may incur extra cost to garner long-term credibility. 

3. Increased Consistency: This is a vital cog in the wheel as far as content marketing is concerned. Marketing professionals miss out on the fact that consistency is more imperative than publishing an endless pool of content that is streaming in nowadays. 

4. Niche Market: From 2019 onwards, it has become critical to go for niche marketing. So leads cannot be forsaken because they are on the fringes. There is fierce competition concerning engagement for content marketing. So every crucial niche has to be catered concerning your brand. 

Tags: Influencer and Content Marketing, Influence Marketing vs. Content Marketing, Influence Marketing Strategy