Why Brands Need to Work With Bloggers in 2016 by BlogsRlease

​​Influencer marketing has exploded in the past few years, as blogger-influencers gain more followers and power online. If you haven’t started reaching out to bloggers for your marketing campaigns in 2015, make it your New Year’s resolution. Still wondering about the advantages? We’ll lay it out for you. Here are 5 reasons to start working with bloggers this year:

• More Brand Awareness

One influencer can have thousands of followers, some of which undoubtedly haven’t been exposed to your brand yet. The influencers you choose to work with may have a diverse audience that is completely unfamiliar with your product. This could result in an unexpected bonus – a new way to reach your target market or the discovery of an entirely new one. Many brands are doing it already, and in increasingly creative ways. Nike, for example, has worked with fashion bloggers instead of the more obvious choice of fitness bloggers in a recent campaign. Rather than reaching out to sports blogs, where their products ran the risk of blending in with similar merchandise, Nike took a chance on something different – and increased their brand awareness.

• Budget-Friendly Promo

It is well-known that celebrity endorsements can be majorly successful, but they tend to come at a steep cost to the brand. If you’re on a tight budget, it’s unlikely that you’ll have room in your marketing plan to partner with a major celebrity. Bloggers and other types of social media influencers will charge significantly less for exposure that may be just as beneficial. Nowadays, over 50% of marketers are dedicating their budget to ‘social media community growth and engagement’, but not all are spending it wisely. Something as simple and cheap as a blogger campaign where free samples are sent out to just a dozen bloggers can yield thousandsof views.

• Gaining Audience Trust

Working with influencer helps your credibility because people trust them. If a trusted friend or someone you admire makes you a recommendation, you are much more likely to check out the product than if you had just come across an ad. A survey by Varietydetermined the American teen demographic, for example, puts significantly more trust into YouTube personalities, whom they view as more authentic and approachable than ‘traditional’ celebrities like actors and musicians. It is becoming apparent that social media influencers like bloggers and YouTube gurus are starting to replace movie stars in the eyes of the younger generation. A good review from such an influencer is a huge boon to a brand.

• Customer Conversion

While conversion is often the most difficult aspect of influencer marketing to quantify, there is a strong argument to be made for its positive effect, as consumers are more frequently turning to blogs as sources for products (in fact, blogs are third only to brand and retail sites). Over 60% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post; clearly, blogs are becoming one of the top to-go places to get reviews and inspiration for shopping.

• Increased Content-Driven Traffic

When running a blogger campaign, generally the brand asks the blogger to help promote both the product and the company. Naturally, an upswing in clicks and SEO is often the result. Speaking of SEO, blog posts give it a particular boost since the reviews will remain searchable on the internet, as opposed to things like Facebook comments. The nature of marketing with bloggers is also largely content-driven, as the campaigns depend on reviews, videos, and other content created by influencers. Considering the fact that more consumers are choosing to use ad-block software to block all ‘traditional’ advertisements from their web-surfing – leading tobillions lost in revenue – brands need to reevaluate and embrace the kind of marketing that will draw in users, rather than alienate them.

Ultimately, what these benefits point to is the fact that influencer marketing encourages personal engagement with the brand through the influencer. And the more involved and engaged they are, the more the audience is likely to connect with your brand and make that valuable decision to make a purchase.

Do you know any more benefits of working with bloggers that we missed? What are your other marketing resolutions for 2016?

BlogsRelease is the #1 PR marketplace for brands to engage with influencers by posting blogger review campaigns for products, events, and news.