Influencer marketing is great for SEO and social conversation starters

September 16, 2014 11:03 am Published by Kirsty Sharman

Two of the lesser known benefits of influencer marketing—the tactic to have credible digital personalities talk about your brand—are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social conversation fire-starters.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website as a means to obtain a high ranking organic placement in search results. Higher placements in search results usually yield more visitors to the website.

There are over 200 factors which are processed by Google to determine where a website appears on its results page following a search query. One of the more important factors is the number and quality of inbound links to the website.

During the month of June, Smirnoff launched their #ExploreTheNight marketing campaign to promote the latest addition to their product offering; Smirnoff Ice Double Black with Guarana. The campaign created awareness around the launch by asking people how they explore the night and encouraging them to add their experiences to the Explore The Night platform using the hashtag #ExploreTheNight.

Webfluential was tasked with enhancing the reach and creating online talkability around the Explore The Night Campaign — using the right influencers in order to get the message to the right audience.

Besides for the obvious short term benefit of talkability, our influencer marketing campaign yielded a long-term benefit which will add value to Explore The Night throughout its duration. The Google search results for the brand initiative illustrate the benefit of SEO – the top five links from the chosen influencers rank higher than the Smirnoff owned website.

   

The second benefit influencer marketing highlights is the ability to start the conversation tone and sentiment and influence the volume of discussion on social platforms. By investing into the right influencers addressing your target market, and providing great content to discuss, social amplification can leverage the distance that the conversation travels.

Recently, Webfluential was briefed to run an awareness campaign for Nando’s Mass Hysteria. The volume of social discussion is given in the graph below. Note the seeding of conversation by the right influencers, driving conversation from their audience.

   

In the digital age anyone can create a community and cultivate an audience that trusts the value of the content provided. Consumers choose their brand ambassadors and the communities they belong to. The platforms and digital insights available to marketers has changed the notion of influence such that brands don’t have to aggregate their own audiences anymore. Influencer marketing allows brands to leverage the audiences and communities of trusted influencers.

Sign up as a marketer here to run your own influencer search. Try out your first campaign.