Influencer marketing is booming as new influencers add the count and offer high conversion rates to the businesses. Influencer’s audience is exponentially growing with each passing day; that is another great reason businesses are considering this opportunity for branding and sales.
Yet, many marketers confuse deciding their marketing budget between influencer marketing and paid ads. Undoubtedly both of them benefit you, but which one best suits your business needs? Below is a head-to-head comparison between these two Marketing Practices that helps you find the right marketing opportunity.
Post Formats: Whenever you run paid ads on various ad platforms, they are always labelled as ‘ad,’ ‘sponsored.’ This makes it easy for the audience to differentiate between organic and paid ads. However, in the case of influencer marketing, influencers can give review content without letting you know about the paid or organic option. This enables the audience to get legit product reviews alongside offering influencers to promote any product.
Authenticity: Today, every business can utilize paid ads and use them to promote their products or service. However, paid ads never give authenticity about the product/service quality promoted on various paid platforms. On the contrary, influencers have a strong user base that builds trust, and hence the audience always relies on their content and quality. Thus, promoting your content via influencer marketing gives better authenticity than paid ads. E.g., Emilie Haney is a self-employed freelance writer, photographer, graphic designer, and part-time youth director. So, her followers will prove her identity that will help you get significant results.
Ease of Content Creation: Whenever you put your marketing budget on paid advertising, you always put your effort into content creation, graphics selection, Ad optimization, and finally, result tracking. However, in the case of Influencer Marketing, all you need is a one-time collaboration with the influencer and investing your time together to create a workable content strategy. Rest, everything is done by the influencer. It means influencer marketing gives you the ease of content creation overpaid marketing.
Budget Level: When it comes to budget, paid marketing budget can fluctuate depending upon results and current CPC. Your ongoing paid response has a substantial impact on your paid budget. However, influencer marketing has a one-time payment to the influencer. However, some businesses work on a commission basis, limiting their investment to sales count. It means influencer marketing can give you better control over your budget than paid advertising.
Control on Results: Paid advertising gives you leverage to track results from day one. You can optimize your results and efforts based on ongoing outcomes. In the case of influencer marketing, you have to wait for the results to alter your existing influencer marketing strategy or switch to other influencers for branding. The reason being not all influencers can commit you assured results based on your expectations.
With that said, the selection of one marketing practice (between the two) majorly depends upon your business objective. People who want to build recognition and online reputation prefer influencer marketing. Not many know, but influencer marketing benefits SEO. Moreover, it can also help generate a new audience base with an increased sales count. So, make an intelligent move today with either one or both.
