Influencer marketing is set to become the dominant digital marketing strategy in 2017 and beyond.

Today’s Generation Y audiences are spending more time on social media and less time watching TV, so identifying social influencers who can effectively promote brands is crucial for marketers.

Here are 5 ways in which influencer marketing can help your business grow:

1- Keep Your Customers Engaged with Your Brand

People discuss products and brands across social media, so this an effective way for consumers to make their voices heard. Having influencers share content related to brand storytelling keeps your customers engaged and increases the number of positive comments that you receive.

An influencer helps your brand stand out from the crowd and demand attention. A customer tends to trust influencers when they say that your brand is genuine. This means that there is no better way to increase your customer base than influencer marketing.

2- Increase the Trust Factor and Build Customer Loyalty

The YouTube generation study conducted by Google states that “60% of YouTube subscribers say they would follow advice on what to buy from their favorite YouTube creator over a traditional celebrity.”

The simple fact is that people trust their peers and the recommendations that they provide. A word about your brand from an influencer works like magic, instantly establishing its credibility with audiences.

You can make use of influencer finder platforms like Influence.co (click here to learn more) to hire the influencer who is right for your brand. It is best to choose influencers whose ideas resonate with your brand ideology.

3- Give Your Content Marketing Efforts a Boost

Content marketing is a vital part of an overall digital marketing strategy, and influencer marketing can give it a direct boost.

Having trusted influencers to write content on your blog or share content from your blog will help you maximize web traffic, attract more subscribers, earn more high-authority inbound links, and rack up massive social shares. All of these factors will improve your brand value and raise its goodwill score.

4- Dramatically Improve SEO

Influencers help to build up a strong link profile, which in turn helps your website’s rank in competitive queries on the major search engines.

Overall, reputable links pass on authority and trust factor in the main domain and help it to generate greater organic traffic.

Influencers can provide captivating and shareable content, and people tend to be more eager to read content written by influencers as opposed to anonymous or unknown writers.

5- Expand Your Reach

Influencers assist in multiplying brand reach and engagement by helping firms connect to a wide range of niche audiences segmented by influencer type.

Around  84% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with a referral. A well-crafted influencer marketing strategy will generate stronger returns over time than pretty much any other approach you can think of.

Influencers are like an army of brand advocates who create opportunities for participation marketing. The powerful web presence that individual micro-influencers wield can be harnessed to generate brand awareness and instant authenticity. An ideal influencer has an established social network with a massive social following. When brands partner with the right influencer, they gain instant access to a new pool of consumers that matches their target audience.

Have you ever launched or participated in an influencer marketing campaign? How did it go? Please share with us in the comments below.