Samuel Shepherd
If you run a business, you should at the very least have heard of influencer marketing, SEO, and brand visibility. These three concepts are common marketing concepts, because they have proven effective at getting a brand seen by new audiences, or expanding or reinvigorating existing ones. These days a business gets only as much attention as its marketing allows it to, so not tapping into or even knowing about these incredibly useful tools is detrimental as a business owner.
However, this is why companies like Lefty exist, to help business owners understand how modern internet marketing works and to provide assistance in getting the infrastructure of their business’ marketing efforts established. Therefore, today we’re going to go over influencer marketing, SEO, and brand visibility, as well as how they affect each other, and how they work for your brand.
Influencer Marketing
“Influencer marketing”, as a concept, is not new. In fact it’s been around since ancient times, the only difference is back in the day you couldn’t become a celebrity based purely off your endorsing people’s products.
In this day and age, most time spent on the internet is spent consuming “content,” that is material designed purely for the purposes of entertainment and advertising. It’s kind of like reality television, except it’s self-produced and published on streaming sites and social media, rather than broadcast on mainstream television channels.
This content, while entertaining, is usually designed to gather views for the creator, which creates a prime advertising opportunity for businesses to sponsor creators with their products in exchange for promotion. For example, a hammer company may find a DIY content creator, and offer them a sponsorship, in exchange for the creator promoting the company’s hammers. Such an arrangement is mutually beneficial. It allows the creator to make an income off their content, and it allows the company to drastically expand awareness of their brand relatively quickly.
This is called “influencer marketing”, with the creator serving as the eponymous “influencer,” guiding their audience to interact with the sponsoring business. It is successful because the audience, usually loyal to the creator’s brand, associates the sponsor with the creator. A little bit of entertainment, a little bit of marketing, and a little bit of public relations. These days, people can make full-time careers out of influencing.
SEO
“SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”, and is very simple to understand. When you search a query into a search engine (Google, AskJeeves, Bing, etc) the search engine uses the words you type to very quickly search through a log of websites that seem to talk a lot about either your exact search, or subjects adjacent to it.
Research indicates that 91.5% of people conducting a search do not click beyond the first page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), meaning that for your business to be viewed, you have to try to get your business’ website to appear on that first page. You do this through SEO, optimising the content and copy on your website so that search engines understand that your business is an authority on the subject. Proper SEO often takes a long time to implement and see results, but done properly can yield fantastic results.
Brand Visibility
This is possibly the easiest concept to understand that we’re going to talk about today. Put simply, brand visibility is exactly what it sounds like. It is a metric that shows how easy it is for prospective customers to find your business online.
Brand visibility is important because if people aren’t finding your business then they can’t engage with it. It’s just that simple. If people don’t know you exist, they can browse your store, buy from you, leave reviews, or spread word to their friends about your products and services. An invisible business is no business at all.
Tying It Together
So, how do these concepts work? How does a person with a youtube video or tiktok help your SEO or brand visibility? Fortunately, it’s easy to understand. It all has to do with how search engines quantify a brands’ website to appear first in the SERPs.
You see, SEO isn’t the only factor that decides where your website pops up on the ever-vital first page of the results. In order to determine whether a business represents a genuine authority or an attempt at scamming potential customers, search engine algorithms look for several different factors. This includes keywords, website traffic, reviews, and links.
That’s right, links. There are several different types of links, but we’re just going to focus on the type used by influencers, namely “backlinks.” When an influencer does an endorsement on a sponsor’s products and services, they generally include a link in the description section of their video, allowing interested parties to go directly to the sponsor’s website from the influencer’s platform. This link, one that goes “back” to the sponsor, is called a backlink. When examining your website, the search engine takes into account not only the density of keywords across your site, but how many backlinks there are to it from other sources; as well as how much interaction those backlinks get.
This method of vetting websites means that the more you engage with the appropriate influencers, the more likely it is your backlinks will be present and used by audience members, increasing the chance search engines view you as an authority, thereby increasing the chance you appear on page 1 of the SERPs. The result, increased brand visibility.
