A new trend in marketing: Influencer marketing

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Attaching the image of a brand to the image of an influential person is not a new trend in marketing; companies have been hiring celebrities to promote their products for quite some time now. But, with the boom of social media, the influencer market expanded exponentially. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub 2017 Study, the searches on “influencer marketing” increased 325% in a year, while 230 new platforms and influencer marketing focused agencies were created in the last two years. And companies seem to be taking advantage of that; 37% of the companies surveyed by the Hub had budgeted for influencer marketing, and 67% planned to increase their budget in the next 12 months. A study by theAssociation of National Advertisers found that 75% of the surveyed brands were utilizing influencer marketing, and almost half were planning on increasing their budgets for influencer marketing over the next year.

There seems to be an expansion on both the supply and the demand side for influencer marketing. On the demand side, we have to remember that marketing is about strategy. A company would likely change its marketing strategy for one of two reasons: the previous plan was not working, or a new strategy seems to be more efficient. Which leads us to the question: why are companies increasingly considering influencer marketing to be more effective than traditional marketing?

According to theInteractive Advertising Bureau report, 26% of consumers use ad-blockers to block traditional advertisements. Ads that cover content, lengthy ads before short videos, and ads that move down the page as the user scrolls are the advertisements that annoy consumers the most. Besides being annoyed, consumers seem to be finding it harder to trust companies and the media. According to Edelman’s 2017Global Trust Barometer, 55% of people trust individuals and only 45% trust institutions.

A report by Fullscreen and Shareablee found that 37% of people engaging with influencer posts say their trust in a brand increases when influencers mention a brand. And this could potentially increase over time, especially because younger audiences are likely to trust influencers, with 44.3% of Gen Z/young millennials, and 35.7% of older millennials saying they trust influencers over brands.

Traditional ads seem to be losing their power because brands are losing credibility while influencers increasingly gain trust from their followers; this helps explain why more companies are getting interested in this kind of marketing, but other factors might be attracting marketers to this niche too.

Beyond being a necessary tool to communicate with younger audiences, influencer marketing offers other benefits over traditional marketing. Since there are thousands of influencers in hundreds of niches, a company can find a good fit for a campaign without enormous budgets, and there are platforms that can help companies find the best fit. For example, Patron assigns values to different influencers according to the evaluations they received from other users, their power to engage others, and their dissemination ability. Facebook recently launched its own platform for connecting companies with influencers, calledBrand Collabs Manager. And there are platforms likeAspireIQ, which are focused on a specific group of social media platforms and give support on relationship management between company and influencer.

These platforms seek to make the connection between marketers and influencers easier by eliminating intermediaries and cutting expenses for companies. Other possible expense cuts can happen on the campaign production level since many social media influencer campaigns will not require more than a person and a device that connects to the internet.

As for the audiences, on top of the overall increased trust mentioned above, there is additional trust added when someone is perceived as knowledgeable in a particular field. There is also increased trust in a brand when a customer sees the product being tested -- perhaps by someone who looks similar to themselves. Another benefit of influencer marketing via social media platforms is that influencers give companies access to an ever-growing pool of consumers since avast majority of adults are using at least one social media platform.

Companies and brands can hardly avoid the influencer marketing wave. Both the demand and the supply for digital influencers has been increasing over time along with the trust consumers place in them. While companies might need to reorganize their strategies, social media influencing can be beneficial for those who adopt it. The benefits range from lower costs to higher returns, with the latter stemming from bigger audiences, higher trust levels, and more targeted marketing strategies.