Marketing budgets for influencer marketing have grown rapidly over the past few years and are projected to rise even more. With more dollars betting on the outcomes of this type of marketing, agencies and corporate marketing executives alike are studying what works and what doesn’t.
First, it’s important to define influencer marketing. In the days before the internet dominated communications, an influencer was usually a celebrity who was targeted by a company or its agency to represent and promote a brand, usually on TV and radio. This definition may still apply to some influencers, but today’s influencers are usually people with big online followings, either because of the popularity of their blogs or due to their ability to attract a large number of social media followers. Many of the biggest influencers didn’t start out as celebrities, but their position as online influencers has made them celebrities. Influencer marketing is a digital marketing channel for delivering content to marketing targets. That makes it sound like a cut-and-dried commodity purchased by marketers or their agencies, but there is an important element of relationship-building between the influencers and marketers they work with.
Influencer marketing has evolved significantly in the digital age, transforming how brands connect with their target audiences. Today, san diego influencer marketing plays a pivotal role in leveraging the online presence of individuals with substantial social media followings. These influencers, often renowned for their blogs or social media prowess, have cultivated communities that trust their recommendations and insights. Brands capitalize on this influence to authentically engage with consumers, tapping into the credibility and reach of these digital personalities to amplify their marketing messages.
Effective influencer marketing goes beyond transactional content delivery; it’s about building genuine relationships between influencers and brands. By partnering with influencers whose values align with their own, brands can foster meaningful connections with their target demographics. This approach not only enhances brand visibility but also cultivates loyalty and advocacy among consumers who value authenticity in their online interactions.
Many in the ad industry believe the growth of influencer marketing occurred because of the shrinking audience for online advertising. Banner ads are considered an annoyance by internet users, and ad blocker software has become very popular. It is also advised that you use the best residential proxies to protect your internet data.
Over the past year or two, influencer marketing stats show a shift away from big social media influencers towards micro-influencers, and nano-influencers – defined by MediaPost as influencers with 1,000-5,000 followers. There are several reasons why:
• The cost is minimal compared to the big name “mega” or “macro” influencers with huge followings.
• Brands aren’t so vulnerable to scandal or negative publicity. If a micro- or nano-influencer does or says something negative, it won’t create a crisis or damage the brand the way a big-name influencer could.
• Using small influencers provides much greater ability to narrowly target a specific audience. According to Neoreach, a company that provides software for influencer marketing, “Nano influencers are considered the most powerful of all the influencer marketing groups. This is due to how specific smaller accounts allow advertisers to get. An account with around 1,000 followers might have the exact audience companies are trying to target. In comparison, larger influencer accounts, like huge celebrities, have a wider following with fewer similarities.”
• Smaller influencers have much greater intimacy and engagement with their followers than well-known influencers with half a million or a million followers.
• The general public is becoming aware of the fact that big influencers are very well-compensated for endorsing brands. This has eroded trust in the content mega-influencers provide. They are increasingly seen as paid channels for ad messages.
For all these reasons, influence marketers are turning more to smaller influencers despite their limited reach compared to the big guys.
Influencer Marketing Hub partnered with two influencer marketing agencies in 2017 and again early in 2019 to survey 800 marketing agencies and brands about influencer marketing. Some of their findings:
• As influencer marketing has grown as a marketing tool, many influencer marketing platforms and agencies have sprung up to make it easier for marketers and influencers to find each other. In 2017 there were 420 (up from 190 in 2015). By 2018 this number had grown to 740.
• The number of Google searches for the term “influencer marketing” grew from 3,900 per month in 2015 to a whopping 61,000 per month in 2018.
• Of those surveyed who use influencer marketing, 69 percent are business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers and 31 percent are marketing to other businesses (B2B).
• Ninety-two percent of survey respondents thought influencer marketing was an effective marketing tool. This was demonstrated by their budget plans for 2019, since 47 percent of respondents planned to spend over 20 percent of their marketing budgets on influencer marketing.
There are statistics that challenge that last point, by the way. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) did research showing that 75 percent of marketers are using influencer marketing, but only 36 percent of them consider those activities to be effective and 19 percent consider them ineffective.
When influencer marketing fails to yield good results, the most common problem marketers point to is selecting the wrong influencers. There are literally millions of influencers to choose from, and researching which ones are the best fit is laborious and time-consuming. The influencer marketing agencies and platforms have sprung up to meet marketers’ needs in this area. With databases that have 50,000 influencers or more, and extensive information about the audience for each one, these platforms have greatly simplified the task of choosing influencers.
A couple of years ago, one of the biggest negatives marketers voiced about influencer marketing was the difficulty of showing what the return on investment was. Now, however, many of the software platforms provide the means of measuring ROI. For example, using TapInfluence, marketers can see benchmarks by industry to compare the results of their campaigns to industry standards, and can see actual dollar returns on their influencer investments and how much each influencer is worth.
Only a few years ago, influencer marketing was a new phenomenon. Today it has become mainstream. Industry experts writing in the trade media expect it to continue to grow. At some point it may peak and start declining in importance, but right now it fills a gap left by the loss of effectiveness of conventional advertising and the difficulty of scoring big media relations hits due to the shrinking of the media.
