Every year, companies spend billions of dollars on advertising their brands. But, advertising only makes a modest impact on their products or services. Most people rely on their friends, family, or people around them for making a purchase or choosing a service.
This is generally because humans tend to believe in people who are forthright with them or have some interpersonal relationship. It makes them feel comfortable and heard.
Early influencer marketing was a handful due to the difficulty it posed in interacting with audiences. Businesses relied mostly on celebrities. However, technology, social media, and communication tools have shifted it to a vastly different spectrum.
In this blog, we will cover influencer marketing and some other aspects related to it.
Table of content:
- Understanding the terms
- Influencers and their types
- What is influencer marketing?
- Why is influencer marketing important?
- Why are social media influencers the best choice in today’s age?
Understanding The Terms
Influencer
An influencer is someone who is an expert in a specific community or field. They generally can affect people’s choices. They usually influence people according to their reach within the community.
Types of Influencer
There are different types of influencers according to their audience, reach, and efficiency.
- Nano-influencers with an audience of 500-10K
- Micro-influencers consist of around 10K-100K followers
- Macro influencers with 100K-1M followers
- Mega influencers deal with more than a million followers; generally, they are celebrities.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that uses influencers to promote a brand through social media forums. It involves using notable figures or people with a large audience base that can be used for marketing purposes. In other words, they deliver the brand’s message to a specific type of audience.
Click on this link to get a list of top influencer marketing platforms that we’ve curated for you.
Why is influencer marketing important?
In this age of digital media, the growth of exhibitionism is quite visible; people want to follow trends or know what is going on around them. In this process, they follow some successful figures within their niche or influencers who reflect choices of people’s interests to keep themselves informed or entertained.
They influence people on a plethora of scales; people want to wear what influencers wear, eat what they eat, and consume products or services they use to feel relevant. This massive impact creates a necessity for influencer marketing.
Here are a few more points listed below for the importance of influencer marketing.
1. Helps Increase engagement
Influencers are generally experts in their fields and people follow them because of their expertise. Influencers frequently post quality content. Their content is consumed at a higher rate than traditional means of advertising because of higher consumer involvement on social media which increases engagement.
2. Assists in targeting audiences
Most influencers have expertise in their niches; for example, a bodybuilder knows about bodybuilding, diet, and related practices to bodybuilding. So, if a brand uses an influencer in the field concerning their product, it becomes easy for them to target their audience.
3. Creates an exemplary brand image
Generally, when people are uncertain of buying decisions; they look for social proofing. Influencers are trustworthy sources to their audience, so their choices help create a better image for the brand they are associated with.
4. Provides long-term benefits
Influencer marketing is very effective in the long run. It creates profits for businesses at a very low cost. It takes time, but it provides long-term benefits as slowly it helps to build brand image and target specific audiences. Also, influencers’ following keeps increasing and that helps to gather new consumers.
Why are social media influencers the best choice in today’s age?
The definition of influencer has evolved with time, though the traditional definition of influencer just means a person or thing that influences another. But, the contemporary definition focuses on social media influencers.
Social media influencers are the best choice in today’s age for marketing purposes because they provide authentic and believable messages with the help of their content. They are quite cost-effective compared to celebrities and provide natural settings for their content. For example, you would have seen many times big celebrities endorse different smartphones but during their public appearances, they are found using other smartphones. But that is not the case with social media influencers; they generally try to show the brands which they endorse through their content.
Also, these days an average person spends 5-6 hours on social media, and an influencer’s popularity depends on their social media behaviour which creates a better engagement rate than traditional influencers.
Conclusion
According to a report by Statista, a database company, influencer marketing has a market cap of 13 billion dollars and is expected to grow to 24 billion dollars by 2025. It is because consumer behaviour is pretty much on display because of social media, it drives a consumer to act based on that.
Earlier companies used to rely only on celebrities, the organic nature of products, and word of mouth. But, today things have changed due to the internet and online social media platforms. It has enhanced communication between influencers and consumers or followers, in today’s age.
Therefore, brands are choosing influencer marketing.