Growth of Influencer Marketing

Who is an influencer?

Influencers are individuals with many loyal social media followers who are experts in their niches and have a friendly relationship with their fans.?

They come in different forms, including bloggers, activists, journalists, and celebrities, among others, and use various social media platforms to connect with their audiences.

Unlike mainstream celebrities, influencers are accessible and develop personal connections with their followers, earning their trust and becoming role models.

Why brands are Interested in influencers over celebrities:

Brands can leverage this trust and influence to connect with their target audiences, increase visibility, and shape purchase decisions. This leads us to the concept of influencer marketing.

Despite the long-standing existence of celebrity endorsements, initially, many brands were hesitant to include social media influencers in their marketing strategies.?

Some marketers saw it as an option but were unwilling to allocate budget or resources. However, luxury watch brand Daniel Wellington took a different approach and relied solely on influencer marketing to reach potential customers.?

This risk paid off, as Daniel Wellington is now one of Europe's fastest-growing companies.?

The success of this strategy has encouraged marketers to reconsider influencer marketing, with 80% of them now believing it to be effective, and 71% agreeing that the customers and traffic generated through influencer marketing are of high quality, according to Mediakix.

Advantages of influencers

1. Boost in reach and visibility

Having an online conversation about your brand is crucial in today's competitive market. The wider your reach, the easier it is for potential customers to discover your products. Influencers have a massive reach and high engagement rates, making it possible to achieve this through influencer marketing.

When an influencer features your brand in their content, their followers are likely to take notice and share it with their own networks, further increasing your brand exposure. Influencer marketing can help your content cut through the noise on social media and reach the right audience.

A study by Influencer Marketing Hub found that 37% of respondents use influencer marketing to build brand awareness.

2. ROI from Influencer Marketing

Although influencer marketing has many lucrative benefits, brands have faced challenges in assessing the overall performance of their campaigns. Calculating the ROI of influencer marketing campaigns has proven to be particularly difficult.

One way to overcome this challenge is for marketers to define their influencer marketing objectives and establish appropriate KPIs to measure the outcomes. For example, if the objective is to increase audience engagement rates, tracking the number of likes, comments, and shares on specific posts can help determine the success of the influencer marketing campaign.

As influencer marketing becomes more mainstream, marketers are developing customized metrics to evaluate its performance, making it easier to measure the ROI of such campaigns in recent times.

Future of Influencer Marketing:

Exploring the growth of influencer marketing would be incomplete without considering its future. It has become a popular term among brands and business owners, and its applications are expected to expand and improve.

As marketers continue to recognize the advantages of influencer marketing, they are likely to invest more resources and capital into it. Social media influencers will remain a key component of marketing strategies, and the increased budgets and resources allocated to influencer marketing will lead to more effective campaigns.

Therefore, the trend of influencer marketing is expected to continue, as demonstrated by its growth into a $9.7 billion market in 2020.