What is Influencer Marketing?
The influencer marketing industry is expected to grow to approximately $13.8 Billion in 2021. What is more, the majority of companies’ representatives perceive influencer marketing as an effective form of promoting business. What is influencer marketing and why is it growing so spectacularly? Let's check it!
Who is an influencer?
The word “influencer” is often equated with a celebrity. In fact, an influencer is any opinion leader with built-up social followings.
Influencers can create content as bloggers, youtubers, podcasters or even ordinary social media creators in a given niche. No matter the form, influencers are seen as experts by their community and they can affect others' decisions (including those related to purchases), using their relationship and authority.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing activity in which brands collaborate with selected influencers. The role of influencers is to promote a brand, a product or a service to an audience using their channels. It involves endorsements, product mentions or product placement in their posts, stories or videos. Thus, influencers encourage the audience to familiarize themselves with the offer of the promoted brand.
As influencers have a strong position as experts or opinion leaders and command the trust of their community, their recommendations are a potent form of social proof.
As mentioned above, an influencer is any person perceived as an opinion leader with a community of loyal followers. You are probably wondering how big the group of fans must be. And here we may surprise you - in perceiving someone as an influencer, the core should be the quality of relationships with followers, not only their number. In this field, micro-influencers achieve very good results.
Depending on the criteria, micro-influencers are considered as having at least 1000 followers on a single social platform. Analyzing insights we can observe that micro-influencers have better engagement rates on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok and other social platforms than larger channels. What is more, micro-influencers often gather people with similar niche interests. For brands, cooperation with micro-influencers allows reaching a narrowly targeted audience.
The word influencer is often associated with a young creator. Meanwhile, an important issue regarding influencers is the lack of upper age limits. In recent years, we have seen a growth in the number of silver influencers, which is related to the increasing use of social media by middle-aged people. According to a KPMG report (2017), Baby Boomers spend more per transaction than Generation X and Millennials. That fact may have a significant impact on the growth of the silver influencer industry in the next decade.
What about social media platforms, types of content and topics? There are also no limits here. Influencers can act in a variety of channels, including their blogs, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, and many others. They can deal with various topics, such as fashion, beauty, sport, travel, technology, gaming, parenting, design, DIY, cooking or any specific niche that arouses the interest of Internet users.
The advantages of influencer marketing
As you might have noticed, influencer marketing gives a lot of advantages for creators of content and brands. Let us analyze the most important of them!
For influencers it allows them to monetize their channels and earn from their passion. Influencers receive products for testing, thus they can create attractive content for followers (such as unboxing, testing, reviews). What is more, they build the role of the opinion leader.
Brands are given the possibility to reach a targeted audience and create a credible message. They achieve this, because the influencer is an authentic user and tester of a product or service and, as the creator of the content, is responsible for the message.
Thanks to the reactions and comments of influencers’ followers, the range of content can grow exponentially and they can obtain the snowball effect.
Footnotes:
Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2021: https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-benchmark-report-2021
KPMG, The truth about online consumers, 2017 Global Online Consumer Report: https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2017/01/the-truth-about-online-consumers.pdf
The Native Hash editorial team is made up of experienced specialists and enthusiasts of influencer marketing.