Traditional marketing usually marketed products using celebrity marketing as an ultimate tool. Marketers use celebrity endorsers in hope that the positive images of the celebrity endorser of the brand will also be passed on to the products or the brand image associated with the celebrities.
Celebrity marketing surely works in the digital marketing world too. But, it is going through an evolutionary phase with Influencer Marketing increasing extremely fast over the past years and its global value now is estimated to be 1.07 billion U.S. dollars.
The influencer marketing space is very powerful and has the potential to have a more genuine impact. This is because the ad. Is woven in the content and does not seem like an advertisement.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on influential people rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.
How does influencer marketing work?
Influencer marketing is an offshoot of content marketing . Content marketers created content to market products/services. Quality content creators became influencers in the long run. Some have established such good reputation for themselves that when they mention a product/service in their content it has a positive impact on the sales of that product and the helps build a brand image too.
Every celebrity may not be an influencer but every influencer has the potential of becoming a celebrity.
It is the fastest growing customer acquisition channel – beating organic search, paid search and email marketing.
Who is an Influencer?
An influencer is someone who has earned a good reputed presence on social media with a sizeable no. of followers/subscribers (at least 3000 – 5000).
How can an influencer promote your products/services?
As the name suggests, influencer marketing is when a brand uses an “influencer” to promote the brand by posting about a product or service or about the brand in general. Influencer marketing is the new “word of mouth”. Of course it is a paid WOM but the way it is presented in the content of the influencer makes it trust worthy or makes it look just like another ad.
How to Implement an Influencer Marketing Campaign?
- Define your goals to be achieved by the campaign.
- Identify the products/services to be marketed on the relevant social media channels.
- Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Pinterest work well with a product that you can physically see. Unsurprisingly, the most common products promoted by influencers on Instagram are fashion and beauty related.
- Services are less obvious because of this service brands work better with longer form. Bloggers or video bloggers are the perfect influencers in this case as they can review their experience and tell their readers a story.
- Identify the influencers on those social media channels. Influencer identification and selection is without a doubt the most time-consuming step, but it is also the most imperative; this stage can make or break a campaign.
- Select a relevant analytics platform. Usually the social media platforms have their insights and analytics which give you the detailed data.
- If doing all this sounds like a herculean task then there are influencer marketing platforms which offer expert help in executing these tasks. To get an idea goto https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-agencies/ select the social media platform to get the relevant list.
Currently, YouTube and Instagram are the 2 most popular platforms for Influencer Marketing.
According to Shane Barker - Some Key Statistics Instagram vs. YouTube:
- The 50 most followed Instagram influencers have a combined follower count of 2.5 billion.
- With an estimated 14.5 million sponsored posts, influencer marketing on Instagram is a $1 billion industry.
- It’s estimated that tens of millions of people make money off, of Instagram. Top Instagrammers can make up to tens of thousands of dollars per post and $500,000/year.
- 48.4% of respondents in a survey comprising 20000+ consumers use Instagram to engage with influencer content.
YouTube
- 7 out of 10 YouTube subscribers relate better to their favorite YouTube content creator than to traditional television or movie stars, and 40% of millennials believe their favorite YouTuber understands them better than their friends.
- Videos created by the top 25 YouTube stars were viewed 3x more, commented on 12x more, and resulted in 2x as many actions than videos from traditional celebrities.
- A YouTuber with one to three million subscribers averages $125,000 per post.
- 24.6% of the respondents in a survey said that they prefer using YouTube to engage with sponsored content.
