In today’s digital landscape, you can’t deny that we’ve undergone a paradigm shift in the way we create, consume, and distribute media. In the past few decades, people slowly began stepping away from traditional media such as newsprint and even television and instead found comfort in media that’s authentic and resonates with them. For this reason, influencer marketing remains one of the most relevant tools for brands and PR professionals to utilize in this day and age.
Essentially, influencer marketing is a combination of traditional and modern marketing techniques that mixes celebrity endorsements with highly content-driven media. This results in highly niche marketing targeting the specific demographics that influencers control.
Social Media is Ubiquitous
The prevalence of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest has allowed people to own a digital space where they are free to do as they please. Social media is so ingrained in today’s culture that it becomes hard to imagine life detached from your mobile phone. As marketers and PR pros, we must meet the crowd where they’re spending over 2 hours and 29 minutes.
Social Media, The Marketplace
Consumers nowadays have already grown weary and skeptical of brands that rely solely on traditional forms of advertising. It’s become second nature to the average consumer to simply swipe away any paid ads that come across their feeds, skip ads on YouTube or change the channel during commercial breaks.
From its early days, social media has evolved a tremendous amount and has become a melting pot of opinions, issues, and different perspectives that it’s hard to deny its power to influence our thoughts and behavior – including our buying patterns. I even bet that you’ve been influenced to buy or try something out because of a Facebook post or YouTube video.
The distrust fueled by traditional advertising forced consumers to seek out authentic forms of advertising that show them whether or not they’re being duped by just another brand. Moreover, with the thousands of other brands making noise over social media, it’s hard not to get muted in the crowd.
Influencers are a reliable source for the average digital citizen for reliable information and product endorsements. As such, brands ought to utilize these voices of the masses to present themselves as trustworthy in the eyes of their consumers. These key figures act as bullhorns that can help get you heard in a room full of noisy people.
To give you a snapshot of the power of influencer marketing, the following figures demonstrate their relevance in today’s economic and digital climate—
- Businesses make almost $6 ROI for every dollar spent on influencer marketing
- Since 2016, Google searches for Influencer Marketing have increased by 465%
- 90% of survey respondents find influencer marketing an effective marketing tool
- In the last 5 years, over 1360 influencer marketing platforms and agencies were created
- In 2021, influencer marketing soared to $13.8 billion.
Influencers can drastically impact your consumer’s purchasing decisions. These individuals carefully have a niche that follows them for their rich content, knowledge, and reliability. Influencers have fostered a deep relationship with a certain audience, making them integral for brands to penetrate that particular market segment.
A brand’s ability to relate or resonate with its target audience is crucial to its success. But we need to face the reality that brands are not humans. It’s unsurprising therefore that a lot of brands have ridden on the trend of “humanizing” their brands, highlighting the people responsible for their operations.
Influencers can give brands a face. It humanizes brands by allowing a relevant figure in their target audience to speak for them. In essence, people hear and listen to them. Influencers also avoid the average consumer’s ad aversion since most searches for influencers are organic and deliberate, lending brands organic traffic and searches as well.
Brands being shared by influencers aren’t inherently being promoted in the traditional sense. Influencers allow brands the opportunity to show their face as a member of the influencer’s community, giving you credibility.
Influencer marketing is a key service that Publicity For Good offers its purpose-driven brands. Through the power of influencers, these brands can see a possible 6-fold increase in their sales while boosting the visibility of their advocacies by painting themselves as industry shakers and world changers in the eyes of an influencer’s niche.
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