What is Influencer Marketing?

What is influencer marketing? Let us break it down for you

In a world where social media is continually growing and attention spans are shrinking, advertisements and other traditional marketing techniques are easily overlooked or more likely ignored by potential consumers. That’s where influencer marketing comes in. Influencer marketing is defined as a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brands message to the larger market.

Let’s break that down.

The responsibility to drive sales obviously doesn’t fall solely on the shoulders of a TV campaign, and there are more issues behind these respective falls from financial grace.

When you are scrolling through your Instagram at night and see Kim Kardashian post about how much she loves her hair growth pills or how great her detox tea worked for her, that is influencer marketing. These companies hired her to post about their product, in exchange for the product or money (in celebrities cases, most likely money). In short, influencer marketing means getting someone to spread the message of your brand or product. There are four tiers of influencers, depending on the reach/following of the influencer.

1. Celebrity Influencers; over 1 million followers.

2. Macro-Influencers; around 1 million followers.

3. Middle-Influencers; around 100,000 followers.

4. Micro-Influencers; around 10,000 followers or less.

About 20 years ago the average banner ad click through rates were around 45%. Today they are less than .06%.

People are skipping through the ads and downloading things like AdBlocker because they only want to access the content that they are interested in. But with influencer marketing, there is really no way around it. The ads are integrated into the content and the followers of the influencers are more likely to support the influencer by liking the post or even better, going on to buy the product. The only way they could ignore the integrated ads, was if they unfollowed the influencer, which is unlikely to happen considering they enjoy the content they normally produce.

So now that we have an understanding of influencer marketing and how it works, why is it important? The most important voice in marketing has always been the customers and the growth of social media has become the platform for that voice. A majority of people are likely to buy a product because a friend or someone they trust uses the product and loves it. And that is where influencer marketing really comes in. If you can find an influencer with a tight-knit following to promote your brand, their followers are more likely to pay attention and buy into what it is that they are promoting.