influencer marketing essay

influencer marketing essay

The Impact and Effectiveness of Influencer Marketing in the Digital Age

1. Introduction to Influencer Marketing

Moreover, brands are increasingly appreciating the reach of these influencers, who usually have a legion of followers on different platforms that they can target. In our work, we focus on the effectiveness of this strategy when the influencer endorses a product in a video and measures how the length of exposure of the product in the video, the platform, and the influencer’s characteristics can affect the evolution of customer actions in the form of clicks from viewers who watch the video.

The Edelman Trust Barometer Global Survey of 2015 shows that 75% of people trust the recommendations of others posted online, whereas only 50% trust messages that a person or company communicates over social media. This has led to the emergence of influencer marketing. In an influencer marketing strategy, a brand sells products using an influencer’s endorsement who recommends their product to his/her followers.

The impact of social media in our society is undeniable. Today, over 3 billion people around the world use social media each month. Social media is now the greatest source of data on consumer trends. Increasingly, those consumers are turning to it for inspiration, product information, and guidance, creating tremendous customer acquisition opportunities for brands. The question is how to effectively tap into the platforms, users, and emerging technologies to help their audience grow.

2. The Role of Influencers in Brand Promotion

Influencer marketing has been hailed as a magic bullet for all the problems of traditional marketing. Branded Content Brings 11 Times More ROI than Other Ads, Claims Study. We know it better and better – users want to see real life. The reasons behind this resonance of brand messages within our social networks lie in the nature of the influencer. For, it is these very facts that differentiate an influencer from the traditional marketing message conduit. Consumers find the influencer and her posts naturally engaging. The potential of influencer marketing is further underscored by the fact that brands and agencies have access to an underserved market. The active Instagram user base has surpassed a billion, with the number of frequent users estimated to number at least 500 million. The potential number of influencers is enormous – there are about 500,000 Instagram influencers with over 60,000 followers.

If you are a digitally savvy brand marketer, you have almost certainly been bombarded with reasons to integrate influencer marketing into your brand’s strategy. Not a week seems to pass without some influencer making the news for delivering astounding results for some relatively unknown brand. In the last three years, influencer marketing has established itself as the new shiny coin in digital marketing. Between 2016 and 2019, the number of Google searches for ‘influencer marketing’ rose by almost 100%. According to a recent business survey, 73% of marketers allocate budget for influencer marketing and 19% plan to do so in the next year. The buzz is not unfounded. It is estimated that the influencer marketing industry has nearly doubled and is now worth in excess of $8 billion. Major brands from all over the world have embraced influencer marketing as part of their promotion mix.

3. Measuring the Effectiveness of Influencer Marketing Campaigns

We combine data from the extensive literature review with a quantitative content analysis of micro-influencer advertisements. The content analyzes key elements of the managed techniques and discursively encodes them. From the research, our findings add a specific understanding of micro-influencers’ conventions related to real-world practices. We then develop four different strategy categories that represent different micro-influencer performance practices. These findings show that micro-influencers oversee the adoption of different organizational practices that suggest an installed form-related consideration little touched by previous research. These four categories of influences consider examining different marketing strategies. Finally, we use these categories to explore micro-stakeholder practices and understand how, through produced items and videos.

First, an overview of influencer marketing is provided, supplemented by essential views on influencer advertising. In the warehousing castle, a basic sphere defines how micro and other influencer behavior can be separated as micro-influencers.

This chapter will analyze both the impact of influencer marketing campaigns and possible measurement metrics. We are going to divide this section into three categories of metrics regarding the success and impact of influencer marketing initiatives: marketing performance (KPIs), customer-related performance, and a group of novel metrics that are coming from digital marketing technologies. The research aims to delve into the hotly debated topic of influencer advertising impacts and address the many questions surrounding the evaluation of micro-influencers’ actions and advertisements by juxtaposing older studies with industry reports. According to recent findings, influencer marketing research is still an area that lacks consensus and requires further investigation.

4. Ethical Considerations and Challenges in Influencer Marketing

In order to nurture the quality of the influencer marketing environment and make sure that the actual meetings can work together, Instagram made an announcement saying that as part of their plan to decrease violations from third parties, users might not be able to see the number of likes on photos of other users – a move meant to “depressurize” customers and instead focus on creating content. Purchasing fake followers is one of the biggest trends in the influencer sociable advertising industry which establishes a dubious double standard amongst programs and brands. The increasing competition and the daily need for “high-quality deals” are motivating influencers to make misleading comments, either from each other or by using unreliable artificial intelligence and application solutions, usually discovered on top of Google search. It seems easy to obtain likes and comments by buying respect for influencing content and to obtain without generating actual respect for this. Despite calling out influencers caught using fake blogs in Instagram feedback, failing to report potentially misuse for fear of damaging brand associations, both parties are taking part in genuine people, who merely use follower buying actions. The commitment among manufacturers and brands goes beyond buying fans and comments; they are simply not doing their homework though they are confident they are. Preferably, brands might enjoy the influencers they are praising to pay attention to the analysis of RIO and the suggestion of natural brand over fame.

There are various ethical issues in influencer marketing that must be taken into consideration. Most of the issues are faced by influencers and therefore need to be addressed first. Fake followers and followers bought by influencers are one of the most contentious issues faced in the influencer marketing industry. To some extent, it’s logical to believe that some influencers who acquire fake Instagram followers do this to improve their brand’s self-esteem. Meeting a certain follower count could be a million-dollar changing operation. As there is a huge variety of brands that focus on influencers and everyone wants to make a different target, it often becomes more attractive for these influencers to purchase Instagram followers.

5. Future Trends and Innovations in Influencer Marketing

Cross-platform influencer strategies: The core pain point that drives decentralized content initiatives is this: We still have a hard time measuring the longer-term implications of social media platform algorithm-based influencer performance. Greater importance on influencer engagement and the diversity of public platforms on which an influencer communicates successfully over stricter emphasis on creating multimedia content specifically designed to maximize visibility within borders of a single platform (and the vulnerabilities that implies). It’s also possible businesses will choose an influencer, rather than an influencer for certain executions, when deploying fluid, cross-media support. Decentralizing influencer management relieves many of these concerns and results in improved influencer popularity and performance, greater earned media value and publishers, and additional compensation premiums. It’ll be more work for them, busier space for creators of influence, but the consequences are well worth it.

Decentralization of content: Content creation will find a way to connect brands and influencers outside of public-facing platform inventory. New marketplaces will emerge that support commercial messaging exchanged between brands and influencers independent of social media platform algorithms, rules, or limitations. These marketplaces will become the enablers of all new commercial messaging connections because they are untethered to any single platform’s limitations, rules, or algorithms but allow all others to execute on better, faster influencer marketing strategies across the social media universe. What we’ll have discovered is that the buying and selling of actual influence is substantially easier when it operates free from the fluidity and whim of a single party. This won’t “kill” social media platform algorithms, but it will force platforms to continue to explore and refine the business models that rely less and less on algorithms to manage content into them. In other words, they will believe they’ll have gendered confidence in algorithm-friendly content.