Influencer marketing has grown from a small-scale idea with celebrities promoting previously established brands to a worldwide phenomenon involving thousands of businesses and billions of customers. The influencer marketing business has expanded dramatically in recent years. There are many social media influencers like the Jenny Fisher Influencer Spotlight.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is when a company works with an online influencer to promote its goods or services. Some influencer marketing partnerships are less concrete than that — companies collaborate with influencers to increase brand awareness.
How did influencer marketing become so popular so quickly?
Influencer marketing is rapidly maturing. As a consequence, many insiders and onlookers in the business are wondering, “What now?” To answer this, companies and influencers that want to build long-term brand relationships must grasp and master three of the essential factors for every brand in today’s marketplace: authenticity, personalization, and customer experience.
Influencer marketing has already evolved significantly. It has gotten cheaper as costs have decreased. Smaller influencers are seen as more successful than the so-called “big name, large reach plays” by many, owing to changes made by the significant influencer networks — Facebook and Instagram.
For starters, influencer marketing is becoming more standardized, with companies increasingly utilizing self-serve ad solutions to provide influencers with creative assets to publish on their social networks. As a result, it’s starting to resemble a platform-style publisher relationship. A rising number of companies are opting to deal with fewer (and more closely with) influencers due to a growing focus on pricing and brand safety screening.
According to some analysts, the next stage will be blockchain-based influencer marketing, which worries about authenticity with fuel. Start-up in Switzerland Mavin, for example, is a blockchain-based influencer marketing platform with a compensation system that promises to address many of the issues with influencer marketing today. It, for instance, assigns influencers based on their interaction rates rather than their total number of followers. It also employs human verifiers who collaborate with artificial intelligence to examine each influencer post for legitimacy.
New kinds of scalable monitoring and influencer marketing measurement will be crucial for others. This involves spending more money on appropriate tools to monitor content – impressions, clicks, shares, re-pins, page views, and other metrics —to assess and forecast influencer success. As a result, influencers and brands will better meet customers’ expectations for openness and authenticity.
Consumers’ demand for customization and personalization is pushing new methods and behaviors, most notably in the cosmetics industry, but this is a significant trend that is likely to expand. Influencers will increasingly tap into the direction of increased shop-ability through social media, bridging the gap between being inspired and completing a purchase for customers. The swipe-up feature on Instagram, Instagram Shopping, and Instagram Stories are already compressing the consumer experience. As this trend continues to develop, more possibilities for businesses and influencers will emerge.
Influencer marketing will move farther upstream in brand marketing strategies, which can only be positive for everyone involved, as brand/influencer interactions are increasingly viewed as deeper and more complex long-term collaborations than short-term transactions.
