Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing that uses influential people online to share brand messaging with their audiences in the form of sponsored content. It is a broadened form of a celebrity endorsement that applies to more people because of the rise of social media. With the popularity of blogs, video channels, and other social media pages has come a new way to define celebrity. Although they still are used, marketers no longer need to rely solely on traditional celebrities such as movie and television stars and athletes to get the word out about a particular product. Instead, marketers now can choose to have a blogger, for example, post about their product and use that person's following and influence to engage an audience and sell products. The reason for this is because many consumers now want to base their purchasing decisions on the thoughts of other consumers like them, not just celebrities.

Background

In the early 2000s, two events combined to usher in the new era of influencer marketing. The first was a global economic downturn that began in mid-2000. The United States and Japan first were affected, with Europe following after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In many industries, sales tanked and would not recover until 2004. Marketing budgets worldwide were cut on the assumption that there was no point in marketing to people who were not in a position to buy. Marketers had to come up with new and less expensive ways to get their brands and products out to a wider audience.

The second event that contributed to the rise of influencer marketing was more of an aftershock involving the arrival of the internet in the 1990s. By 2002, the almost universal adoption of broadband access enabled businesses to do much more online than ever before. Lower distribution costs of online over physical practices, along with the worsening economic climate, made the move to online practices happen even faster. With this greater reliance on online business came the rise of the early influencer marketing concept. More and more people were going online not only to shop, but also to create their own personal websites and blogs.

The introduction of social media in the early 2000s and its widespread adoption across the world by the early 2020s also was a big boost in the influencer marketing concept. As social media grew in popularity, it allowed marketers to engage with their audience in a whole new way. Regular, everyday people could gain a following on a blog, TikTok account, YouTube channel, Facebook page, Instagram account, or other social media site. Marketers could then tap into that person's following by way of a sponsored post.

Overview

Whether they are traditional celebrities or regular people, marketers can harness the power of influencers to get their message out to a broad audience more quickly and easily than they were able to in the past. Influencer marketing has been a rising trend in the marketing world. There are many reasons for its popularity. Those reasons include:

• It is powerful.
• It is social.
• Many consumers have grown tired of traditional ads.
• It is native advertising.
• It is targetable and trackable.

Influencer marketing is a powerful tool for a marketer because it presents an opportunity for brands to leverage the power of word-of-mouth through personalities that consumers already follow and admire. For example, in 2015, when fifty fashion influencers posted an Instagram picture of themselves wearing the same Lord & Taylor dress on the same day, it sent the message to their followers that the dress was a must-have article of clothing. The dress sold out by the following weekend. (Lord & Taylor later settled Federal Trade Commission charges that it had not disclosed that it paid the influencers to wear the dresses as part of a coordinated campaign.)

The social aspect of influencer marketing also is a reason for its rise in popularity. Thanks to the shift to social media, it is easier for a marketer to connect a business or product with consumers than ever before. People now expect brands to engage with them through social media. Consumers also want brands to entertain and inform them, rather than just sell to them. In this new paradigm, brands can partner with the right influencers to spark organic conversations about a product or service.

People are exposed to thousands of traditional ads every day. In fact, so many ads are seen on a daily basis that people are unconsciously tuning them out, which is called banner blindness. Influencer marketing allows an advertiser to break through that blindness because a social media post may not immediately come across as an ad, meaning the consumer is more likely to pay attention to it. This makes influencer marketing a form of native advertising because it places brands and products within organic content, creating a better experience for consumers. However, as influencer marketing has become more popular and better known among the public, many consumers have begun disregarding popular influencers as well, leading some brands to adopt the strategy of using "micro influencers," who have smaller follower counts but are well known in particular circles and may be perceived as more trustworthy. Also influencing trends away from large-scale influencers has been the rise of "fake influencers," people who misrepresent the size of their social media followings by paying for fake followers and bots that like or comment on their posts. Cybersecurity company Cheq estimated that fake influencers cost advertisers roughly $1.3 billion in 2019.

Influencer marketing also is targetable and trackable, which is important in determining marketing strategies. Data plays a big role in the digital world. Every website visit, social media post, and any other online activity can be stored and analyzed. This, in turn, yields data for marketers to gain insight about a target market and advertising performance. Before the rise in social media and influencer marketing, marketers were limited to traditional media such as television, radio, and print, which did not always yield clear data when it came to audience reach and brand impact. Influencer marketing allows for better data tracking, which can help show whether or not a marketing campaign is successful.

Influencer marketing continued to grow in popularity throughout the 2010s and into the third decade of the twenty-first century. A survey conducted by influncer marketing agency Mediakix published in 2019 found that 80 percent of marketers saw influencer marketing as effective, and 71 percent felt that visitors and customers motivated by influencer marketing were of a higher quality.

Indeed, by the 2020s, influencer marketing had become commonplace in many countries. In particular, many companies had begun working with micro-influencers to tap into niche markets. In 2021, according to a study by influencer marketing platform Linqia, 90 percent of marketers had plans to work with micro-influencers. By that point, companies were also open to taking advantage of and experimenting with newer social media platforms as well.

At that time TikTok had attracted particularly strong interest from marketers, as the platform had joined Facebook, Instagram, and other longstanding platforms as one of the most popular social media apps in the world. In 2021, for example, 68 percent of marketers hoped to use the platform more in subsequent years, according to data collected by Linqia. This platform had grown in popularity quickly and had millions of active monthly users, a significant number of which were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four; by mid-2024 TikTok had an estimated billion monthly users worldwide. For this reason, marketers in many countries saw TikTok as another viral opportunity to reach especially younger demographics.

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