Influencer marketing is growing fast, and an increasing number of brands are investing in it this year.

According to a recent research study by Rakuten Marketing, which was conducted together with 200 marketers, 75% of respondents expected their spending on such influencer campaigns to rise during 2018. The same study notes that although the price of influencer marketing rose last year, it has not prevented marketers from investing in it. In fact, as stated by Econsultancy (2017), companies are expected to spend an average of 24% of their marketing budgets in influencer marketing this year.

What is Influencer Marketing, and Why Does It Work?

Brands are turning to highly active and engaging influencers on social media more than ever before to reach their marketing goals.  Influencer marketing happens as a collaboration between brands and influencers. Influencer campaigns leverage the power of influencers—celebrities, bloggers, vloggers, thought leaders and other specialists—who have the power to influence not only trends but ultimately the purchase decisions of consumers. In comparison to advertising, influencers tend to be perceived by their followers as trustworthy, authentic and unbiased. Influencers often enjoy their follower’s trust in the same way that your friends trusts you when giving out recommendations. Followers also tend to be very engaged, because it was their choice to follow the influencer in the first place.

Why Are So Many Marketers Investing In This?

Traditional advertising struggles to engage with the consumer, who uses multiple devices at once while viewing content. As digitalization has taken over, and as it has become harder and harder to reach target audiences through traditional advertising, the 21st-century consumers tend to ignore advertising. As today’s consumer doesn’t like mass marketing, he or she values authenticity above all. 

Even advertising on digital platforms is losing reach, as more and people have started to use ad blockers. In the same way that personal recommendations are more trusted than traditional advertising amongst consumers, influencer marketing works in the same way, and it is effective.

Influencer campaigns offer a high probability of the brand or message grabbing the attention of the audience. Additionally, the difficult job of producing unique and engaging creative assets is taken care of by the influencers who continually evolve their content to ensure they don’t lose their followers.

Partnerships between brands and influencers have provided an oasis for consumer engagement with companies. Influencer collaborations enable the brand to get into personalized conversations with the audience through influencers that the audience trusts and considers authentic. These collaborations give exposure to a target audience that is already involved and interested in the content. Simply, this audience is likely to pay attention.

Taking a Closer Look at Influencer Marketing: the Brand’s Point-of-View

Several consumer and retail brands including Nike, L’Oreal, ASOS, Estee Lauder, and Maybelline have launched successful influencer campaigns recently, and the rest are following.

Let’s take Maybelline as an example. Maybelline works with several social influencers ranging from vloggers to celebrities. In 2017 Maybelline launched their first Influencer campaign by tying up with a male beauty influencer, Manny Gutierrez, a well-established beauty vlogger with over 4 million followers. Manny conducted beauty tutorials using Maybelline products and authenticated his relationship with the brand by acknowledging that Maybelline was empowering men to enjoy makeup. Throughout 2017, Maybelline’s Instagram account regularly mentioned an influencer, ranging from beauty to fashion vloggers such as Manny Gutierrez and Shayla Mitchell. While it’s the influencers who created the content, the brand encouraged the influencers to use a specific hashtag #mnyitlook. Maybelline also uses celebrity power of Gigi Hadid, their spokesperson who posts frequent Maybelline-centric content to her own Instagram account, where she has over 36 million followers.

Challenges Ahead

As companies embark on influencer marketing journeys, they are likely to encounter a range of challenges. Influencer marketing often requires a change of mindset for brands. An influencer campaign should have goals beyond product pushing and focused on what can be accomplished by placing the brand in the unique narrative created by the influencer.

Brands must identify influencers who are relevant to your target audience, campaign’s goal, and brand’s identity. Creating influencer segmentation that links different influencers to different target groups and marketing goals could be useful.

While reach and engagement with the brand’s target audience are essential in the influencer campaign, marketers should keep in mind that some influencer networks reach may be small, but often consist of highly engaged followers that more likely to act on a recommendation. To remain authentic in the eyes of followers, it is necessary for the influencer to have a positive sentiment for your brand, for him/her to authentically like the brand. 

Rich engagement metrics such as comments, shares, and likes’ will help gauge if the content resonated with the audience. Also, measuring the impact on the brand by looking at positive and negative sentiment, brand mentions, mentions of key buying factors will help estimate contribution towards brand’s equity.

As influencer marketing is evolving fast, companies should experiment, adapt their approaches, and learn more every day. At the same time, they should remain mindful of the balance between consumer and promotional requirements and protecting the authenticity of the influencer campaign. That said, it is essential that the partnerships are genuine. Otherwise, the campaigns can backfire both for the brand and the influencer if the integrity of the campaign is called into question.

Cornfield & Partners can help you with market opportunities related to digital marketing. To find out more about potential business opportunities, contact info@cornfieldpartners.com or you can
call us on +44 (0) 20 7692 0873.

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