Influencer marketing is becoming a widespread type of digital marketing. Trending since forever now, and that mainstream media constantly mentions. However, there are still those people & businesses who do not fully know any influencer marketing platforms and does not get what does an influencer marketing strategy entails. Indeed, when some individuals hear the word for the first time, they may wonder, “What is influencer marketing?”
However, influencer marketing is not limited to celebrities. Instead, it is centred on influencers, many of whom would never consider themselves famous in a traditional sense.
An influencer is someone who exhibits the following characteristics:
One of the most common mistakes the conventional media makes is failing to distinguish between celebrities and internet influencers.
It’s also crucial to remember that most influencers have worked hard to build a loyal and passionate following. It is not by chance that these people prefer to follow influencers rather than brands. The audience could care less about your brand. They are solely interested in the opinions of the influencers. Try not to impose rules and business procedures on your influencers. They have control of the audience, and they may just walk away, bringing their followers with them.
Influencer marketing is more than just finding someone with an audience and providing them money or exposure in exchange for saying nice things about you. That’s why there are viral celebrities. Influencers are persons who have spent time developing their own brand and nurturing their following; they are naturally protective of their reputation and the people who believe in them. They are people who have the patience and drive to thrive in social media one organic follower at a time—those who aren’t interested in performing influencer marketing purely for financial gain.
Influencer marketing is also not about getting immediate results. It’s the same method as Social Media and Content Marketing, where your campaign isn’t about explicitly selling your items. Instead, it’s about proving your industry’s authority, trustworthiness, and thought leadership. It’s about becoming associated with whatever service you do, like when people say they’re going to Xerox a paper instead of photocopying it, or Hoover the floor instead of cleaning it.
Every year, we run an online poll to better understand how businesses see the state of influencer marketing. The results are clearly encouraging, demonstrating that influencer marketing is now really mainstream and on the rise as a favoured marketing approach.
Here are the important findings from our Influencer Marketing 2021 Study, as well as a few additional recent numbers.
Since 2016, there has been a 465 % spike in searches for the keyword “influencer marketing” on Google alone. Clearly, it is now a popular issue, leading to an increase in the number of individuals eager to learn more about influencer marketing and locate influencer marketing platforms and firms. The run-up to 2019 was especially frenetic, with a 1500 % rise in searches for “influencer marketing” between 2016 and 2019. However, searches have slowed significantly since then, as influencer marketing has become more popular among many people.
Influencer marketing is expected to grow to RM57.3 billion by 2021.
Coronavirus has increased the rise of influencer marketing in 2020, and this trend is expected to continue in 2021. Influencer marketing is anticipated to expand from RM7 billion in 2016 to RM40.2 billion in 2020 and RM54 billion in 2021, up from RM7 billion in 2016.
Influencer marketing has grown so common that corporations are constantly developing platforms to aid in the discovery and selection of influencers, as well as to make the system more transparent and user-friendly for both brands and influencers. There are currently several organisations that specialise in delivering influencer marketing services. To avoid losing business, several conventional firms have expanded their offerings to include influencer marketing. Over the last 12 months, 240 new influencer marketing-focused platforms and firms have entered the market, up from 380 the previous year.
Companies clearly perceive influencer marketing as a path in which they aim to go, with 62 % of those polled presently paying for influencer marketing planning to raise their expenditure in 2021. Only 7% of businesses said they would reduce or eliminate their influencer marketing spending.
Marketers and companies clearly believe in the success of influencer marketing, which has resulted in a flood of fresh content published in the previous year. Influencer marketing is considered successful by 90 % of our poll respondents. This number has been pretty stable throughout 2017, and the evidence indicates that this enthusiasm for influencer marketing will continue in the future.
Instagram’s popularity has skyrocketed in recent years. It’s mind-boggling that its users upload 95 million pictures and videos and like 4.2 billion posts every day. Photo posts currently account for all Instagram main feed posts, followed by carousel posts and video posts.
Instagram has greatly benefited from its acquisition by Facebook. There has been a significant surge in Instagram users, with over 1.074 billion active users now. Instagram Stories are also immensely popular, with 500 million people using them every day.
Instagram Influencer Marketing Spending is Increasing RapidlyThe general rise in influencer marketing, and also Instagram’s rising value as a highly visible social media medium, has resulted in a huge surge in businesses spending money on influencers operating on the platform. In 2021, 55 % of marketers planned to utilise Instagram for influencer marketing, second only to YouTube.
We have witnessed a tremendous surge in paid influencer posts as a result of increasing brand awareness of influencer marketing and tighter restrictions around advertising transparency. Between 2015 and 2017, the number of posts tripled to 2.68 million. By 2020, it is to increase significantly to 6.12 million sponsored positions. This figure is certainly larger currently, because of the surge in influencer marketing with the introduction of COVID-19.
Instagram posts tend to have greater engagement rates than tweets, maybe because an Instagram post is visible for a longer period of time, whereas a tweet might swiftly fade into a user’s feed. Influencers with fewer followers find it simpler to build up a high interaction rate on both social media networks than those with more followers. Influencers with less than 1,000 followers have a 7.2 % engagement rate on Instagram, a 1.4 % engagement rate on Twitter, and a 9.38 % engagement rate on TikTok. Average engagement rates for mega-influencers with over 100,000 followers are 1.1 % on Instagram, 0.3 % on Twitter, and 5.3 % on TikTok.
The most ideal social marketing succeeds because it is nothing more than a natural human interaction.
The most ideal content marketing succeeds because the material is actually useful.
And the finest influencer marketing strategy works because it focuses on social content and influencer marketing platforms, where credibility and true authority are already established in the eyes of the audience.
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