Influencer Marketing

29/12/2021 0 By indiafreenotes

Influencer marketing (also known as influence marketing) is a form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field. Influencers are someone (or something) with the power to affect the buying habits or quantifiable actions of others by uploading some form of original often sponsored content to social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat or other online channels. Influencer marketing is when a brand enrolls influencers who have an established credibility and audience on social media platforms to discuss or mention the brand in a social media post. Influencer content may be framed as testimonial advertising.

Identifying influencers

Market-research techniques can be used to identify influencers, using predefined criteria to determine the extent and type of influence. Activists get involved with organizations such as their communities, political movements, and charities. Connected influencers have large social networks. Authoritative influencers are trusted by others. Active minds have a diverse range of interests. Trendsetters are the early adopters (or leavers) of markets. According to Malcolm Gladwell, “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts”. He has identified three types of influencers who are responsible for the “generation, communication and adoption” of messages:

  • Connectors network with a variety of people, have a wide reach, and are essential to word-of-mouth communication.
  • Mavens use information, share it with others, and are insightful about trends.
  • Salesmen are “charismatic persuaders”. Their influence is the tendency of others to imitate their behavior.

Influencers are categorized by the number of followers they have on social media. They include celebrities with large followings to niche content creators with a loyal following on social-media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Their followers range in number from hundreds of millions to 1,000. Influencers may be categorized in tiers (mega-, macro-, micro-, and nano-influencers), based on their number of followers.

Businesses pursue people who aim to lessen their consumption of advertisements, and are willing to pay their influencers more. Targeting influencers is seen as increasing marketing’s reach, counteracting a growing tendency by prospective customers to ignore marketing.

Marketing researchers Kapitan and Silvera find that influencer selection extends into product personality. This product and benefit matching is key. For a shampoo, it should use an influencer with good hair. Likewise, a flashy product may use bold colors to convey its brand. If an influencer is not flashy, they will clash with the brand. Matching an influencer with the product’s purpose and mood is important.

Fake influencers

Fake influencers have been around for as long as their genuine counterparts, and all criteria used to determine the veracity of an influencer account can be fabricated. Third-party sites and apps sell services to individual accounts which include falsely increasing followers, likes, and comments. Instagram has failed to shut down all such websites. One marketing agency tested whether fake accounts could be profitable. The company created two fictitious accounts, built their online presence through paid followers and engagement (likes and comments), and applied for work in marketing campaigns on popular influencer-marketing platforms. They published their results, an explanation of how the false accounts were created, and which brands had sponsored them.