Is Influencer Marketing a New Strategy for Brands?
Santiago Luis, our Marketing Manager, wrote an interesting article about the history of the Influencer Marketing market.
Brand engagement through influencer marketing is the single most important and fastest evolving area of marketing today. As a senior marketing professional with over 10 years’ experience in FMCG in Europe and America, it is hard to ignore the importance of generating a fluent conversation between brands and their consumers.
Is “Influencer marketing” a new concept or simply the modern day “word of mouth”? a communication model used for centuries which eventually evolved into a multibillion dollar industry – advertising.
Brands have a long history of consumer engagement and influence. Traditional consumer research and data tools have long been used to make informed decisions about an ad, a campaign, push an image, a product or service and keep it in line with the consumer’s wants - the ultimate goal? to influence the consumer to buy.
Today social channels have changed the usual benchmarks brands and advertisers once used to gauge their success. The social media boom has seen huge growth in engagement between consumers and the emergence of a new type of influencer. One with a huge social media following, and anyone who fits the criteria of a micro/ macro influencer may peak the interests of a brand wishing to engage with the right audience for their brand. Today brands can no longer dictate the image to the consumer in the same way they once did and we are witnessing far more collaborations in the retail world than ever before, placing the relationship between brand and consumer on a far more level footing.
As far back as I can remember brands routinely promoted their products through popular personalities using regular communication channels such as radio, television and newspaper. These celebrities or popular characters had the ability to influence consumers and the wider the social demographic that character / personality appealed to, the stronger their influence was.
A prime example of this was the controversial 1920s Coca-Cola advertisement, what is now considered to be one of the first “influencer campaigns”. The image shows the iconic chubby Santa Claus, who has brazenly helped himself to a coca cola out of the family’s refrigerator, looking at the reader while smiling cheerfully with a caption that reads “Give and Take say I”. The implication being that Coca Cola is so good even Santa cannot resist.
Another influencer with similar wide social appeal was and still is David Beckham. The image was paramount to Pepsi trying to outplay Coca Cola as the brand of choice for the popular football player.
At the time the only way of measuring your client’s engagement or the success of your campaign was in the usual way – a rise in sales.
Traditionally celebrity personalities were sought after by brands to build their appeal and promote their products or services. Today influencers are bridging the gap between a “celebrity” and your “normal everyday person”. Their ability to engage with consumers based on either their regular social appeal or their more specific interests means brands can use them to further their consumer sales. Current strategies are more about finding regular people with strong social media followings to help achieve a direct relationship with their audience.
A powerful example of this was the campaign Audience2Media managed for Batiste. Using our influencer marketing platform impact, we worked with micro influencers and reached more than 350k impressions, (with a limited budget) an unprecedented level of engagement and one not as easily measurable or as successful through the mere use of celebrity endorsements.
In light of this brands are forced to pick up the pace, up their game and adapt to the consumer’s wants and needs. They have to generate creative content in collaboration with their consumer through influencers.
According to recent research, more than 50% of a brand's budget is spent on digital channels and influencer marketing has repeatedly stood out as the trend with the best ROI results. It has been an interesting journey for both brands and advertisers so far, now for the influencers who are key to bridging the gap between the two.
Impact is a popular choice for many brands and selected agencies. It covers all major aspects of the brands marketing needs, both in areas of targeting and influencers.
Hoping you will be interested to learn more about Impact and the influencer marketing market, please feel free to contact myself on santiago@audience2media.com.
