What is influencer marketing and why is it so important to marketers?

Influencer marketing involves collaborating with influencers that are popular and relevant to your niche to promote your brand and increase your revenue. Influencers are characterized by having a large number of loyal and dedicated followers on social networks. Influencer marketing is a relationship between a brand and an influencer. The influencer promotes the brand's products or services through various media such as Instagram and YouTube.

Not to be confused with celebrity endorsement, influencer marketing does more than simply link a well-known celebrity to a brand. Influencers must be trusted figures within a niche community and retain loyal followers. In addition, they tend to have knowledge or experience about what they advertise. All thanks to the massive reach factor, influencer marketers have the audacity to increase brand exposure in a very short time.

Especially influencers, who have a history of recommending unbiased products, stand behind something, people notice it instantly. Influencers, thanks to their enormous reach, have the ability to expand brand exposure and increase brand awareness. When an influencer suggests or promotes your brand, their followers are likely to notice. In addition, the suggestions of a popular influencer are often perceived as more authentic.

People became smarter about rejecting companies that seemed shady or didn't get much positive traction from social media influencers. With that criteria in mind, let's look at an example of a campaign to increase attendance and knowledge from the global conference on content marketing. Influencers operate independently, create their own content and integrate the company's advertising specifications into it. Influence marketing continues to grow in popularity and this certainly won't stop anytime soon.

Depending on the price of your product, you can use a small amount of your budget to give away some products every month to competition winners or influencers. It may be more beneficial to work with influencers who share your values and embody your brand, since it's better to reach a smaller group that is likely to buy your product or interact with your brand, rather than thousands of people who don't match your target audience. Influencers with less than 1,000 followers have an average engagement rate of 7.2% on Instagram and influencers with more than 100,000 followers only have an engagement rate of 1.1% on Instagram. A study shows that 33% of participants agreed that influencers are the most reliable sources of purchase recommendations.

Therefore, instead of being skeptical of a commercial advertisement or on social media, consumers are confident that if their favorite influencer loves the product, they will like it too. This is something to consider when choosing influencers to work with and the benefits of partnering with them. Companies were smart enough to realize the importance of influencer marketing and how to convert traffic through social commerce plugins. Mega-influencers make the most of their authenticity factor, but as a new business owner, working with social media influencers on a small scale is much better.

The monetary value of an influencer is generally calculated based on the size of their followers on social networks and the platform they use. Therefore, while the ultimate prize is the influencer's audience, the brands' target market includes the influencers themselves. Analysts can then find out what content from the best-performing influencers is and generate paid ads to reach a specific target audience. Instagram has live stories and Instagram TV (IGTV), which is basically a channel for top Instagram influencers to broadcast longer content to their huge number of followers.