Influencer Marketing is one of the latest buzz words in the market that is hugely popular among brands. Brands use influencers to create awareness and share brand messages. An influencer is an expert in a specific domain who influences buying decisions for a group of people. We always considered influencers as personalities associated with Sports, Movies, Business, Chefs, Politics as influencers. But now, this category has people who are experts in specific areas and share updates regularly on social media. They have a good number of followers who look up the updates.
Social Media Platforms
In the past, brand advertisement mostly featured in Print & Television. But in the digital age, we have multiple Social Media Platforms. These channels command far more audience. Some of the most popular channels include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blog, Pinterest. Every platform has individuals that constantly share updates in a specific area. This led to a systematic increase in their followers/fan-base.
Every social media platform had its own unique characteristics that people loved.
Blog – A place for sharing detailed textual content along with a good selection of pictures and video.
Instagram – A place for sharing the best of pictures, video along with the concise text. The focus was on sharing the content on mobile devices.
Facebook – The most popular social media platform with subscribers across the globe. People share posts that have text, links, anecdotes, pictures, videos. Individuals are also allowed to create their own page, comment on other posts, create groups and communities.
Twitter – This platform allows information to be shared as text with a character limit. Along with text, individuals can share a few pictures and short videos.
Social media platforms constantly bring in new features into their platform. These features allow individuals to share information uniquely.
Benefits of Influencer Marketing
- Reduced cost of Advertising – The cost of engaging a celebrity for brand promotion is very high. Whereas Influencers cost very less for the brand. Brands can engage with more influencers in place of just one.
- Reaching a wider audience – Almost every human across the world uses mobile phones for communication. Every mobile phone comes with pre-installed social media apps. Invariably every individual has an account. It makes it easier to advertise on these platforms and quickly reach out to millions of people.
- Reduced time to market – In traditional advertising, brands did plan their marketing strategy well in advance. While implementing the plan, many issues might come up But now with Social Media, planning and execution are easy. Brands are able to realize the impact very early.
- Ready to consume – The updates shared by influencers on their social media platform are immediately consumed by their followers. The followers can immediately take the decision to buy/sell products by looking at the feeds on social media.
- Really genuine – Every customer always desires to buy a quality product. We are all aware of many failed brand promotion done by celebrities. As celebrities have very little knowledge about the product. But when we engage with influencers, we can be certain about the product. If in doubt, we can quickly reach out to influencers and ask them to share their experience.
Decision Time
There are many more advantages of new-age Influencer Marketing. The next million-dollar question would be to identify the specific social media platform for brand promotion. The top spot is occupied by Facebook, Twitter, Blog, and Instagram. Brands choose the top influencers in each platform and engage them for executing brand campaigns. This will also in turn increase the number of influencers across platforms.
