Influencer marketing has become mainstream form of online marketing in recent years. It has been a buzzword for a while now, and the mainstream media regularly refers to it. Yet, there are still people who don’t really understand what influencer marketing is all about. Indeed, some people come across the phrase for the first time and instantly ask, “What is influencer marketing?”
This Article on Influencer Marketing is to explain the intricacies of influencer marketing, along with other types of online marketing. We know, however, that there are still people who come here for the first time, wondering what influencer marketing is. So, we have updated this article to focus on the basics of influencer marketing for 2022.
Influencer Marketing is a hybrid of old and new marketing tools. It takes the idea of celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign. The main differentiator in the case of influencer marketing is that the results of the campaign are collaborations between brands and influencers.
But influencer marketing doesn’t just involve celebrities. Instead, it revolves around influencers, many of whom would never consider themselves famous in an offline setting.
In Our Article we will explain Who is an Influencer. we define an influencer as someone who has :
- the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience
- a following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages. The size of the following depends on the size of his/her topic of the niche.
One of the biggest mistakes that traditional media makes is a failure to see the difference between celebrities and online influencers.
It is also important to realize that most influencers have systematically built a keen and enthusiastic audience. It is not accidental that these people follow influencers rather than a brand. The audience doesn’t really care less about your brand. They only care about the opinions of the influencers. Don’t try to foist rules and business practices onto your influencers. The audience is theirs, and they can simply walk away, taking their followers with them.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing involves a brand collaborating with an online influencer to market one of its products or services. Some influencer marketing collaborations are less tangible than that – brands simply work with influencers to improve brand recognition.
An early example of influencer marketing involved YouTube celebrity PewDiePie. He teamed up with the makers of a horror film set in the French catacombs under Paris, creating a series of videos in which he underwent challenges in the catacombs. It was pitch-perfect content for PewDiePie’s 111 million subscribers and received nearly double the views as the movie’s trailer. Everybody won.
That’s a simple example. It’s easy to imagine a celebrity teaming with a company to pitch a product—even if the pitch is a series of 10-minute videos instead of a 30-second television ad.
But people wouldn’t be talking about influencer marketing—you wouldn’t be at a website called the Influencer Marketing Hub reading about it, either—if it didn’t have a much broader set of applications. And the key is in that word, influencer.
Influencers, unlike celebrities, can be anywhere. They can be anyone. What makes them influential is their large followings on the web and social media. An influencer can be a popular fashion photographer on Instagram, or a well-read cybersecurity blogger who tweets, or a respected marketing executive on LinkedIn. Within any industry, there are influential people—you just have to find them. Some will have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of followers. But many will seem more like ordinary people. They may only have 10,000 followers, less in some cases. Yet, they will have developed a reputation for being the experts in their field. They are the go-to people who provide the answers to people’s questions. Depending on their sphere of expertise, they are the people who make the most engaging social posts on their specialist topics. They share the best pictures, make the most entertaining videos, and run the most informative online discussions.
