Influencer marketing has been on the rise for quite some time now, but a recent article by Social Times named this trend, the “new content king”.
With the growing number and popularity of blogs and YouTube vloggers, consumers are now turning to influencers on these platforms to give them product recommendations. Why? This is simple: consumers trust independent influencers more than brands.
This is not to say that consumers don’t consult the actual brand or retail sites before making a product purchase. Retail and brand sites still remain the #1 most influential platforms to guide consumer decisions; however, blogs have risen to #2. This is because consumers can visit the brand site and absorb the information that the company is putting out there, which depicts the company or product in the best possible light, and then they consult blogs as a reassurance mechanism. The blogger or YouTube star is an independent entity apart from the company, and they are not afraid to give bad product reviews.
Even though consumers know certain influencers are paid by the companies to give those reviews, according to The Shelf infographics, “92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people – even someone they don’t know – over brand content”.
The growing importance of influencer marketing is also reflected in companies’ ever-changing marketing budgets. The Shelf infographic also shows the vast amounts of money that go into these budgets, with 5% of companies having an influencer marketing budget of over $5 million per annum, and 25% of companies having a budget of $500k per year.
When put into perspective, these are huge amounts of money that are only going towards sponsorship of influencers. So are these bog-scale budgets worth it?
The simple answer is yes!
Not only are companies allowing consumers to build trust to the brand at a faster rate by using these influencers, but they’re also increasing the number of conversations of their brand, in turn building awareness and attracting new customers. Influencer marketing can increase the amounts of conversations by 3-10 times, meaning vast awareness, and a huge potential to retaining existing consumers and acquiring new ones.
This is proof that the trend of influencer marketing is here to stay, but it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Will bloggers become more involved in the brand advertisements? Will consumers turn to different platforms for reviews? Only time will tell.
Sources:
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