The rise of influencer marketing

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

The rise of influencer marketing

- When you have a product or a service to sell, one of your primary tasks is finding the shortest and surest way to your customers' heart. For years, marketing theorists have been analyzing and practitioners experimenting with an array of vehicles to carry the message from the advertiser to the end consumer. Some have been more effective than others. In this video, we will trace how the evolution of marketing and internet-powered technologies culminated in a powerful type of marketing called influencer marketing.

In recent years, influencer marketing has been on a notable rise. So much so that in 2016, Google classified the key phrase influencer marketing as a breakout term, or one experiencing search growth greater than 5000%. This clearly indicates peoples' interest in it. Some call it word of mouth marketing on steroids. Others believe it to be a form of affiliate marketing. While it is in many ways related to both, for a better understanding of what is really going on, we must roll back at least 30 years in the history of marketing.

In the 1980s and 90s, businesses realized the power of peer recommendations, and began to actively focus on word-of-mouth marketing. Companies began encouraging customers to recommend their brands and products to friends and family. In 1999, marketing luminary Seth Godin proclaimed that the interruption marketing is doomed as a mass marketing tool. In other words, don't make your prospects stop what they are doing to pay attention to your marketing message, but rather focus on permission marketing, within which the consumer decides who to listen to.

Instead of interrupting strangers, Godin said, "Think of marketing like dating, "focusing on turning strangers into friends, "and friends into lifetime customers." With time and the evolution of blogging and online forums, the concept of seeding had evolved. Seeding is when marketers construct conversations, engineering the buzz, as well as targeting select individuals to sample their products and review them online. In 2005, YouTube was created, and in 2006, Twitter launched, and Facebook was opened for public access.

With some three billion combined monthly visitors, these three remain to be the top social media platforms. These, as well as Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and others, have changed the end consumer, calling for a change in how brands do marketing as well. By 2014, the advancement of mobile internet had made the present day consumer more connected than ever before. With all of this, you can understand why consumers have grown weary of advertising, or interruption marketing.

Our customers have taken a definitive turn towards what's most natural to believe. According to a 2015 Global Trust in Advertising report by Nielsen, the most credible advertising comes straight from the people we know and trust. More than 8 in 10 respondents, or 83%, stated they completely, or somewhat, trust recommendations of friends and family. 66% of respondents chose consumer opinions posted online as a trusted source.

Similar studies have confirmed similar findings. The Razorfish Fluent report revealed that online influencers such as bloggers and social media influencers score second only to your closest friends and family. Present day consumers are tired of being bombarded by advertisements. They are also now heavily connected with other consumers, and by the ever-evolving social networking opportunities empowered by the internet. All of this has created a perfect storm for the birth of an extremely powerful type of marketing, influencer marketing, which relies on taste-makers for targeted message dissemination, is what we will study in this course.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/marketing-foundations-influencer-marketing