One of the most influential social media trends in recent years is influencer marketing. With billions of active users alone on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, brands are putting thought and emphasis into influencer relations to reach audiences that traditional advertising hasn’t. Brand development and recognition can be done through leveraging trust, connectedness, and community influence.

Why Influencer Marketing is Successful

Influencers rather than celebrity endorsements are usually regular people who have created a community around a niche interest like fashion, health and fitness, travel, or tech. Due to shared experience rather than a direct endorsement, their endorsements come across as more natural and authentic. This authenticity creates trust and leads to people being more likely to give a product or a service a chance that their proud influencer has used, has endorsed, or suggested.

Social media platforms also favor engagement thanks to their algorithm. Influencers will typically receive favorable engagement (comments, shares, likes) that gets amplified first to their own content and frequently to the brand that they are promoting as an additional bonus.

Benefits to Organizations

1. Broader Reach – Influencers enable brands to reach into a highly niche audience. For example, a health-minded consumer that is looking to buy a wellness product has access to a fitness influencer.
2. Less-Expensive Campaigns – Most ads are costly to execute and less flexible compared to influencer campaigns. Micro-to mind influencers that have lower engagement rates are still capable of producing similar results and through a cheaper price tag than those of big influencers.
3. Greater Loyalty and Trust – People are far more likely to trust a word of mouth from a person whom they follow and revere than an ad from a large media campaign. This added trust can lead to higher brand loyalty.
4. 4. Better Content Creation – Influencers understand how to create content that is familiar to you, stylish and trending. Brands have the ability to use an influencer’s content repeatedly and on their own social media as well, if needed.

Strategies for Influencer Marketing

1. Choose Relatable Influencers – Choose relatability over following count! An influencer that has less brand exposure can generate you more than a brand-time exposure with the influencer fitting a brand rep either.
2. Be Authentic – Let the influencer tell your product or services and in their engagement voice. Consumers will believe an influencer’s real and authentic experience more than a script that looks constricted.
3. Set Specific Objectives – Consider what your goal of your campaign is -brand awareness, website traffic, or sales. You will have a hard time tracking the ROI if you do not have specific and quantifiable outcome tracking.
4. Develop Long-term Engagements – While you may have a onetime engagement, the value in trust gets lost, and future engagements may feel canned and brand time for these long engagements.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is no longer a trend and ought to be included in all social media development strategies. Brands that do so will align with an appropriate influencer, and will demonstrate relevance to not only influencer followers but to influencer audiences. Social media will keep evolving and evolving interaction with influencers will yet again be a bridge audience.