Current Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a form of online marketing that involves leveraging the influence of popular individuals and/or organizations on social media to promote products or services. This type of marketing has become increasingly popular in recent years as influencers have become more and more influential in the digital space. Influencers have the power to reach a large audience and can often be more effective than traditional forms of advertising. As a result, many brands have turned to influencers to help them reach their target audience and spread their message. The current state of influencer marketing is strong and growing, with more businesses investing in influencer marketing campaigns to reach new audiences, drive sales, and build brand awareness.

In the past five years, searches for influencer marketers on Google have skyrocketed, with businesses from small homegrown ones to Fortune 500 brands investing heavily in the farm. When a brand decides to add influencer marketing campaigns to their marketing mix, they can choose to approach the influencer directly or work with influencer management agencies. The former is a tedious process, while the latter is costly and may not be the most optimised for the brand’s audience or requirements. When selecting micro/macro influencers, brands usually rely on their follower count, engagement rate, and the sentiment they have on people or other brands. However, this selection process is often based on old posts provided by the influencer, skewing the data in their favour.

As a result, results yielded by companies relying on these metrics may be unreliable. What’s more, brands often face difficulties extracting in-depth data from incentive influencer posts. While they may get some general data about the post’s performance after it is made, most do not get to trace the deeper metrics of how users engage with the incentive content. Likewise, the value of influencers' traffic contribution to the brands is not being rewarded on a practical basis because it can not be accurately measured.

Although there are a couple of problems that negatively impact all participants and hinder the increased growth of influencer marketing, the industry has proven to be effective for brands since it is still being used increasingly.