Impact of Influencer Marketing on Advertisers in Times of Covid-19
Impact of Influencer Marketing on Advertisers in Times of Covid-19
While everything has become online today, offline marketing strategies are slowly being switched to the digital end. As the existing and renowned brands are focusing on their online sales, the need for relevant influencers is rapidly increasing. Hence, with new businesses coming online, many new influencers are also being observed.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer Marketing is termed to be a collaboration of brands with social media influencers so as to have mutual benefits. These benefits could be either monetary or non-monetary. In simpler words, a brand and an influencer come together via barter or paid collaboration for a higher audience reach. Depending upon the purpose of a brand, it might approach an established blogger or as much as a microblogger. Influencer marketing could be substituted with a social media strategy under digital marketing as a form of content curation.
Influencer Marketing has become one powerful marketing strategy that must be adopted by the brands – existing and new ones. In times of COVID 19, it has indeed become the need of the hour. Advertisers/Brands/Businesses which used to be behind the digital store, are now leading social media platforms using the power of influencer marketing. As much as offline markets are dynamic, social media platforms change too. Hence, consistent research has become a requirement for optimum results. For this, advertisers must keep up with the latest trends, viral content or even contests that could attract more users. In 2020, major growth in influencer marketing was observed which directly impacted brand
advertisers.
Here are some of the major ones:
Rise of Micro-Influencers
As observed during lockdown, young influencers with organic content and follow base were pitched more than the celebrities. Primarily the reason behind pitching them are as follows:
• Barter Collaboration
• Genuine Follow Base
• High Influential Power
• Maximum Efforts
• Immediate Results
Micro-Influencers tend to focus more on non-monetary benefits which help the advertisers to spend less on marketing strategies. Brands like Mama Earth, Caffeine, Paper Boat were observed targeting such influencers which helped them cover a huge online market share leading to market growth.
Better Reviews
Pitching social media influencers has not only proved to be effective in terms of cost, time and efforts but has also resulted in generating better reviews. The reason being, influencers are first asked to receive, use and then provide with personal reviews for a product/service. Here, videos play a vital role for which users tend to get influenced and hence the positive electronic word of mouth is spread. It was during Covid-19, immunity-based capsules were produced by various companies and rapid demand for customized masks has been observed over social media platforms especially on Instagram.
Return on Investment
Ever since the need for digitalization rose, social media platforms were the first to approach. With the consistent growth of e-businesses/influencers, such platforms came up with its own analytics. These analytics not only helped in providing numbers but over the years, the insights also provided the right direction. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, for every $1 that brands spend on influencers, they are getting an ROI of $5.78. Sponsored blog posts alone have proven to yield up to 11x more ROI than standard banner ads. That’s counting the increase in revenue. According to sources, it was a survey conducted by Mediakix, it was observed that 89% say influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other channels.
To conclude, it’ll be right to say that influencer marketing is definitely influencing brands to switch from other channels right away!