Why Influencer Marketing Is the Next Big Channel

As a channel, influencer marketing provides brands with a fast, easy, pain-free way to not only reach, but engage their customers through a modern-day rendition of the oldest trick in the book: the endorsement. As we know, influencer marketing is on the come up, disregarding its long history when we referred to it as a ‘celebrity endorsement.’ Technically, we’ve just given the influencer more leverage since the age of Joe DiMaggio and the Wheaties ad. However, I say endorsement, leaving out “celebrity” because in actuality, more times than not, a brand’s engagement is higher when using an influencer who is less well known. The chances that your favorite celebrity reaches more people than a less popular influencer are high, but if you want real engagement with your customers, and their followers, it’s always more beneficial to choose someone with a narrow and specific following; bigger is not always better.

Using an influencer marketing platform such as HYPR can simplify your search even more with specific tools and ways to narrow your search by age range, gender, or the subject of your audience, like Beauty, Health and Wellness, or Sports. It’s important to do your research as you are finding influencers. to take a look at, and monitor an influencer’s following to get an idea of how it will work in your favor.

(Deliciously Ella social influence data – https://hyprbrands.com/influencers/deliciouslyella)

Influencer marketing works because it’s impact is powerful. Influencer marketing is about developing a relationship of trust between your influencer and your brand. A customer is going to trust a friend or a small time, or local celebrity more than he or she trusts someone like Kim Kardashian, which adds another positive note for brands, because someone with under 100,000 followers is going to require a much smaller paycheck than someone like Kim, who has close to 100 million followers.

When we break it down, influencer marketing is just more effective as a channel because it doesn’t beat around the bush. Money isn’t being unnecessarily spent because the effort made is towards a specific audience that matches up with the target audience at hand.

If we think about influencer marketing as a shotgun method of marketing, we can best understand how it’s the most efficient way to market. Instead of spraying (hypothetically) an advertisement at the world and hitting a variety of people, most of whom will not be engaged, either because the product does not appeal to him or her, or because he or she feels as though the (minimal) effort was made generally.