Marketing has always been one of my favorite things to learn about because the work requires you to find the balance between creative work and quantitative fact and is grounded in the understanding of human behavior and how to nudge people to make decisions in your favor.
Working in Analytics has taught me how to use past results to make better decisions and the importance of accurately measuring your initiatives, factoring in all things that could affect the outcome of the consumer response. Marketing isn’t a binary response where exposure to an ad = changed behavior, it’s more like an exercise where you want to strengthen the association between an ad and your brand. The more you’re able to effectively get a rep into the consumers mind, the stronger the chance they have of recalling the ad later.
What makes influencer marketing so interesting to me is that brands are using influencers and the trust their followers have in them to drive those followers to the brand. This type of marketing has gone through so many iterations over the years:
Early Days: Early on, influencer marketing was all about reach. Who has the most followers? How many eyes can you get on your brand? It was another vehicle of mass marketing similar to a national ad, but there wasn’t as much of a focus on synergies between the brand and the influencer. This is what made the Kardashians and other celebs so valuable and allowed them to charge insane amounts of money to post on their accounts.
The Evolution: Once brands realized that reaching eyes doesn’t lead to sales, they started to see how much value came from picking the RIGHT influencer that actually had a following that cared about them and had large amounts of followers. To me the peak of this was when Vine was extremely popular and you were seeing all of these Vine stars suddenly getting big opportunities with big brands and running ads with them and starring in movies.
Today: Today, you’re seeing an even bigger specialization in influencer marketing with Micro influencers not only proving to be good stewarts of their own personal brands, but their fans being far more engaged with them and also having deeper trust in the opinion of these influencers because the niche they are in leads to an extremely tight-knit community and can lead to a better response for the brands that work with these micro influencers who have very high engagement with their audiences and their brands are more specialized, allowing for brand synergies to be easier for the brand to find and for them to better target specific people they want to reach.
So the question that I keep asking myself now is what’s going to happen next? Will there be more reigning in of advertising in the influencer space? Are we reaching the point where it’s TOO expensive to do influencer marketing?