Using influencers to boost market recognition has become an
essential part of marketing strategy for most brands. These brands count on influencers
they partner with to endorse their products and ‘influence’ their followers to purchase
them. Hence, it’s obvious that more followers make an influencer more valuable,
making them able to demand heavier fees. This frenzied competition to increase
followers has led some so called ‘influencers’ to artificially inflate their follower
numbers. With the popularity of influencer aided marketing growing in recent
months, the phenomenon of using bots to increase follower numbers has also seen
a rise. These bots with non-human profiles add no value for the brands and
result in a complete waste of marketing budget.
This problem of losing money to inluencers with fake followers has started
to significantly eat into brand marketing spend. According to a new report from
Points North Group, an influencer marketing analytics specialist, out of the
$744 million that brands spent on influencer marketing in 2018, $102 million
was wasted on fake followers. Some brands have been hit harder than others.
According to data published by Points North Group, Raw Sugar Living lost nearly
half (46%) of their marketing spend on bots and fake followers. Even apparently
digitally savvy brands such as the Amazon owned Zappos lost more than a third
(38%) of their marketing dollars to these fraudsters.
Big organizations such as Unilever have also been impacted. Last
year, a quarter of the cash that Unilever's Dove brand spent on influencer
marketing went to fake followers. This led to CMO Keith Weeds to publicly announce
that Unilever will no longer work with social influencers who inflate the cost
of their partnerships using fake followers. If such announcements will lead to
a reduction of bot usage remains to be seen. At the very least it will
highlight this growing problem and encourage strategies that mitigate the risk
of brands falling victim of this digital fraud
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