Monday, March 09, 2020

Social Media Influencers & Digital Marketing Strategy

One day in the not-so-distant past, I was scrolling through my Instagram feed to catch up on friends’ posts. I quickly scrolled past a number of targeted ads (Instagram’s targeting algorithm is quite accurate for me, and I wasn’t in the mood to be tempted to purchase whatever item had been perfectly pushed my way that afternoon). But then I saw it: An amazing photo of Jennifer Lopez in what I knew was the most perfect sweatshirt ever designed in the history of fashion:


The next thing I knew, I was frantically searching Coach’s website and messaging friends and classmates to learn every- and anything I could about this Barbra Streisand sweatshirt.

This was a perfect example of social media influencer marketing. According to Business Insider, “Brands are set to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022…up from as much as $8 billion in 2019, according to Business Insider Intelligence estimates, based on Mediakix data.”

While my reaction to Jennifer Lopez wearing a Barbra Streisand sweatshirt is just one data point, it makes good sense to me that, in a time when consumers are becoming more conscious of how they’re being watched or tracked online, brands will go the way of enlisting influencers – real humans, not just algorithms – as part of their digital marketing strategies. And as these strategies develop, brands are getting smarter about how to maximize impact on influencer campaigns like Coach’s. For example, sometimes a big name like Jennifer Lopez isn’t necessary for a campaign to succeed. According to a 2019 eMarketer report, “A growing number of marketers are taking a back-to-basics approach, scaling back their use of celebrities and megacreators for so-called ‘micro-‘ and ‘nano-‘ influencers who have smaller audiences but may actually use a product and can speak authentically about it.”

Influencer marketing has some risk tied to it – surely nobody will forget the debacle of Fyre Festival any time soon, and one could question whether the products featured within influencer marketing posts are trustworthy – but as brands increase spending in this area and work to get smarter at building authentic, influencer-led campaigns, it will be interesting to watch how this space evolves both for consumers and for businesses.

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