Last year, the influencer marketing industry was worth nearly $14 billion, and about 60 percent of all companies had a specific budget dedicated to content marketing. Additionally, nearly 80 percent of companies had the intention to allocate specific funds for influencer marketing campaigns, which means this type of marketing effort is incredibly important for companies to reach their target audiences and develop more trusting and loyal relationships with them.

Influencers

According to research, about 5 percent of Internet users have control over 80 percent of overall page impressions, simply because these people have made a unique brand for themselves. They’ve managed to evolve in a way to turn their pseudonym or actual name into a brand by positioning themselves, and their content as experts. Aside from simply sharing valuable information with their audiences, they become content creators that are constantly communicating with their followers, successfully building a community in this way. 

Influencers are people that truly care about their target audiences and fully understand whom they’re communicating with daily. For these influencers, and the companies that are interested in collaborating with them on promotional efforts, the quality of the followers that the influencers have is a lot more important than the quantity, because the audience, the influencers, are curators of high-quality content. This is one of the ways that they are able to successfully develop and maintain a trusting relationship with the followers, interact with them and engage them in conversations.

Influence

Social media influencers, as well as content creators, are individuals and not companies or machines, which allows them to identify with other people and establish long-term relationships with their followers. However, these influencers still need to have a somewhat specific area of expertise, while still being adaptable and flexible enough to talk about several different topics to be able to find more common ground with other brands, and even influencers, too. Because of that, influencers have their own opinions which can easily sway and influence the opinions of their followers, and the overall audience that they have, and encourage those people to share their own opinions on social media platforms. 

That means if a company is looking for more strategic and relevant information on a specific topic, a great resource for this type of information is directly created by influencers, as well as their followers. Not only that, but the followers of influencers really respect the opinions that they have, which means if a company is able to get a social media influencer, or a content creator, interested in, and even happy with talking about a company and recommending its solutions, the company increases its odds at getting the followers of that influencers to try out the company’s product as well.

The author, Dara Busch, is Co-CEO of 5WPR, a leading influencer marketing agency.