The study reveals that the Influencer Marketing market size will reach $84.89 billion in 2028, which is several times more than 2022 and 2023. In 2024, the Influencer Marketing market size is projected to grow to $22.3 billion. However, not everyone fully understands what this promising area of marketing is all about. Let’s understand what influencer marketing is, how it works, what the future holds and how to succeed in this promising area of digital marketing.
What is Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a strategy for promoting products or services in which a brand collaborates with an influencer for some audience. In the process of collaboration, the Influencer advertises the brand’s product or service, after which the audience, interested in the products, buys them or takes other targeted actions. As a result of the collaboration, the brand receives an influx of target audience and increased sales, while the Influencer receives a monetary reward. In essence, Influencer Marketing is a mixture of classic marketing strategies and utilizing people who have credibility with their audience and can influence them.
Influencers can be anyone, it doesn’t necessarily have to be media personalities and celebrities. Influencers are people with a large audience and a large number of followers on a personal blog or on social media. Influencers can be an author of a fitness blog, a popular photo model or an experienced expert in the field of cryptocurrencies. The only difference is the number of subscribers and the topic of the posts, but this is what brands pay attention to when choosing an Influencer. The chosen topic will determine whether the brand will have an influx of target audience or uninterested users. The number of subscribers will determine how many users will be directed to the brand’s offers — the more subscribers, the more likely some of them will click through to the brand’s offer.
Basic principles of Influencer Marketing
Before starting to work with Influencer marketing, it is important to make a clear plan and work out the strategy of the campaign. It is also worth calculating the budget in advance. A good solution is to spend some time on analytics – what audience is needed, which Influencer is suitable for promotion, how many subscribers it should have, etc.
After that, you can start searching for an Influencer. You can contact them directly or use the services of specialized agencies to find Influencers. Before proposing to them, try to build rapport and only after that move on to a business conversation. Agree on the terms of cooperation – how much revenue the Influencer will receive, how much content with advertising he should release, and determine the timing of the release of advertising content.
Any Influencer’s reputation is important, so they will not jeopardize it by advertising low-quality goods or dubious services. Verify your offerers and make sure your products are of quality so that you don’t degrade the reputation of the brand and the Influencer. Influencer marketing will not be able to bring you a huge audience in a short time. This strategy will slowly but effectively bring you an audience that is interested in your products and services.
You need to find an individual approach to each Influencer rather than acting on generalized guidelines. They are people, not a marketing tool, so it’s important to treat them like people. If you want a truly engaged and loyal audience, don’t just focus on the popularity of the Influencer. Popular people can have little to no influence on their audience, and conversely, very niche bloggers with few subscribers can influence their opinions and actions.
Why Influencer Marketing is so effective
Some brands are hesitant to use full-blown Influencer Marketing in their campaigns. Instead, they use a traditional approach, or use their own subscribers as micro-influencers to get organic traffic. While traditional marketing involves classic strategies, using subscribers is not the most obvious way.
The essence of this method is that as a brand’s blog or social account develops and is filled with content, the most active subscribers are identified. By taking a personalized approach to these subscribers, for example, by appointing them as moderators or giving them a discount on products, brands motivate them to invite their friends and acquaintances to the brand’s website, blog or account, where they can later buy something, order something or perform another targeted action. However, this method has many disadvantages, the main of which is a very low conversion rate, since active subscribers rarely have more than 100 friends and acquaintances. In addition, finding the most active subscribers can be time-consuming
Influencer marketing eliminates these disadvantages – by engaging an Influencer, a brand saves a lot of time and gets more subscribers in the long run. Also, a brand can engage multiple Influencers, which will greatly increase the influx of loyal subscribers. If a brand has built a good relationship with an Influencer, by partnering with them, the company can get a stream of targeted and engaged audiences for a very long time.
Future of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is becoming more and more popular every year. Brands are realizing the effectiveness of this approach and are developing new ways to integrate this strategy into their campaigns. The Influencer Marketing Hub blog conducted its own research to determine what the future holds for Influencer Marketing.
More Influencer Search Agencies will emerge
Due to the growing popularity of Influencer Marketing, various companies are regularly creating websites and platforms to help brands find Influencers for given criteria. In 2023 alone, there are over 240 new platforms and agencies providing influencer search services. This number is expected to increase strongly every year.
Increase in companies’ budget for Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Over 50% of companies are realizing the prospects of Influencer Marketing and are allocating more budget to use this promotional strategy, giving less priority to other strategies. In the future, even more company budgets will be spent on Influencer Marketing, pushing other strategies out of marketers’ arsenal.
Influencer marketing on instagram
Instagram is experiencing an extraordinary surge in user engagement, with 95 million photos uploaded and 4.2 billion likes on content every day. According to Semrush, Instagram is one of the 12 most visited platforms in the world, garnering 6.89 billion monthly visits.
Different types of content show different user engagement rates, with photo uploads at 0.59%, posts at 1.26%, and videos at 1.23%. Business accounts typically publish an average of 1.71 posts per day, with 48.9% photos, 31.8% videos, and 19.3% carousel posts.
Instagram’s advertising potential is huge, connecting with at least 996 million users through Stories and up to 1.32 billion through the feed.
Facebook’s acquisition has greatly accelerated Instagram’s growth to over 2.35 billion monthly active users. The Stories feature on the platform resonates with 996 million daily users.
The dynamics of influencers in different niches
Influencers on Instagram vary greatly by niche. While modeling and beauty users boast millions of followers, there are fewer “superstars” in niches such as lifestyle and music, resulting in a lower average number of followers per influencer.
The rapid growth of influencer marketing and Instagram becoming an important social channel has led to brands spending significantly more on influencer engagement. With 76.7% of marketers using Instagram to engage with influencers, it will become the leading influencer marketing platform in 2023.
The rise of influencer marketing and increased ad transparency has led to a significant spike in sponsored posts by influencers. Instagram has seen a staggering 27% growth in #ad-tagged posts, from 3.8 million in 2021 to a projected 6.12 million in 2023.
Instagram outperforms Twitter but lags behind TikTok in terms of engagement. Posts on this platform tend to have higher engagement due to their longer visibility. Small influencers consistently achieve higher engagement rates on Instagram (7.2%), Twitter (1.4%), and TikTok (9.38%), while mega-influencers have lower average engagement rates: 1.1% on Instagram, 0.3% on Twitter, and 5.3% on TikTok.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is one of the most promising areas of modern marketing. If you are planning to use Influencer marketing in your advertising campaigns, be sure to take into account the basic principles we have highlighted in this article. Keep an eye on the evolution of this marketing strategy, because based on research, Influencer marketing will eventually supplant other digital marketing strategies.
