Digital marketing has been growing in complexity with each passing year. Marketers are implementing all sorts of strategies to boost their brand above the rest of the competition. However, one change that has been making waves in the marketing scene is the rise of influencers.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing refers to the practice of hiring or sponsoring influential social media users to promote or endorse your brand’s products and/or services. These social media users typically have a large following of dedicated followers who trust them to provide good recommendations.
Why is Influential Marketing Significant?
Influence marketing can be viewed as a commercialized variant of word-of-mouth marketing. This is based on the principle that people are more likely to listen to the recommendations of others they know instead of a marketer or an advertisement. However, few people realize that social media influencers themselves are a type of freelance marketer.
Are Influencers the Future of Content Marketing?
A single recommendation from a social media influencer can boost brand awareness significantly. This approach is guaranteed to generate a large amount of web traffic, and may offer better results than using other forms of paid advertising.
This also makes influencer marketing far more likely to generate traffic compared to the traditional content marketing approach of creating SEO-friendly content and hoping it ranks well in search engine results. After learning this, it’s natural to assume that traditional content marketing will become obsolete due to the rise of influencer marketing.
Given the widespread adoption of social media, it’s safe to say that influencer marketing is here to stay. But will it actually replace other forms of content marketing? There are many reasons to assume it won’t.
A New Type of Advertising
Content marketers can be viewed as the next stage of advertising, with content marketers being the ones that create and present these advertisements.
Ordinary web advertisers who have a wide reach, typically charge their clients more to promote their brand. Similarly, the more popular an influencer is, the higher their fee will be. However, these high costs may also put popular influencers out of reach for businesses with smaller marketing budgets.
As a result, these businesses may need to rely on traditional content marketing practices for promotion. This makes it likely that traditional marketing will still exist alongside social media influencers.
Quantity of Content
Social media users enjoy following influencers because of their trustworthiness, and the personalized touch they provide in their content. However, this may also limit the quantity of content a particular influencer can put out within a given amount of time. With the exception of large corporations who have the funds to hire multiple social media marketers, most businesses may need to use a combination of influencer marketing and traditional content marketing to get the word out about their brand. So, traditional content marketers should view influencers as potential allies, instead of as competitors.
