The last few years saw the rapid growth of social media influencers’ popularity in numerous fields. And 2019 is expected to be the optimal year for them to thrive. And for marketers, regardless of what they are marketing—commercial products, politics, etc.—underestimating the role that those social media influencers play would be considered a big mistake. There are many reasons why you should turn to social media influencers to achieve your marketing goals this year, if you haven’t already done so.
Statistics show that social media influencers truly have a great influencing power.
If you want to know how powerful social media influencers are in influencing people, see the statistics. The fact that 70 percent of teens trust their influencers, more than 80 percent of women rely on social media influencers to buy stuff, businesses earn $6.5 for every dollar they spend on influencers, influencer marketing has become the fastest-growing method to attract customers, more than half of worldwide fashion industries rely on social media influencers in their marketing campaign, influencer marketing business will hit the $10-billion threshold by 2010, influencer marketing has surpassed print marketing, and many other statistical data show the tremendous effectiveness of influencer marketing are clear signs that today and in the future, businesses will rely on influencer marketing campaign at a much higher level than before.
Social media influencers are more reliable than celebrities.
People actually trust social media influencers more than they trust celebrities. The statistics above have shown you the data, but there are also some clear reasons why people’s trust in social media influencers is generally bigger than their trust in celebrities. To begin with, they are already fed up with printed, TV, and online commercials, in which celebrities show their face and verbalize their obviously fake marketing messages. Everyone knows that commercials lie more than they tell the truth about the products they promote, and celebrities are already deeply involved in this big lie. Influencers, on the other hand, speak more believable messages, even when they are promoting a product, because they promote the product using more genuine testimonials and because they position themselves as ordinary people, just like the people whom they influence.
Many people prefer to block advertisements.
The only other massive promotional tool that businesses can use besides social media influencers is advertisement. However, as already explained above, people generally hate advertisements, commercials, and the like. Many of them even go as far as installing ad blocker on their device to make sure that the websites they visit, YouTube videos they watch, and other digital contents that they enjoy don’t show any advertisement whatsoever. Social media influencers, on the other hand, offer messages—including promotional—that they are ready to receive. Even people who don’t really like promotional messages will become more receptive if those messages are given by their influencers. With social media influencers dominating the marketing world, failing to team up with them in your marketing campaign will put you far behind your competitors.
People tend to listen to honest testimonials.
When people try to find a certain product to buy, before or after they visit the online or offline stores where the product is sold, they will go places to check out reviews and testimonials, preferably the honest ones. They will seek valuable advice and they will even be more willing to buy the product if they buy it through referrals. The reason why there are so many review websites on the internet is this consumer behavior. Many people believe that social media influencers are the most reliable reviewers who will least likely publish faked reviews because doing so may cause them to risk losing their fans.
The best marketing strategy tends to be inbound.
Based on all reasons that are already mentioned above, we can sum up that inbound marketing strategies tend to be more successful than outbound ones. Businesses have already been practicing various outbound strategies, including advertising, mass emails, mailshots, etc.; however, they generally gain a much bigger marketing success when they use inbound marketing strategies, such as reviews and testimonials. This is actually normal because customers are naturally inbound entities, so they will likely follow and be influenced by people who can convince them to buy certain products. This is also true outside commercial activities. People tend to trust people with influence who support or criticize certain government regulations more than they trust the official announcement provided by the authorities.
With all of the reasons above explained, it is very true that influencer marketing will be the dominating marketing power in the future and, for businesses, skipping it would not be considered a wise step.
