Influencer Marketing: Driving Impact & Business Results Through Digital Brand Partnership
As second-semester students of Digital Media Marketing at George Brown College, Toronto, every week we get an opportunity to attend a session by one of the marketing experts. Last week Ashley Walsh senior account director at North Strategic, one of the professionals with years of experience in influencer marketing, shared her experience and guided us about trends and career opportunities in influencer marketing. In this blog let me put some light on the session to give my audience an overview of how Influence marketing works in 2022.
Selecting Right Influencer: For a digital marketer or digital agency, influence marketing plays an important role in building a brand. It looks more natural to the audience because of the trust they have in the influencer partnered with the brand. However, it requires a deep understanding of the audience, brand, and market to select the right influencer for the brand. Some of the factors that a marketer needs to consider while selecting influencers for their brand are budget, the number of influencers’ followers, the client’s recommendation, the influencer audience background, targeted audience, and also engagement rate.
Influencer Marketing Stats & Trends: Branding is not what we present to the consumer, but actually what they tell about the brand to each other, and influencer marketing helps a brand to gain a loyal audience by creating trust. Talking about the social media platforms and industry statistics 87% of the audience took action after seeing product information on their Instagram platform following TikTok and YouTube shorts. According to marketers, influence marketing is 89% better than any other form of marketing in terms of returns on investment. Moreover, 75% of markers always have a dedicated budget for influence marketing. AI virtual influencer is the future with the rise of Meta verse we are definitely going to see more of it, especially with big tech and fashion brands. By the end of 2022, it is expected that the influence marketing space will grow to be worth $16.4 billion which is $3 billion more compared to last year.
Career in Influencer Marketing: I personally think the influencer market is the backbone of today’s marketing strategies and this is what got my attention from the very beginning of my career as a result I started my YouTube channel and in a year of time I successfully made a community of 2800+ people and will definitely going to focus on its growth. What I relished from my experience is being an influencer you have to be very consistent with your content. Being consistent on social media platforms is key to unit your audience.
Question/ Answer: In this one and a half hour of session one question that I asked our guest speaker is about how to get rid of fake followers, views, and likes on your account because sometimes competitors can try to spam your account, and the answer I got from our guest speaker Ashley Walsh is that there is no such solution to stop that until or unless you don’t have a private account. So this is quite challenging for content creators and influencers to get rid of these bots.
If you are someone who is looking to be an influencer marketer always focus on contacts and guidelines before collaborating with any of the partners. With this, I would like to thank my professor Wendy Greenwood for this inviting Ashley as a guest speaker and for such an informative session.
