The Age of Influencers

“All the cool kids are doing it”. Remember hearing that on the school yard? I do.

In the case of influencer marketing, it’s true.

The even cooler kids are doing it well. Their monetizing their online presence with user generated content and they’re changing the marketing landscape in a massive way.

But before we look at the change, let’s define our terms. This is particularly important because of social media, where technically, everyone can be an influencer.

Think of all the platforms we’re on. Every day, we get the highlight, or lowlight, reel of our friends’ lives. That builds our aspiration and inspiration to act. For better or worse.

Either way, it’s clear that we are all heavily influenced by our digital networks and the way we use them.

Influencers then, are those who use their networks to build a following, a micro-audience, on a particular topic or topics. Their audience looks to them to create or share strong and valuable opinions about certain areas of life. Parenting, sports, travel, food, the list goes on.

Influencers audiences are not only niche, they are engaged: ready and willing to listen to the perspective of the ones they follow.

This allows influencers to promote brands in their space, usually at a small cost to the company employing them in comparison to traditional ad spend; which is especially true when you remember how qualified the influencers’ followers are. There’s no question that views are more valuable on an influencer’s platform than an ad stuck on the right side of the screen while scrolling by.

Influencers save businesses money, make their content more relatable and generate massive audience engagement.

The poster boy for influencer marketing is Daniel Wellington. The Swedish watch company made a record $111M in profit by using UGC, 2016-2017.

More than profit, influencers also add a creative, layered approach to a brand. Different influencers in the same space can have different styles, different ways of presenting the same material.

This is good because it allows for a diversified aesthetic which can reach more people than what a single internal marketing department or external agency could do by themselves.

So when you hire a single agency that has an influencer program it's actually like hiring many agencies: meaning more content, more creativity, more perspectives, more audiences, more sales.

That’s why influencers are, in fact, so cool right now.