Everyone is always asking does “Influencer Marketing” actually work or is sending products to bloggers who will inevitably gush over how amazing the product a waste of time and money.
Aside from the whole debate about picking your influencers wisely and selecting people who A) are genuinely interested in your product and B) have the experience or expertise or have simply shown that they can properly review your product and remain unbiased.
I thought about myself not as an influencer but as a consumer and realised just how integrated influencer marketing has become in my own day-to-day life. It is the primary form of advertising that I am exposed to.
See I don’t watch television, I stream so no ads. I don’t listen to the radio while driving. I don’t read magazines or actual newspapers. I read my news online and even then I have an Ad-Blocker on. I also couldn’t care less about which celebrity is endorsing what or is the face of a brand.
However, I’ll follow my favourite beauty blog on Twitter and see a press-drop for a new product that I’d like to try and perhaps next time when I’m in Clicks and spot it there I’ll pick it up. That influenced me. Sure, a well written blog post might have encouraged me even more to try something new but on a whim I chose something simply because I saw it on an influencers page.
That to me shows that Influencer Marketing truly does work. Yes, the more natural a product placement on an influencers feed is the more likely I am to trust in both the product and the influencer. However, even seeing the product repeatedly will have an influence on my spending habits the same way a big TV advert probably had in the past.
