Influencer marketing: does it really have the expected impact?
Teresa Sádaba and Patricia SanMiguel analyze the reach and effectiveness of influencer campaigns in an article published in Harvard Deusto Magazine.
Photo /Teresa Sádaba and Patricia SanMiguel unveil 10 benefits of Influencer Marketing.
17 | 07 | 2020
Harvard Deusto Magazine publishes in its July issue an article by Teresa Sádaba, director of ISEM Fashion Business School, and Patricia SanMiguel, professor of Digital Marketing in the Executive Master in Fashion Business Administration. The text analyzes influencer marketing strategies and what should be taken into account when launching a campaign of this type. It also includes a summary of the possible benefits of this type of strategy.
Influencer Marketing: does it really have the expected effect?
Influencers are in fashion. But we do not know if it is a passing trend or if they are here to stay. This will depend, to a large extent, on whether the impact of the marketing and advertising actions they carry out are sustainable over time and whether it is clearly demonstrated that they are profitable. With the data and the path we currently have, does the role of influencers get the expected return, either in brand image or sales?
In a world saturated with social connections and advertising impacts, the relationship between brands and consumers is certainly complex. The COVID-19 crisis has only increased the number of messages, offers and content circulating on the Internet. This is why, today more than ever, the great challenge for marketing is to make consumers identify and listen to the voice of each brand.
Before the pandemic, some forecasts, such as those of Statista (1), estimated an increase in advertising spending on digital marketing for 2023 of around 9%, but the data will change drastically due to the economic consequences of this crisis. The "new normal" will certainly be somewhat less face-to-face and will boost online channels, so we can venture that investment in digital marketing will increase.
In the context of this new flourishing of digital marketing, the figure of influencers will also take on a singular relevance. The 2019 Annual Social Media Study by IAB Spain states that 68% of social media users claim to follow an influencer, a figure that increases among millennials and Generation Z. Hence the relevance that influencer marketing has acquired, defined as "the science of involving different profiles of opinion leaders and influential consumers in favor of a company or institution, with the aim of strengthening its brand image and boosting its sales, through the content they share among their contacts and audiences" (2).
Despite its indisputable topicality, the origins of this discipline date back to the beginning of research on media influence in the 1950s, a time when the characteristics of influence and its impact on audiences were already established. It was the sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld who demonstrated the existence of opinion leaders who informally influenced other people's decision-making in areas such as politics, commerce, cinema and fashion. The empirical discovery of these scholars was that the real influence was not produced by those known as official opinion leaders (such as politicians or public figures), but was attributable to unofficial, everyday, informal, daily, sometimes invisible and unconscious leadership of...