Influencer Marketing in 2024
By: Luke Lawton
What is Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is using a social media personal (e.g. TikTokers or YouTubers) to advertise another company or brand. This can include product placement or sponsoring influencers to use their product in a video. Influencer marketing is an extremely popular and growing industry being worth roughly 21.3 billion dollars in 2023.
Social media is still expanding and growing at a rapid pace and companies using these personalities to advertise a product is extremely useful and profitable. If a brand uses someone trendy with the culture at the time just them using that product in a video is valuable to the company. Kids are susceptible to this advertising the most.
How Effective is Influencer Marketing
Many people might question how profitable or usable this marketing is. Others question why someone just blindly listens to an influencer on social media and just takes their word for how great the product is. Studies show that 31% of social media users prefer to find new products through influencers.
How much does this cost for a band? Many think that it costs millions of dollars for a brand to sponsor and use influencer marketing, however, 43% of companies that use influencer marketing spend less than 10k on this. Only 11% spend over 500k so for the majority it is a relatively cheap way of advertising and getting your brand the most traction and for as many people as possible to see it.
On average, this is a profitable way to market your company. For every $1 spent on influencer marketing brands can earn $5.78 in return. That is nearly six times their profit. Showing that this is an effective form of marketing.
Also, companies try and focus on smaller creators. They look for influencers with 100k followers or less. This is because they have a more intimate and tight-knit community with more engagement. They are more likely to buy a product from someone that they like and trust.
Huge creators have their advantages simply because they have such a massive audience the brand will know that they are reaching millions. However, this will cost the company a lot more money to get a creator to promote their brand. These influencers with millions of followers know what they are worth, and this could be too expensive for smaller brands cannot afford.
Who is Most Susceptible to This Kind of Advertising
Gen Z is most susceptible to this advertising mostly because they are the most active on social media. Forty-three percent of Gen Z show that they prefer influences as a way to discover new products. Gen Z has grown up with YouTube and now that TikTok has become so popular the influences that they grew up watching on YouTube also have a big following on TikTok.
To many Gen Zers YouTubers are just people and they can relate to them and that is why they have watched them for as long as they and feel a sense of trust toward them. If someone online whom you trust is promoting a product you are more likely to want to be like them and trust their opinion. This makes influencer marketing one of the best ways to market if you are especially trying to reach Gen Z. This is effective with all age groups it is just the most successful for Gen Z.
Future of Influencer Marketing
Social media is the future and taking advantage of every part of it for profit is huge for companies to get ahead and stay with the times. If you are not using influencers to promote your products you are not going to be able to compete with companies who are.
There are some draws in the future because creators are becoming bigger than we could ever imagine and getting big creators to promote products is a challenge because they are beginning to know how much they are worth as individuals.
Kids still want to use products their favorite creators are using because that is what is cool and trendy for them, but many of these influences are beginning to make their products to sell to make themselves bigger and would not want to show off another company. Influencers are starting to become their brands and that is what is scary for the continued use of influencer marketing.