The World Of Influencer Marketing
By Jack Morgan
What is Influencer Marketing?
In this post, I will be going over the social media strategy of influencer marketing. This is a practice where a social media influencer will use his or her platform online to promote a product for monetary gain from the sponsor. This sponsor will pay for the advertisement in hopes of higher sales. Lately, there have been many examples of this, and it is due to the advent and rising popularity of social media. I believe that this practice will only continue, and this strategy can best be described by looking at TikTok’s model.
Case #1
TikTok sees plenty of brands using influencers to promote their product. Take Joe Mele for example, a TikTok influencer with over 30 million followers. He uploads content with his dad. Typically, this content is tailored by ongoing trends on the app at the time. He has used that method and formula to find success on TikTok, so much so that he has received many sponsorship opportunities. While I would imagine he doesn’t take every single one, the one he did take came from Gillette. They needed actors for their new GilletteLabs product that they were coming out with in summer of 2023. They starred in this commercial and there were a ton of people that recognized the duo, and it did lead to a successful rollout. Multiple media outlets and consumers were impressed with the movement to younger influencers (despite the dad’s age of course) and it took off. I decided to put the link to the commercial down below, so you are able to see for yourself.
Case #2
Another successful example of this was with Addison Rae. It’s tough to encounter someone who does not know who Rae is, but for those who still don’t, here is a rundown. Addison is a TikToker who rose to fame early on in the app’s life in the United States. During the Covid-19 quarantine, she emerged as one of the app’s premier content creators. She is a brilliant dancer who does a lot of trending TikTok dances. She also works out, and it played perfectly into her landing a Gymshark sponsorship. Gymshark is a fitness company that sells clothing, water bottles and other fitness accessories. They partnered together to show off a new collection of clothing, the Vital Seemless Collection. The terms were for Rae to make videos wearing the clothing line and advertise it as well as encourage her viewers to buy some and wear it. This advertising did well, as it helped both sides. Rae got more followers and views, garnering as many as 200 million views on these sponsored videos in the timespan. On the other side of the coin, Gymshark saw their sales rise by as much as 20%.
There is another lower level of influencer marketing, and this comes with the TikTok shop. TikTok users have an opportunity to promote items on the TikTok shop and earn commissions for the sales of every item they advertise. This is beneficial for both parties. The influencer is able to not just gain experience in marketing by making fun skits, but it also gives them money. A lot of the kids doing this are the age of a teenager or college student who is looking to make money somehow, and they can accomplish this pretty easily. For TikTok, they get a cut of things sold on their marketplace (TikTok shop), but that isn’t even the best part of the deal for them in my view. It gets more traffic across all areas of their app. If you can have the For You page being one of the most popular aspects of any app ever and make the TikTok shop follow suit, it just raises your stock and popularity.
Bottom Line
If you do influencer marketing right, it can help your brand as well as your consumers more than most think. Just take those examples, along with many others, and keep a lookout for this strategy, because it is not going anywhere due to how beneficial and smart it is.