Take a look around. Everywhere you go, you are surrounded by hashtags and links to bios, and a non-stop diet of YouTube content. Social media and digital marketing are now so always-on that they have a direct impact on our daily lives and thought processes.
How did that happen? Let’s take a quick look at how the terms “creators” and “influencers” came along, because they both had an awful lot to do with it.
“Creators” was the tag first applied to content makers such as bloggers, vloggers, photographers whose work made it on to social media platforms such as Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram and WordPress. Creators are focused on creating informative or entertaining content that can assist or uplift an audience – check out the ASMR videos to see what we mean.
For creators, it’s all about the quality of their content and the way it engages its audience. In a business context, a good creator can transform a company’s marketing materials and resulting engagement levels.
If you’re a brand and you work with creators, they can build your reputation and show persuasively how your products can make a difference to people. You can get across the details of your services in a way that builds trust in your audience.
What about influencers? This is a term that first reached everyone’s ears in 2016 and 2017 – and by 2020 the numbers of influencers out there had multiplied several hundred times! To put it really simply, an influencer gives a platform to companies who want to promote their brand and products to a large audience.
Influencers have a huge following that can be “influenced” to use the products and, in doing so, increase the reach of the company to a wider range of people. They highlight products, engross their followers in the glimmer of the brands producing them and encourage greater sales. If you are a lifestyle influencer and you drink a particular brand of tea – and you tell your followers about it in a social media post – that can boost sales of the brand.
It’s possible to be both a creator and an influencer. But as you can see, there’s a subtle difference in the way they work, with different motivations and strategies.
For the creator, it’s all about the content, while an influencer uses content to increase the awareness and reach of a particular brand among their followers.
If you’re a business, you can use both – but you need to work out your marketing strategy carefully. We suggest doing the groundwork by investing in some mainstream advertising and promotion to see what works – then tap into your clients’ mindset through influencers.
Creators and influencers have taken the digital world, and digital marketing, to the next level. It’s no surprise that so many companies now have teams of experts in this field dedicated to brand promotion and marketing.
