The world has changed from physical to digital. Remember how different life was just a few years back, before the Coronavirus pandemic? There were in-house interviews, door-to-door sales, hard copies of books, and photocopies to study from.
The world functioned through touch and up-front communication and interaction. It was a time when engagements were not limited to the number of shares and comments on each post, it was also about real-time connections.
How the table has turned. People have now started to rely upon digital platforms and social media for almost everything – from chatting with friends or doing educational classes online. Recruitment is now carried out over LinkedIn, while Instagram has massive potential for visual brands.
We really need to examine some of the terms that have come along with the march of online platforms. And one of the most intriguing is “influencer”.
What does it really mean to be an influencer? Well, if you look in places like the Oxford English Dictionary, the word describes a person with the ability to drive people into doing or believing something. In recent years, an extra layer of meaning has been added – in the digital context.
Being an influencer is not just about your follower base, or the number of likes on a picture. It is about having the power and the charm to guide your follower base in a certain direction.
For instance, a lifestyle influencer might want to wear a specific brand of clothes to promote the brand among their followers and friends. Likewise, a foodie has the potential to influence large audiences, by urging them to check out a new deli in their city, or by promoting the opening night of a restaurant. It is the followers that make influencers who they are.
So, this new meaning of influencer describes someone who provides a space for companies of all capacities and sizes to increase their brand awareness and product reach by using a digital or social media platform.
Inspiring, motivating and driving followers to do something unique, to buy something splendid, to use something fantastic, or even to wear something beautiful, is the main job of influencers.
To put it in a nutshell, influencers convince people to aspire and achieve a new standard of life.
Companies must align their target base along with the influencers they want to collaborate with, and they should do this in a way that avoids a conflict of interest during marketing and advertising.
Online campaigns to drive donations for a charity at a music festival will work better with a celebrity influencer like Chris Martin, while promoting beauty products with a popular sports personality work less on the influencer side and more on the print ads side.
That’s not to say sportspeople wouldn’t increase the consumption of a product, but the return on investment there is potentially low. This is because the range of followers is different, and the content consumption is varied.
Deciding who to work with depends largely on the target audience or potential customer base of a brand. Using an influencer is a marvellous way of building trust in a brand name, and in the reliability of its products.
Online promotional strategies using influencers to open several creative fields can deliver a huge success rate in increasing brand trust, sales, and awareness. Influencers’ ability to drive increased footfall and purchases, responsibility and accountability is comparable to that of other advertising and marketing strategies, and could be even greater.
Companies and brands have an immense opportunity to thrive and establish themselves through digital channels and social media platforms, with the help of different influencers and creators.
Ultimately, being influential in today’s world means possessing the vigour to participate in the way the world functions politically, socially – and especially commercially – through all online platforms and digital sources.
