The Impact Of Influencer Marketing On The Global Economy

Abstract

The sphere of media and advertising is changing at a rapid rate. The promotion method, which was effective a year ago, may not work now. Social media influencers are Internet users with a lot of subscribers across different social networks, who have significant influence on their followers. Therefore, marketers are starting to look for ways to deliver their message to consumers through influencers without using direct advertising. Marketing strategies, focused on consumers, include content marketing, native advertising and other types of influencer marketing instruments. The use of the Internet opinion leaders, who integrate product or brand information into their content, has become an alternative to the traditional marketing tools and is in direct competition with the related field of paid social media marketing in every company's marketing budget. Consumers trust less brand ad on the Internet and prefer peer-to-peer communications. For this reason, influencer marketing has continued to grow as an essential component of companies’ digital marketing strategies. Nowadays, nearly 75% of marketing specialists use social media influencers to spread word of mouth (WOM) about their products and brands on social media. Previous researches show that there is a great number of contradictions about the effectiveness of influencer marketing. That evokes many questions. This article is aimed to clarify what influencer marketing is, to explain why influencer marketing is effective and how to use it properly.