1. I can name a handful of products that I've bought because <insert some triathlete / olympian> uses them. Out of 6 or so products I've bought I've only had bad experiences with 1 of them, otherwise they all were
2. Sales tactics are basically tried and true throughout time. It's no coincidence the most effective e-commerce techniques are scarcity and social proof[0]. Genuine influencers have the ability to affect social proof on a massive scale.
3. I loathe FashionNova, but they are a grade A example of how effective influencer marking can be if done correctly at scale[1]
4. Scaling influencer marketing is a delicate balance. It's just not programatic (and never will be) like placing ads on Facebook or Google.
[0] - https://www.qubit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/qubit-resea...
[1] - https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-bites/influe...
I wonder if 'social proof' is easier to fake/generate on social media with Sybil attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack) as well as payment to real individuals to vouch for something they don't actually use
I wonder if people will/are starting not trust these measures of social proof
Which makes a lot of sense since a lot of that has happened behind the scenes in a way that may have limited their visibility or limited their margins.
Meaning ceramic underwear?
https://www.marketingweek.com/roi-look-like-world-influencer...
https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-gb/blog/20-influenc...
That said, I do kind of wonder about some of this myself. What percentage of an influencer's fans would already be planning to buy the product regardless of said influencer's marketing efforts?
I mean, your average gaming/TV show/music focused social media account/channel is already likely targeting people with an interest in those areas. And the more niche ones likely only appeal to the people who already bought said products anyway. The average Ceave Gaming viewer already probably owns Super Mario Maker 1 and 2, and the average TWD98 viewer is probably an avid Mario Kart fan. Wonder how many other influencers and successful channel owners have fanbases made up of existing customers/people who've already made up their mind on a product/service?
Regardless, it's infuriating to read hotels, airlines, clothing companies and others throwing money and freebies at people just because they have a high follower count. It's also sad to watch people from my hometown become walking advertisements -- one girl recently started shilling for Disney -- and try pushing their "brand."
In that case there was no real product to buy, the _only_ reason to try to buy the product was its advertising, more than 4,000 people did, and its advertising was almost exclusively via social media / influencers.
Like a lot of marketing and ad spend in general. Influencers (or any other media) are simply other channels to put product in front of people who no longer watch TV or read magazines.
It's quite hard to track though some progress has been made through tracking you online on longer time scales. Most people dislike this type of tracking across channels cause we really don't get much out of it besides being bombarded with ads from the same company.
Exactly. Coca-Cola and McDonald's didn't become billion dollar companies by not advertising.
The regular level influencers are complete nonentities. I remember a story here a while back where an "influencer" with 2 million "followers" couldn't sell 36 T-shirts.
The t-shirt account can't get past 200 comments with 2.6 million followers? Sub-0.001% engagement screams purchased followers - you typically get more than that in spam comments or shoutout-begging alone most of the time I've seen if they are humans...
I am also inclined to believe this even more so due to scrolling through the follower list for under a minute, based off usernames. Another thing is that while scrolling through, some hypermajority appear to be either India, Middle Eastern, or CIS countries, while she has never written a description in any of those - possibly the vendor was also difficult to order from or ship outside of the US or her home country otherwise.
I suspect AI wouldn't even be needed, just harvest real comments from existing high engage feeds and dump them with minor word swaps on to low engage feeds. this alone would probably take a couple years for countermeasures to respond to, assuming there is even an incentive basis to respond at all.