Skyline University Nigeria Advices On The Impact of Influencer Marketing on Brand Engagement

Feb 25, 2024 - 12:05

The growth of social media platforms gives people additional avenues to share their personal beliefs and attract the attention of others, which greatly increases their impact.

Some people could share their lives, interests, and ideas on social media, draw large audiences with their distinct personalities, and eventually become influencers.

Pandey and Yadav (2019), describe ‘Influencer marketing’ as the process of providing consumers with sophisticated information, communication, and involvement all at once through a social media post about a specific company. Using a prominent individual to promote the brand is the method employed here.

According to Lui (2021), Influencers are able to draw in large, homogenous audiences, effortlessly mold and alter the lifestyles of their followers, and even alter their opinions and attitudes on current branding trends. Influencer marketing is the practice of using social media influencers to market goods and services to their followers in an effort to increase brand recognition, spark interest, and elicit positive feedback.

Social Media Influencers

The social media Influencers are known as the Online celebrities by a larger fan following base through different social media pages in contrary these social media celebrities are the normal person who has become an online celebrities by creating and posting content in the social media platforms, the Influencer-Marketing stated that it is a form of marketing where Marketers and Brands are investing in selected Influencers for promotion to his own followers right along with the brands target consumers (Brodie, Ilic et al, 2011).

The brands consider that the consumer feels Influencer promoted brand contents are considered it to be more authentic, interactive and it will lead to make a direct contact the target consumer’s than the brands advertisement. Also at the same time popularity of the Influencer is growing rapidly in the past few years (Liu et al., 2015).

According De Veirman, Cauberghe and Hudders (2017), the role of influencers is considered the source of information on social media, and consumers often refer to the information published by influencers before making a purchase. Scholars believe that the success of influencer marketing in social media is due to the high credibility.

Consumers can make decisions through information from sources with high credibility and trust. Such emotional connections between influencers and audience are prerequisites for obtaining preference and trust in influencer marketing.

The Efficacy of Social Media Influencers in Brand Engagement

The influencer opinion plays a vital role for the brands they are enforcing along with the product adoption and endorsement of the relating information as essential to part of communication in the social media which is going through the online community and these Influencers are widely experts in a particular field of their interest making videos and posts which will be seen by the individuals who share common interest, Pandey and Yadav (2019).

Moreover, Kim & Han (2009) explain that these Influencers seems to score higher interactiveness defined as to lookout for what is new and conventional seems to be heightened in the social media platforms with number of followers to turning and tuning the blogger into a key influencer for promoting the brand.

Creating brand awareness on social media is very imperative today. This is because of the multitude of audience/potential customers available on social media. Many business owners leverage the large audience base of the influencers to gain more popularity and sales.

Creating a self-branding in the social media is generally practiced by the influencers for there is a strong celebrity image was expected such as to be celebrities, sports-people, professional, big musicians and ‘ordinary’ people who audience by the marketing possibilities to create a brand value for the brands in the social media (Suh et al., 2018).

Conclusion

Today, brand engagement on social media is intensely driven by social media influencers. Social media influencers are said to be important in shifting the trends of business online to that of profitability. Hence, business owners can run out of stock within a short period without wasting millions of money on other channels of advertisement that are either expensive or will not generate any meaningful leads. For this, brands will continue to reach to the influencers that they might get acceptance and more patronage from online community.