Influencer Marketing is now the hot topic in the Marketing space. As brands fight to grab a share of the pie, consumers’ trust in brands is slowly waning. Consumers are becoming more and more dependent on recommendations from their friends, families or a prior user of the product.

These people are what are known as ‘Influencers’ or ‘Opinion Leaders’. They have the potential power to influence the buying decision of others with their opinion. Social media influencers create high quality, relevant, and interesting content to reach out to their audience and engage with them in a manner that brands can’t with their traditional advertising channels. Brands have now started to rely greatly on influencers to pass on their message of marketing and communicate with their target audience in a more customized way. Thus, influencer marketing has brought in a fresh, new approach to brand marketing.

Here are 5 major reasons why influencer marketing will boom in 2021 and in the foreseeable future.

Consumers are tired of endless bombardment of untargeted and irrelevant ads wherever they go. They are now looking for honesty and authenticity. That’s where influencers come into play. Influencers have a very niche group of followers with whom they have a transparent communication channel with a personal touch. This helps brands target their potential customers better. The influencers promotes the brand to their audience through different kind of content. This includes video demonstrations, reviews, DIYs, blog posts etc. This binds their audience to their content and builds interest thereby facilitating brand building.

Influencers merely do not endorse a product; they build a story around it. Moreover, most of the influencers agree to work with a brand only when they build a genuine appreciation for the brand and its products. Since the audience can relate to their stories, it elates their opinion and purchasing intent about the product.

Influencers offer value to their audience, and that’s why their followers like to view and share their content. They have their own creative method of content creation, which differs from one influencer to another. The audience can relate to this content, as it comes from another consumer rather than directly from the brand itself. And if they learn something useful from it, they will most likely share it with others too. This will increase the reach of both the influencer and also the brand they are collaborating with.

Traditional advertising channels can come at a huge cost and may not be everyone’s cup of tea. With the advent of influencer marketing’s popularity and recent growth, small businesses are now being able to afford brand marketing. If brands want to, they can keep their marketing budgets low. While there are big influencers who charge very high rates, there are smaller influencers as well, and they are typically quite affordable. These micro-influencers charge much less for a post compared to the bigger influencers. So if you cannot afford a celebrity, you can still launch an influencer marketing campaign with the help of micro-influencers.

Brands have begun to realize that sometimes less is more. The success of any influencer marketing campaign doesn’t solely ride on the number of followers. Many influencers buy fake followers, so their engagement rate is low. On the contrary, micro-influencers have less followers but they work to maintain personal bonds with their audience. Therefore, their posts get higher engagement. Unlike popular influencers who have a huge following on social media, micro-influencers are more reasonably priced. Micro-influencers will rule the future of influencer marketing.