Influencer Marketing Can Have a Big Impact on Consumer Purchasing Decisions

The concept of influencer marketing has quickly evolved from a buzz word to an industry of its own. The idea started years back when brands began paying for celebrity spokespeople to appear on TV to promote a product. As our culture has become more digital, and as social media started to change the world of advertising as it once was, marketers realized they could go beyond using celebrities and instead use influencers from a variety of industries and reach.

With these changes, the process of tracking results has evolved, too. When marketing revolved around TV ads, brands would attribute boosts in sales to the ads, but that was hard to trust. Influencer and digital marketing is easier to track now, as consumers can click through content to a purchasing place, but it’s still hard to say how much these influencers affect awareness, trust and purchasing.

On March 30^th, 2016, a first-of-its-kind study was released that examined exactly how these smaller, non-celebrity influencers are driving buying behavior. The study was conducted by Dr. Jonah Berger, marketing professor at the Wharton School, in partnership with the Keller Fay Group, a word of mouth marketing research company, and was funded by Experticity, an influencer network.

To answer the probing question of how influential these influencers really are, the survey points out the swaying impact these bloggers and social media celebrities actually have on consumer buying behavior. According to the study, these “micro-influencers” have up to 22.2-times more conversations each week regarding recommendations on what to buy versus an average consumer. Demonstrating the high impact of these recommendations, 82 percent of consumers who were surveyed for the study reported they were highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.

Ryan Paul, Vice President of Digital at No Limit Agency*, explained the effect influencers can have on a brand besides directly boosting sales.

“With influencer marketing, you’re creating awareness the same way a TV ad does. Sometimes it’s easy to track, but usually you can’t attribute in-store sales to a sponsored post someone saw,” said Paul. “Certain platforms – Pinterest for example – make it easy to understand why it’s important to use influencers to share content, but what people may not realize is that when your brand is mentioned on relevant sites, it’s also going to lift your searchability and awareness overall.”

Here are a few other key findings from the study.

1. Not only do these influencers have more buying conversations, they are more direct in their recommendations with 74 percent encouraging someone to “buy it or try it” compared to 66 percent of the general population who encouraged those actions in their recommendations.

2. Eighty-seven percent of the buying recommendations they make are happening face to face.

3. According to people receiving advice, influencers were seen as more impactful compared to an average person based on the following characteristics: more credible and believable (94 percent vs. 83 percent), more knowledgeable (94 percent vs. 84 percent) and better at explaining how the product works or could be used (92 percent vs. 83 percent).

While the study makes it clear that using influencers is very effective, companies don’t need to blow their entire marketing budgets on it. In fact, it may be a better strategy to contract a community of brand influencers than to find one big celebrity.

“People are thinking about using influencers, but what they’re not thinking of is how to decide which influencers to use,” said Paul. “You have to meticulously curate who you’re choosing and put together a clear strategy of how your influencer relates to your brand and to their followers.”

In this era of authenticity, your strongest brand boosters aren’t celebrities – they’re everyday people. While celebrities can offer a flash of social activity, the micro-influencers gain higher trust and loyalty.