What is Influencer Marketing? – The Ultimate Guide for 2024

Influencer marketing is now a mainstream form of online marketing. It has been a buzzword for a while now, and the mainstream media regularly refers to it. Yet, there are still people who don’t really understand what influencer marketing is all about. Indeed, some people come across the phrase for the first time and instantly ponder, “What is influencer marketing?”

The Influencer Marketing Hub is now an established website with hundreds of articles explaining the intricacies of influencer marketing, along with other types of online marketing. The original version of this post was the first article we wrote for the site. We know, however, that there are still people who come here for the first time, wondering what influencer marketing is. So, we have updated this article to focus on the basics of influencer marketing for 2024.

The Landscape of Influencer Marketing in 2024

Influencer Marketing is a hybrid of old and new marketing tools. It takes the idea of celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign. The main differentiator in the case of influencer marketing is that the results of the campaign are collaborations between brands and influencers.

But influencer marketing doesn’t just involve celebrities. Instead, it revolves around influencers, many of whom would never consider themselves famous in an offline setting.

In our article, What is an Influencer we defined an influencer as being someone who has:

• the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience
• a following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages. The size of the following depends on the size of his/her topic of the niche.

One of the biggest mistakes that traditional media makes is a failure to see the difference between celebrities and online influencers.

It is also important to realize that most influencers have systematically built a keen and enthusiastic audience. It is not accidental that these people follow influencers rather than a brand. The audience doesn’t really care less about your brand. They only care about the opinions of the influencers. Don’t try to foist rules and business practices onto your influencers. The audience is theirs, and they can simply walk away, taking their followers with them.

An early example of influencer marketing involved YouTube celebrity PewDiePie. He teamed up with the makers of a horror film set in the French catacombs under Paris, creating a series of videos in which he underwent challenges in the catacombs. It was pitch-perfect content for PewDiePie’s 111 million subscribers and received nearly double the views as the movie’s trailer. Everybody won.

That’s a simple example. It’s easy to imagine a celebrity teaming with a company to pitch a product—even if the pitch is a series of 10-minute videos instead of a 30-second television ad. 

But people wouldn’t be talking about influencer marketing—you wouldn’t be at a website called the Influencer Marketing Hub reading about it, either—if it didn’t have a much broader set of applications. And the key is in that word, influencer.

Influencers, unlike celebrities, can be anywhere. They can be anyone. What makes them influential is their large followings on the web and social media. An influencer can be a popular fashion photographer on Instagram, or a well-read cybersecurity blogger who tweets, or a respected marketing executive on LinkedIn. Within any industry, there are influential people—you just have to find them. Some will have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of followers. But many will seem more like ordinary people. They may only have 10,000 followers, less in some cases. Yet, they will have developed a reputation for being the experts in their field. They are the go-to people who provide the answers to people’s questions. Depending on their sphere of expertise, they are the people who make the most engaging social posts on their specialist topics. They share the best pictures, make the most entertaining videos, and run the most informative online discussions.

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Influencer Marketing is also not about quick results. It’s the same kind of slow-and-steady approach as Social Media and Content Marketing, where your campaign isn’t about directly selling your wares. Instead, it’s about demonstrating your authority, credibility, and thought leadership within your industry. It’s about becoming synonymous with whatever it is that you offer, like when people say they’re going to Xerox a document instead of photocopying it, or to Hoover the floor, rather than vacuuming it.

With Social Media Marketing, it’s a slow game of acquiring the kind of followers who are going to be loyal and engaged. So it’s tempting to think that joining forces with an influencer is going to be an easy way into the hearts and minds of his or her followers—it’s not that simple, though. Because to ally yourself with influencers, you’ve got to earn their trust and respect. But how?

What doesn’t work in Influencer Marketing

Generalizing your approach to finding and making use of different influencers. One size doesn’t fit all influencers: tailor your approach to the specific influencer

Simply looking at the popularity of the influencer. Influence does not only mean popularity. Remember that your goal is to elicit a particular action from your customers. Don’t automatically assume that the people with the most followers are the influencers of a niche.

One Simple Rule: Influencer Marketing is Marketing to Influencers

With traditional social media marketing, a brand can set up its identity on whatever platform it chooses, and as time passes and its follower bases grow, it can see who its brand champions are. These are the customers who like and share content or mention the brand itself in a post. Followers like these can be further nurtured through personal attention and as part of a highly segmented group of all the brand champions. Efforts to market to this group focus on ways to keep them spreading the word.

One problem with this approach is that some of a brand’s followers just don’t have enough followers themselves to make much impact. In fact, most ordinary people on social networks don’t. Most people have a small network of maybe a few hundred friends and associates representing all kinds of tastes and preferences. Meanwhile, brands struggle to curate and create content that they hope will resonate with their followers in some meaningful way while staying engaged with day-to-day interactions. 

This scattershot approach to social marketing yields predictably erratic results. Instead of blindly trying to grab likes and followers or throwing various bits of content out to see what sticks, influencer marketing tells us that our time is better spent marketing directly to influential people whose likes and dislikes we already know — they align well with our own. This means engaging with these people across social accounts—not just following and liking but commenting and demonstrating knowledge and a personality. It can also mean curating or creating content that’s hand-picked to get the attention of influencers. So, while it’s the influencer’s audience that’s the ultimate prize, the target market for brands includes the influencers themselves.

By laying this groundwork, you can achieve two things as a brand:

The first is that by merely interacting in positive and constructive ways on influencers’ social pages, you gain early access to their followers. You’re not promoting anything to them; you’re showing your face as a member of their community, adding to your credibility down the line.

The second achievement is that, eventually, when you do propose some kind of influencer marketing collaboration, they’ll already know you. Influencers aren’t celebrities, per se, but their online life can look a lot like a famous person’s real-world one: lots of interruptions from people they don’t know, wanting a piece of their time, either to praise them or to pitch them. You need to be able to stand out from the noise of attention they get in the form of emails and tweets. This means that when you finally reach out to them, they’ll already know what you’re about, and they’ll know whether you’re a good fit for their audience.

Influencer marketing has become sufficiently mainstream that companies are continually setting up platforms to help the influencer search and selection process, as well as making the system more transparent and easier for both brands and influencers. Quite a few agencies have now opened that specialize in providing influencer marketing services. Not wishing to lose clients, quite a few traditional agencies have added influencer marketing to the services they offer. There have been 240 new influencer marketing platforms and agencies entering the market over the last 12 months, on top of 380 doing so in the previous year.

4. High Average Earned Media Value per $1 Spent on Influencer Marketing

Typically, companies earn $5.20 for each dollar invested in influencer advertising. Among the highest-performing 13% of businesses, the return is $20 or more for every dollar expended.

5. Many Firms Now Budget for both Influencer Marketing and Content Marketing

Content marketing is now so firmly established that 79% of marketers spend more than 10% their total marketing budget on content. This figure is in some ways lower than expected, as HubSpot reports that 82% of their respondents use content marketing. Some firms who use content market clearly fund it from a centralized marketing budget.

Influencer marketing is rapidly gaining traction in the advertising world. According to our research, a compelling 82% of survey respondents have indicated they would be dedicating a budget to influencer marketing in 2024. This is a significant rise from the 37% who expressed similar intentions back in 2017. Delving deeper into the 2023 data, a global survey among marketing agencies and brands revealed nuanced spending habits: 25% of respondents mentioned they channeled 10 to 20 percent of their marketing budget into influencer marketing and another 23% allocated more than 40% of their budget to this form of digital marketing.

6. The Majority of Firms Intend to Increase their Influencer Marketing Budget

Companies clearly see influencer marketing as a direction where they intend to head, with 67% of those respondents already budgeting for influencer marketing planning to increase their influencer marketing budget in 2023. Only 7% of firms declared they would decrease their influencer marketing budgets or move away from it.

7. Most Marketers Judge Influencer Marketing to be Effective

Marketers and brands clearly believe in the effectiveness of influencer marketing, and this has led to an explosion of new content created over the last year. 90% of our survey respondents believe influencer marketing to be an effective form of marketing. This statistic has stayed relatively static since 2017, and the signs are clear that this positivity towards influencer marketing will continue into the future.

Instagram has experienced an immense rise in its user engagement and activity over recent years. Users upload 95 million photos and videos daily, generating a whopping 4.2 billion likes on these posts. According to Semrush, based on total website traffic, Instagram proudly sits among the world’s top 12 most-visited websites, boasting 6.89 billion visits per month.

A closer examination of content type reveals fascinating patterns. According to SocialPilot, as of 2023, images make up 71.9% of Instagram’s content. The platform also shows varying levels of user interaction for content types: photo uploads have an engagement rate of 0.59%, carousel posts garner 1.26%, and Instagram Reels receive a 1.23% engagement rate. Looking further into business accounts specifically, they typically publish an average of 1.71 feed posts daily. The composition of these posts is slightly varied: 48.9% are photos, 31.8% are videos, and 19.3% take the form of carousel posts.

The advertising potential on Instagram is immense. Through Instagram Stories, you have the potential to connect with a minimum of 996 million individuals, and at least 1.32 billion users can be engaged via the primary feed.

2. Instagram has Seen Huge Growth in Support Over the Last Four Years

Instagram has certainly not suffered from being bought by Facebook. There has been a massive increase in Instagram users during the Facebook era, with over 2.35 billion monthly active users currently. Stories are also highly popular, with 996 million people using Instagram Stories every day.

Source: insiderintelligence.com

3. Influencer #Followers Vary Greatly by Niche on Instagram

There is a surprising variation in the number of followers that Instagram influencers have. A few niches, such as modeling and beauty, have some extremely popular influencers with up to 20 million followers each. Other niches, such as lifestyle and music, have fewer “superstars,” leading to lower average influencer followings.

4. Instagram Influencer Marketing Spending Growing at a Rapid Rate

The overall increase in influencer marketing, and the growing importance of Instagram as a highly visible social media channel, has led to a significant increase in brands spending money on influencers operating there. 76.7% of marketers use Instagram for influencer marketing making it the most popular influencer marketing platform in 2023. In comparison, 58% signposted using Facebook, 50% TikTok, 44.2% YouTube, 25.5% Twitter, and 18.5% Snapchat. Marketers anticipate this trend persisting through 2024 and beyond. 

5. Number Of Brand-Sponsored Influencer Posts Growing Almost Exponentially

Influencer marketing’s heightened brand awareness and stricter advertising transparency requirements have led to an impressive surge in sponsored influencer posts. Notably, in 2021, Instagram saw about 3.8 million posts marked with #ad worldwide, marking a significant 27% rise from the three million observed the previous year. These were further expected to rise substantially to 6.12 million sponsored posts in 2023.

6. Instagram Engagement Rates Much Higher than those on Twitter, But Lower than those on TikTok

Possibly because an Instagram post sticks around for a while, yet a tweet can quickly vanish into a user’s feed, Instagram posts tend to give higher engagement rates than tweets. With both social media channels, influencers with fewer followers find it easier to build up a high engagement rate than those with more followers. Influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers average 7.2% engagement on Instagram, 1.4% on Twitter, and 9.38% on TikTok. For mega- influencers with over 100,000 followers, average engagement rates are 1.1% on Instagram, 0.3% on Twitter, and 5.3% on TikTok.

EA Sports, renowned for its sports video games, leveraged TikTok to promote its title, Apex Legends. Recognizing TikTok’s reach in the gaming community, they collaborated with influencers like Brent Rivera, whose engaging content received 900k likes. This strategic move allowed EA Sports to tap into a younger audience, significantly boosting the game’s popularity.

The Cake app, which facilitates English and Korean learning, turned to YouTube influencers in Latin America to expand its user base. By partnering with five influencers who creatively showcased the app’s features, the Cake app reached 1.2 million viewers, demonstrating the power of educational content in influencer marketing.

Formerly known as Clash app, Huddles is a short-form video platform that gained traction by engaging influencers on Twitter and Instagram. Amidst the uncertainty of TikTok’s status in the US, Huddles seized the opportunity to attract TikTok users, resulting in over 20 million impressions and 250k downloads, ranking it #17 on the App Store.

• Instories App: Dominating Brazilian Markets with Instagram Reels

Instories, an app for creating visual stories, utilized Instagram influencers to penetrate the Brazilian market. Fifteen influencers created reels that not only showcased the app’s capabilities but also resonated with beauty, fashion, and lifestyle audiences. This campaign’s success was reflected in the app’s surge to the top of the App Store and a significant increase in downloads.

• Gamee App: Engaging Gamers with Social Challenges

Gamee, a casual gaming platform, expanded its reach by involving YouTube and Instagram influencers who could challenge their followers in games. This interactive approach led to half a million to a million additional installs and showcased the effectiveness of direct engagement in influencer marketing.

These examples illustrate the diverse strategies and outcomes of influencer marketing campaigns across various industries and platforms. Each case study highlights the importance of selecting the right influencers and platforms to reach and engage the target audience effectively.