Johannesburg, July21:
Lockdown, the global pandemic and the shift to remote working all accelerated the digital economy. Side-by-side with heightened social media use was an increase in influencer marketing.
Here’s why. Consumers today are inundated with digital content. A few short years ago, it was estimated that the average person saw 4 000 advertising messages a day (and filtered out 95% of them).
In 2014, Mark Schaefer, author of The Content Code and Return on Influence, warned us that the supply of free content being produced by brands was far outstripping the ability of humans to process it. He coined the term ‘content shock’ and counselled that we would soon reach a point where more content would be produced each day than there are people in the world.
Marketers flew into a tailspin – content marketing and digital marketing had become the solution to every challenge marketing teams were facing, but if more content was being produced than people, how could any brand cut through the clutter? And then 2020 came along and said, ‘hold my (homemade) pineapple beer.’
So, why, within all this content chaos, have influencers become central to marketing strategies? The answer is simple. From macro influencers to nano-influencers, influencer marketing is built around real people, and that’s something everyone today is interested in, far more than brand messages that are developed behind closed doors, with no input from the people they are created for.