Weekly Column: 2017-12-08

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Not long ago, I went to an event on cosmetics. There were many unique new products that caught my eye, but the most memorable thing for me was the young female host that led the event. She led the event with a brief explanation on how to apply makeup. What was fascinating to see was that the explanation was focused on most of the young women attending the event that day, giving out prizes and taking pictures with them. Also, they did not hesitate in waiting for the host after the event, standing in a long line to speak to her, get her signature, and take a picture with her. Wondering if this was a famous person, I asked around and was informed that she was the famous YouTube blogger Morgan Stewart of The Beauty Breakdown. It was good timing because I was just looking into influencer marketing, so I waited about 30 minutes to talk to her and was able to exchange simple greetings.

Influencer marketing, the new marketing strategy you may have heard about recently, has attracted a great deal of attention from early on this year. Influencers are people, usually, those who are famous in social media or have many followers, who are able to influence others and influencer marketing is the marketing strategy that takes advantage of these influences.

The main reason they recently started receiving attention is that they communicate directly with their followers. They do this via videos and comments, and people trust them and feel that they are authentic due to their honest self-expression. They are able to approach their followers, who were tired of seeing as they did not want, with this communication and frank criticism, which made followers view them as approachable and trustworthy. Additionally, since they do not approach their followers from a commercial standpoint, there is less resistance.

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A few years ago, there was a barrage of advertisements pouring into social media, breaching the consumer’s limit of patience. When it began, it was a good, fresh strategy for utilizing the power of social media in a one-sided conversation, but the advertisement marketing that demands purchases has already reached its limits. Because of this, marketing through influencers that the consumers deeply trust can convey your own trust to consumers and encourage them to participate directly by providing information that they really want.
Traditional marketing approaches target an unspecified group as their audience, but influencer marketing has a very effective strategy of having a specific target market. By going through the influencers who have followers that are like-minded, you can increase the efficiency of notifying them about products and services in their specific fields.

It really is not easy to identify trends that can change daily. However, who can deny that influencers, within their creativity and focused attention on their followers, have not met follower expectations and have shown a clear distinction in marketing?

In recent marketing, the area that required the most attention was to be able to empathize with consumers. Many consumers are greatly influenced by the information they see via social media channels when they are purchasing items. The time where information consumers don’t even want is infused has passed by. Rather than forcing on things they don’t even want, marketing’s greatest aim now is to understand what consumers really want and satisfy their needs by communicating with them. Influencer marketing is perhaps the best marketing approach for this purpose.

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If you have been tiring consumers with repetitive marketing until now, I hope that in the future you will receive drastically different results by influencer marketing that has creative content, is trustworthy, and empathizes with consumers.