translated from Spanish: The growing phenomenon of the influencers and their impact on companies

the role of managers of marke Ting has had a drastic change in recent years. The days in which they focused on the campaigns have been in the past and today are at the heart of the business strategy. In the new digital era, consumers looking to purchase products and/or services, 100% custom needs and continuous interaction with brands. They go even further and seek shared values.
In this context, the influencer marketing has become a key element. It is no coincidence that in the last three years the pursuit of influencer marketing has increased 90% worldwide. Leading brands and fast-growing companies are turning to influencers, in addition to their usual celebrities as spokespersons, to get highly attractive content that drives sales. This, since, as evidenced by recent studies, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends, family and influential people at the time of purchasing a product or service.
The phenomenon is growing and will not stop. Thus, while 85% of companies around the world currently using influencer marketing somehow, projected that investment in this tool will reach the US$ 10 billion in the next 5 to 10 years.
Despite the potential that has influencer marketing, arises the question of if investments are being made in a correct way. The numbers show that not: only influencers in Instagram investment mean losses for 100 million dollars annually for companies around the world, because they hired influencers whose hearings are covered by a significant amount “fake” profiles, i.e. people or celebrities who have many followers, but an important part of them are not real, are bots. Today you can buy fake followers, such as “Bots” that leave comments in order to increase the Engagement (number of comments and likes compared to supporters) of the account. As a result, their results for the brand are very low. On the other hand, it is the challenge of the personalization, which involves stop using celebrities as influencers and work with normal people (nano/micro/medium influencers), which have from 5,000 fans and are much closer to your network.
Is at these points that highlights the importance of the use of platforms that have the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence and big data, in order to have an exact knowledge of the interaction that have the influencers with his followers, the comprehensive study of the profile of these and the features that each influencer to see its compatibility with the objectives of each brand, as well as be able to manage relationships with multiple influencers.
Today we can say that all may be incurring, but actually brands are looking to have a closer to their public influence and this means that the influencer marketing is not an opportunity only for companies, but for society in General. Thanks to the impulse of social networks and the search for customization by consumers, any person can become today an influencer and there are platforms that facilitate this to detect and analyze all the people who have a profile public, and that could be contacted to be part of a campaign of infuencers that, until today, was almost impossible to manage.
in this context, the growth of this new profession has been demonstrated in Chile, once the internal revenue service recently announced that it supervise the profits of the influencers.
the Influencer Marketing delivers unique opportunities for individuals and businesses. The time of drive it is now.

Poured in this op-ed content is the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial line nor the counter position.

Original source in Spanish