Effectively Use Influencers To Do Your Brand’s Marketing - Austin Stanfel

Marketing is changing, gone are the days of ad men sitting in an office drinking scotch and discussing billboards. As Austin Stanfel has continued to preach for years: the modern consumer’s attention is on their phones, tablets and laptops. It’s a post on Instagram or an ad in between videos that draws your attention away from whatever you were doing for 60 seconds and makes you wonder ‘what if I had that?’.

The effectiveness of influencers

89% of marketers report that the return of investment from influencers is superior to those achieved by all other marketing practices. Put simply this means that as of 2020 influencers are the new kings on the marketing block. This is the case for one simple reason. The influencer is the consumer, so when your hire an influencer you’re hiring a customer to convince another to buy a product they already believe in and use.

Not only that but we also must look at where people’s attention is today. We don’t have time to sit down and watch TV with ads in between jobs at the office or customers at the café. What we do have time for is quick 60 second phone checks. Now most people will say they are checking for emails or something important, but the data suggests most of that time is spent on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The influencers are the marketers on those platforms so must be incorporated into your business marketing model

How to do we effectively employ your influencers

Where and how can we employ our brand’s influencers to be most effective? As was alluded to in the introduction to the piece Instagram is king at a whopping 78% effectiveness, followed by YouTube and blog posts. This tells us a few things, firstly that Gen Z and millennials are buying impulsively off idealistic snapshots into a potentially better life. When an influencer takes the perfect shot of Paris under lights with a half-naked girl drinking a Corona, the consumer audience isn’t thinking about the beer. They are thinking about the life you present too them and perhaps the beer represents an attainable piece of that life too them.

These are the platforms, used in this way, that allow for effective brand growth because this is a. Where the consumers are, and b. what the consumers are after. You can’t sell them a different life, but you can sell them a small piece of it.

Another consideration that Austin Stanfel talks about regularly; is also the tracking of trends in the marketing space. Today Instagram is king but tomorrow it may be the next Myspace or msn messenger. The market won’t wait for brands to cross over, the brand needs to be ahead of the curve in this regard. Research and having an ear to the ground about what the next generations are moving too will keep you on point for market capitalization.

Marketing strategies and methods must move with the times and the developing strategy of today and tomorrow is that of the influencer. Business needs to learn how to utilize these contractors in order to grow their brands and ultimately improve their bottom line.