Influencer Marketing vs Paid Ads

Influencer marketing is not an alien concept for marketing or the media industry. In fact, influencer marketing is one of the oldest concepts in the marketing industry! Since ages, word of mouth and celebrity endorsements are taking place for products, services and features. But, in recent years, programmatic advertising has been growing exponentially.

So, is the influencer marketing era dead? No! Let’s find out some of the benefits that influence marketing campaigns would get you compared to paid advertising on platforms…

When you run a paid campaign on any platform, your post would get ‘ad’, ‘sponsored’, ‘promoted’ label in the caption or beside your profile names. That means, your target audience would be able to differentiate between organic and promoted posts. Many people avoid interacting with promoted content, thus you might get a lot of impressions per your money spent, but engagements and real ROI generated would be much lesser!

In contrast to that, influencer posts would gain more interactions as the person, profile and content would be more genuine looking compared to your sponsored posts.

Paid ads are mostly exclusive to get delivered on the given platform only. One cannot run a single ad campaign with a single tool and then distribute it all over the platforms without facing any issues or complexity.

Where in the case of influencers, their audience and reach is already distributed on various platforms at the same time. Thus, going live with an influencer marketing campaign even with a single influencer, the brand would get a lot of reach across the platforms at the same time. Also, in contrast to what paid ad campaigns provide, influencer marketing can go above and beyond to their own followers only. Sharing, engaging and reacting would also reflect your campaign post in their actual follower’s friends and connections’ account — giving you more than the expectations.

Influencers already have their established followers and a great connection with them. When a paid advertising campaign suggests a product or service to users, they are more likely to see it as phishing or a scam attempt as per their thinking. When an influencer suggests or endorses a product, they would have that bonding and authenticity with their followers, thus the brand message would go aligned with their content and get delivered in a better way.

Whenever brands want to promote their products or services, content creation that appeals to the mass market becomes difficult. The paid ad campaigns provide you with all the flexibilities of targeting the right region and audience demographics. But, they do not provide the right content to deliver.

Thus, influencer marketing gives you the flexibility to do this from the beginning. You can simply provide your campaign goals and expectations. The influencer would themself bind your brand message with their own customized content and deliver it to their audience, making it a perfect thing for you.

Paid advertising serves your brand message without realistic approach most of the time. Influencers can give them a lifelike example and connect with the pain points to make them look more legit.

As we discussed, ad targeting does help you target many things about your audience, but it does not give you the flexibility to select the audience niche.

Sounds confusing right? When you can target your audience specifically, then why not a niche? Because many demographics and audience selection might fit into your general category of users and buyers; that does not mean that all will be interested to purchase your products or get your services.

In the case of micro-influencers and even bigger influencers, you would get your niche audience ready with you. That means, typically all the followers of a particular influencer would be able to relate with your brand message easily.

An influencer typically has cult followings. When they ask their followers to do something or go and check something, they are more likely to react to their instructions or suggestions. That thing simply goes out of the window in case of paid advertising campaigns, as a brand would not be able to customize the message for every impression they are getting.

Overall, the influencers have made organic followers over the period of time and they would interact with their posts regularly, thus all these engagements and impressions would be more organic and real.

Platforms generally have a lot of rules for the brands. You have to follow them each time you run a campaign. Thus, it becomes tedious for most of the brands which have a specific niche in their product lineup.

While doing influencer marketing campaigns, you do not have to worry about these things. If your influencer is comfortable with promoting your products or services and if it follows the general public guidelines of the platforms, you are good to go!

On top of it, there is a concept of hybrid influencer marketing picking up pace in recent times. You can do a collaboration with your fine user and then you can boost that post by adding up money in it. This would give you both organic and paid reach you are looking for, from the same custom and engaging content.

While managing influencers and getting in and out ROI results is a bit difficult. CRM platforms and even blockchain-based influencer platforms like Spreadd can help you with the influencer analytics and campaign ROI calculations.

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