The Influencers of Marketing

This week one of my assignments is to read a 60 Minutes story on social media marketers and how they are a driving force in today's world. Television marketers are becoming more and more nervous as streaming services with zero commercials or full on DVR functions that allow subscribers to skip through commercials become prevalent in the cord cutting movement. This means that there is more competition for the advertising dollar in places where the message of a company can be seen.

The evolution of this has been a rise in online advertisers and people with large online followings that are called influencers. Instagram is a huge platform for influencers to drive traffic to products that they enjoy themselves or for companies that pay them for a shout out. This can drive a large amount of traffic to a site in a very economical way.

I myself purchased a marketing course for physical products and one part of the course was how to use Instagram to drive traffic to your product. For example you can have an influencer shout out your product for a hundred dollars to his followers which might number in the tens of thousands.

If your product is shown to ten thousand prospective buyers and you get only 3% in sales, that's 300 buyers for a successful ad buy. To take this a bit further in how lucrative it can be consider your product costs 1 buck and you sell it for 3. That's 900 gross sales and you subtract 300 for your cost, and 100 for the shout out for a total profit of 500 dollars. Now if you can do that every week, well that's more pay than a minimum wage (7.25 per) job working 40 hours which would be a mere 290 dollars.

Now you can play around with that simple model as much as you wish but that's how influencers work on a basic level. Now larger influencers with millions of followers are more expensive and smaller influencers in more of a niche market are cheaper. It really depends on what you want to sell and in what market your niche is in.

I firmly believe it's too early in this evolution to predict where this type of marketing will wind up and how larger companies will find a way to move away from an uncertain future in TV to an increasingly online form of entertainment. It'll be an interesting evolution to watch and pay attention to being a marketing student and all!