| | AUGUST 20219While in the past, influencers and/or bloggers were restricted to mostly women focusing on fashion and lifestyle, this increasing digital penetration helped in-fluencer marketing to leap frogged to different cate-gories of content targeting a wide variety of customer base. Today influencer marketing offers deeper en-gagement and organic growth for brands. However, is influencer marketing worth all the hype? According to a survey 89 percent said that RoI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other chan-nels. Some even said that influencer marketing deliver nearly 11 fold higher RoI.However, this return depends not just on the num-ber of followers an influencer has but on the kind of engagement s/he has with her/his followers. On the other hand, the increasing time spent on internet has enforced brands to engage with content creators and influencers on platforms such as Facebook, Insta-gram, YouTube, Pinterest and others. This is because influencers have become opinion makers who can slip a brand into a consumer's consideration set, resulting in gradual increase in the share of influencer market-ing within their digital ad spends.However, one of the biggest challenges for brands is the fake followers some influencers have. Organizations are competing with each other to engage with authen-tic and effective influencers. This growing competition has increased the demand for micro and macro influ-encers. But this growing demand has made it difficult for brands to identify authentic influencers with a large number of followers. Today, many influencers use fake followers through bots to show their popularity and at-tract big brands. According to Mediakix's survey, an in-fluencer marketing agency, big brands have come across 50 percent of influencers with fake followers. Another survey by Sway Ops, an anti-fraud company, reveals that one day's Instagram posts had 50 percent fake followers.Surprisingly, yet another survey by White Ops/ANA revealed that the global losses due to bot frauds were es-timated to be $7.2 billion in 2016. Hence organizations are adopting auditing tools to identify fake accounts by scanning influencers' account and show the data of au-thentic and fake followers.Indeed these steps will help brands spend on authen-tic marketing influencers and gain more profit in terms of brand presence, brand loyalty and RoI.
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