Advertisers, Influencers, and The Audiences: A New Look at the Challenges of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers–individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche. Influencer marketing works because of the high amount of trust that social influencers have built up with their following, and recommendations from them serve as a form of social proof to your brand’s potential customers. Today, more than ever, consumers are choosing to listen to each other over brands. That’s why influencers are so powerful. They are trusted individuals with loyal followings across digital platforms. Influencers start conversations and make it easier for brands to target their audiences on a big scale.

The first thing you need to know is that influencer marketing is heading to be bigger than ever, recent estimates show influencer marketing set to become a $15 billion dollar industry by 2022, according to Business Insider. To add, 63% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets in this year (2021). And, despite influencer marketing being a relatively young industry, 89% of marketers find it more profitable.

With the rise of influencer marketing, more and more advertisers choose influencers to promote their products in the most authentic and efficient way. Thus, influencer marketing is a great way to reach your target audience and build brand awareness among like-minded individuals. But, despite the exceptional growth, there are a number of unaddressed challenges that advertisers, influencers, and influencer audiences are encountering. Let’s look at what these challenges are.

Advertisers

Influencer marketing has risen in popularity over the years, driven in part by driving sales, quality content creation, and third-party credibility. But as the industry has grown, some issues have emerged. These are major problems which advertisers can come across during influencer marketing campaigns.

• Difficulty and time-loss in finding the right influencers.
• Fraudulent SM activity and fake following of an influencer. Inability to acquire in-depth SM audience analytics.
• Difficulties in conducting payment transactions, especially if the parties are based in different countries (includes government regulations as well).
• Trust concerns among advertisers and influencers. This is a common issue especially when both, or one of the parties is anonymous.
• Scalability of the campaigns — difficulties that involve dealing with a large number of influencers.
• Difficulty in tracking the overall campaign results, especially the sales.

Influencers

Like advertisers, influencers also face some issues in the commercialized influence. Influencers pursuing commercial activity may encounter the below-mentioned challenges in general.

• Advertiser offerings that demand higher quality posting but offer lower compensation.
• Difficulties in direct monetization of the audience (selling influencer products or getting ad revenue). The lack of easier solutions.
• Uncertainty in the advertiser’s product quality, which may lead to the loss of the audience credibility.
• The risk of losing some credibility because of sponsored postings. This may become a major issue for an influencer if the sponsor becomes a target of a public backlash.
• Inability to gather and address all the channel audiences in one place.

The Audiences

The parasocial relationship between the influencers and the audience trumps the opinion leadership and the audience is usually more willing to engage if the influencer content is more authentic. However, with the current state of influencer marketing and in a context of commercialized influencer-audience relationships, the audience engagement is mostly limited to social media features such as “likes”, “comments” and “shares”. Although some popular social media platforms have already implemented rewarding systems like badges or the ability to tip influencers, a thorough solution for commercialized influence is missing. Moreover, the audience is interested to engage with, and support all social media channels of an influencer in one place without constantly visiting different platforms.

The Solution

The solution is to build a transparent, second-layer decentralized ecosystem on top of the existing Social Media networks. At Keepface, we are building that very ecosystem by addressing the challenges of all the involved parties. With the launch of Keepcoin, which will be the native currency of the Keepface ecosystem, we are developing a tokenized and incentive-based network for advertisers, influencers, and the audiences.

At the current stage, our Keepface platform effectively allows more than 5000 registered advertisers to communicate, and work with over 400 thousand influencers globally. More than 100 influencers have their own Keepface e-commerce shops where advertisers too can list their products by agreeing with the influencers.

Keepcoin would allow us to take the Keepface ecosystem to the next level by tokenizing, decentralizing, and more importantly, by adding the missing piece of the puzzle, which is the audience.

• Advertisers will have easier, more data-driven and performance-oriented solutions.
• Influencers will have more means to monetize their influence with their shops and NFT marketplaces.
• Audiences will be able to engage closely with influencers by direct communications or support, product, and personal ratings.

Social media influence has reached a whole new level. Be part of it!