With the rise of social media marketing, social influencers have become a hot topic. Social influencers are people with a plethora of knowledge and experience in their industry. They usually gain traction by voicing their opinions on products or services and reviewing or recommending products for the public. One way to think of these individuals is to think of them as brand advocates.
According to Expert Voice, social influencers can be broken up into various subcategories. Macro-influencers are well known and have many followers. Micro-influencers have a “higher-quality” influence with their audience and tend to be
credible and impactful. Nano-influencers have very few followers and deliver what are considered to be “authentic and trustworthy” messages. Celebrity influencers (think Kylie Jenner and her partnership with Fashion Nova) are famous and have a massive following. The one thing these sub-categories of influencers have in common is that they are all paid, whether in cash or in exchange for free products.
There is also a smaller sub-set of influencers known as “opt-in influencers.” These influencers are essentially organic influencers who love certain brands and products so much, they just want to share their knowledge and opinions with the public. Brands not only love these types of influencers because they offer free promotions, but the
public loves them too because their reviews seem so much more authentic and unbiased since they aren’t receiving any type of monetary gain. Usually posts made by organic influencers have better engagement rates, are cost-effective or free for companies, and feel truly authentic. The everyday average consumer who wants real opinions from other average consumers might tune in to a review offered by an organic influencer versus a paid influencer. Paid influencers not only come with a price tag, but they tend to target more specific audiences and don’t always feel as authentic because they are promoting a product that they are being paid to promote, and consumers know this.
Different types of influencers are best suited for different types of brands, products, and marketing campaigns. There isn’t a one size fits all approach. Influencer endorsements are becoming very important in the field of marketing, regardless of the type of influencer used. When a brand chooses to work with a social media influencer,
they are many times giving their brand a boost in the eye of the public. Influencers tend to have followers who care about what the have to say and they can absolutely make a large impact and get consumers to make purchasing decisions. Social media and influencer marketing has become a modern way to market, and according to a recent study on the Remarkable Rise of Influencer Marketing, delivers 11x higher ROI than more traditional forms of digital marketing and marketers often see a 7X return on their investment. This is a significant difference and one that may make a world of differences for a brand.
Influencer marketing is a great opportunity for brands to dive into and connect with target audiences on many levels. Not only can this practice bring success to a brand, but it is a modern and fun way for a brand to market in order to stay up to date with younger generations. Choosing an influencer does involve a great deal of research, as it is important to choose an influencer who best aligns with a company’s values and fits a certain niche. However, the credibility and expertise that influencers bring when advertising for a brand could be just what a company needs to be more impactful.
Citations
Brooke.musat@experticity.com. “Who and What Are Influencers? – Blog.” ExpertVoice, 18 Mar. 2019, https://www.expertvoice.com/who-and-what-are-influencers/.
“The Remarkable Rise of Influencer Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC].” Influencer Marketing Hub, 19 Mar. 2019, https://influencermarketinghub.com/the-rise-of-influencer-marketing/.
Data, information and insights are sometimes used as interchangeable terms but are not the same thing. Sometimes people use “data” and “information” to refer to the same sets of information, but the reality is that they are in fact very different. The best way to think of these categories is by separating them into a pyramid. Data would fall at the very bottom of the pyramid, information in the middle, and insights at the very top.
is analyzed and viewed, it becomes information. Information is data which has already gone through the decoding and processing stage. Once the information is interpreted, it is easier to digest and understand. When data is first acquired, it is raw and not much can be done with it in this form. By organizing this data, marketers can retrieve information which adds some kind of meaning to these results. Information is knowledge about a particular subject that can assist consumers in their decision-making process. Insights are then taken from the information gathered. Insights refer to the way people take in and process information. During this step, observations can be made, and conclusions drawn based on whatever information is consumed. Insight is a precursor to action, or what people will do based on the conclusions they have made with the insights.
inaccurately believe that data is an insight. It’s important to note that it is near impossible to find insights without data, but they aren’t the same thing! As a marketer, if you work for a cosmetics company it may be an essential component of your job to understand that most of the consumers of a particular makeup brand are women. That’s an important data point, not an insight. However, an insight made from this gathered data might be that it is once of the most admired and successful cosmetics brands globally and that women prefer to buy from this brand over any other.
There isn’t much that a marketer can do with a data point. However, by reaching an insight a marketer can learn to create a marketing strategy to market to these particular consumers in a way that will grasp their attention and differentiate the brand from its competitors. From here, marketers can hash out a master plan that will fuel the growth of the company.
Social media Is a golden resource in digital marketing today. With the advancement of technology and the internet, social media marketing has become an incredibly strong way for a business to reach their target audiences. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn provide a way for marketers to directly interact with customers and can dramatically contribute to a brand’s success by bringing in new customers, new leads, and even more sales. There are now many tools for marketers to create and share content easily in order to achieve their marketing goals, so it is definitely a good idea for every business–regardless of their size– to invest in this type of digital marketing.
Social media marketing is a fabulous tool that allows businesses to share messages, photos, videos, and so many other forms of content that can capture an audience’s attention and improve a businesses’ standing. It can assist in many marketing goals including multiplying website traffic, increasing conversions, making sure audiences know about a brand, crafting a brand identity, and solidifying the communication between a brand and its customers. When a brand has a large social following, it is easier to put a message “out there” and ensure that marketing goals are met. According to
Facebook and Instagram are fun ways to pass time. I personally check my social media profiles various times a day when watching funny videos or browsing to see what my friends and family are up to. Oftentimes, I will scroll and be bombarded with advertisements. However, because I’m so engaged in everything being posted, I really consume the information placed in front of me without really realizing that products are being marketed to me. It’s a clever way for businesses to get inside a customer’s head at a time when they are so receptive to these messages. Social media also gives brands plenty of different ways to be creative in their marketing efforts. For example, a brand can show a different facet of their personality by creating an entertaining video, writing a catchy message (Dorito’s has done this with their catch “comebacks”), or putting up a photo that’s a real attention grabber. This is great for customers who have never heard of your brand and may give the page a follow just based on the interesting content. I have personally become a customer of a handful of brands based on their social media advertisements. It is an opportunity to make new connections and engage with the current ones.
Yet another amazing reason to use social media as a prime marketing tool is that it is cost effective but still impactful. Sure, a brand must invest time into creating content and building relationships, but the money spent on actual advertisements and impressions is affordable even when a company is working with a small budget. In fact, the cost of social media marketing tends to be much less expensive than more traditional marketing efforts.
We also can’t forget about the power of hashtags or mentions. When a customer uses a hashtag to garner the attention of a brand or mentions them with the @ symbol, others can not only view that brand’s page, but they can join in on the conversation as well. This is also an opportunity for brands to construct a relationship and respond back to the comment as well as put themselves out there so that potential customers can learn about them and what they have to offer. In other words, it’s a way for a business to engage with customers and try to build a relationship.
Market research is an amazing tool for businesses—big and small. One of the great things about it is that a company doesn’t necessarily need a lot of money or resources to conduct a market research study and they can often gain a lot from it and carve a niche for themselves in order to establish themselves as marketing leaders. Market research not only pinpoints the demand for products and services, but it can help marketers break into the mind of consumers to figure out how to best garner their loyalty. Once a marketer understands how to play the part of a middle man and offer solutions for customers and support for businesses, they place themselves on the path to marketing success and identifying themselves as marketing leaders.
Businesses must absolutely have solid marketing strategies and while this will ultimately be the proposal that propels a business, market research helps them get there. Acquiring valuable data gives businesses the ability to understand the target audience, and what they want and expect from a product and from a company. Having this information in hand can give a brand a major advantage over competitors so that they can be successful. Some of the other advantages to conducting market research studies include being able to connect with customers on a deeper level to understand what demographics should be targeted. When a marketer has the knowledge of who is purchasing a product and why that product appeals to them, better strategies can be crafted that will continue strengthening the brand. This is essentially what marketing is about and while it is crucial for marketers to do their due diligence to acquire this knowledge, how well and how conscientiously it is done will effectively determine their role as a marketing leader.
Another benefit of obtaining data from market research studies is the way in which it assists in building effective marketing campaigns. With update research information, marketers can invest their time into building marketing campaigns that will actually work effectively. After campaigns are launched, marketers can then perform more research studies to understand how effective the campaign was in order to then build on that campaign and make it even bigger and better. Improving a campaign’s reach and engagement will help a business expand and will help marketers grow as leaders and professionals. Not to mention that market research can help marketers improve products and come up with new opportunities for growth by providing an understanding of what the market size, competitors, trends, and demographics are.
Knowledge is power. With the right data and marketing knowledge in hand, marketers can improve so many things all around. To be a leader in the marketing field, a company must do what they do effectively, and they must do it well. Customer feedback and insights are critical to this process. Data acquired is a golden opportunity for marketers to make the appropriate changes to products and services to make customers happy, build a robust reputation for a brand, and build a name for themselves as marketing leaders.
With the way in which technology continues to rapidly advance, the internet has become the largest and most important channel to target audiences. According to
Keyword research sets the groundwork for various digital marketing practices such as content marketing, big data, marketing automatic, social media marketing, and more. Keywords not only help construct a description of what a business is known for but also assist in helping marketers understand what content should be marketed and where organic search traffic derives from. The websites that receive plenty of organic searches do so thanks to the keywords used. Keywords are essentially words or phrases that people type into search engines to find what they are looking for. For example, if you type “cat” into a search engine like Bing or Google, many broad results related to cats which the search engine believes are relevant to your search will appear. The results are then organized depending on what the search engine believes most closely matches what you intended to search for. Using long tail keywords increases the chance of being ranked highly due to the specificity of the terms used and the lack of competition. Any keywords used should target the type of traffic that flows through your website and that will convert browsing customers into paying ones. By using the wrong types of keywords, you may still bring in traffic but likely not any useful traffic.
This is why it’s so important to research the correct keywords for a campaign. Some of the benefits of using keyword research include finding relevant markets, ranking highly on search engines which in turn drives traffic to a website, and promoting products and services by strengthening marketing goals. When marketers use due diligence to find out what phrases people are typing into search engines, they can meet their goals to assist them in finding what they’re searching for. By putting themselves into the customer’s frame of mind, a marketer can use intuition to narrow down the keywords that will likely be used during a search. There are also a variety of keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, that can aid in coming up with just the right mix of keywords to determine what will yield the best results.
By truly researching the best keywords and phrases to use for a campaign, marketers can improve a company’s ROI and increase awareness or the brand. With content that really attempts to target customers, businesses and audiences will be better connected. This marketing strategy is a win-win that keeps everyone happy and contributes immensely to a business’s growth
There are various forms of market research and while they all differ from one another, the one thing they have in common is their ability to help marketers and businesses understand and fix problems. When businesses attempt to find out more about their target customers and come up with attempts to do so such as focus groups and surveys, they are engaging in market research. Although market research isn’t absolutely necessary, it is very helpful and can help businesses lower business risks, create relevant promotional material, outsell their competitors, set stronger goals, and make better decisions. Two forms of research that hold a lot of value and can be beneficial to businesses are marketing research surveys and marketing experiments.
Market research surveys are useful in providing insights into consumer views and can help a business become even more competitive by providing enough information to better organize marketing strategies. By partaking in market research studies, businesses can find the information they need to understand from a consumer’s point of view, what makes a product or service desirable, why they would want to use the product or service, how effective the marketing campaign is, and whether the product or service meets all of the consumer’s needs. The information accessed with these surveys gives businesses an idea of what they should improve to successfully market to consumers. Surveys can provide the data and information needed to craft marketing strategies. A marketing research survey should include a set of questions for a target audience to answer which includes information on their demographics, preferences, and so much more. The surveys can be either administered in person or sent via email through survey platforms like SurveyMonkey.
Marketing experiments, on the other hand, are typically put into effect to test the waters and determine how a company can best maximize revenues by getting more customers to purchase a product or service. Marketing experiments involve research methods that test markets to discover where there is room for new sales and marketing opportunities. In other words, marketing experiments involve experimenting with a new product or concept and observing the effects. This practice may include creating two separate home pages with different photos and testing which homepage attracts more traffic to understand what the more favorable photo is. Another example might include a company creating two different packaging versions of a product for a limited time in limited stores and seeing which packaging results in more sales of a product. Marketing experiments are always quantitative and should be utilized to find the most effective way to bring in new customers and revenue. It is used as a way to predict how a product will fare once it is on the market.
Artificial Intelligence is a remarkable tool which prompts machines to reason and mimic human tasks. AI allows technology to think and operate like a human being. It has become very popular as technology has continued to advance due to its remarkable ability to analyze data. AI can complete tasks quickly and accurately, in a way that serves both the brand and the consumer. The precision with which AI operates means that there are various sectors of work that can benefit from the abilities it offers. One such industry is digital marketing. Not only does AI save time and resources for digital marketing agencies, but it can identify market trends, which is a crucial job for marketers so that they can best come up with competitive strategies.
Artificial Intelligence has the ability to recognize facial characteristics in order to better meet a consumer’s needs. For example, AI can take a photo of a person and understand that the person has long hair and might be interested in purchasing headbands. This helps to meet a consumer’s needs because as a customer browses a website, a headband might appear as a suggested product. This is a win-win situation because it not only helps a customer to feel like their needs are being catered to, but it helps a business place relevant products out there that consumers may be interested in solely based on their appearance. AI can also analyze data to predict purchasing behaviors and the decisions that consumers tend to make so that marketers can better select what products to advertise to the consumer. All of this information is directly matched to each and every consumer personally. It is a wonderful way to meet individual needs and bring in more revenue for a company.
Aside from coming up with recommendations, artificial intelligence software can send automatic emails. AI can collect user data and contact information to automatically send out messages to engage with the audience. Emails are useful because they not only provide an attempt to personally reach out to a customer, but they can offer sales codes or promotions as a way to invite a customer back to a website. One more amazing advantage that AI can provide is a chatbox feature. Some websites will actually connect you to a bot when you request customer service. The bot can give quick and accurate responses about a product and answer a variety of questions as if it were a live customer service representative. This feature can save money, time, and resources for businesses.





When marketers conduct valid market research studies, they increase the likelihood that the marketing strategies used to collect data are effective. By understanding how a target market relates to a product and what consumers want most out of it, marketers can work towards creating marketing strategies that best meet their needs. Any research tactic utilized must gather consistent and accurate information so that all people in a sample size are represented.
e research target, and enable marketers to run the proper statistical tests without violating any statistical rules.
growth, but they grant businesses the opportunity to dip their hands into the marketing process and be more involved with their campaigns like never before. Marketing platforms mainly exist to help brands resolve management issues and make the content management process more effective. For example, businesses can now use these digital marketing platforms to truly customize and automate campaigns by making them useful for the needs of specific customers. This is a process which would not only be expensive, but time consuming as well if performed manually. However, it can now be easily integrated into a marketing team’s workflow. Marketing platforms also aid marketers in guaranteeing that whatever content is distributed is not only meaningful, but successfully promotes a brand and helps consumers make purchase decisions as efficiently as possible.
As we continue to advance digitally, platform marketing will continue to become more commonplace. It is crucial for digital marketers to master the use of these platforms because they truly are an effective form of contemporary marketing that maximize opportunities to connect with consumers everywhere quickly and efficiently.