This article will shed light on whether influencer marketing or conventional advertising generates more impact. A brief analysis of traditional social media ads and influencersʼ sponsored content on blogs and social media platforms will allow you to draw conclusions on which marketing approach works best for your brand.
A Common Ground
Both ads and influencers serve to provide brands with online dominance and connectivity. They both target the right audience with different types of promotional content. Businesses receive higher brand awareness, engagement, brand affinity, and sales. The main differences lie in the results, impact, materials, approach, and last but not least, the quality of engaging the target audience.
Method and Strategy
Traditional marketing: This approach requires that marketers come up with the whole strategy by themselves. Whether itʼs Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Google, marketers will have to adjust their audience targeting accordingly to activate ads for certain groups and demographics. Furthermore, marketers need to keep up with the ever-evolving algorithms in those social media platforms, requiring them to be alert at all times.
Influencer marketing: Working with influencers will give the brand an authentic boost in terms of organic exposure. Brands gain access to a certain audience group who follow the influencers. Next, they connect with these audiences organically. The content that is distributed to the followers is extremely targeted and each post will reach the right audience in terms of relevancy.
Ways to Measure Performance
Traditional marketing: The tools and analytics available for social media ads is relatively easy to use. Marketers can easily set up a digital campaign and scale it according to their needs.
Influencer marketing: According to statistics, influencer marketing campaigns generate 11 times greater ROI better than any other digital advertising approach. Despite this, it is difficult to track and weigh the performance of influencers individually and on a daily basis. However, there are precise technologically advanced tools and analytics available to help brands monitor their campaign accounts. In addition, these tools provide insights garnered from Augmented Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities allowing brands to actively monitor their performance quality, targeting, audience interests, engagement rate, and multiple key metrics to get a deep knowledge of how their brand and the overall campaign is received on social media.
How Long Do Ads and Influencer Promoted Content Last?
Traditional marketing: Ads remain as long as the budget is available. When the budget isnʼt injected into the campaign, the ads stop running and are discontinued.
Influencer marketing: When influencersʼ posts go live thereʼs no way that itʼll stop. This is where influencer marketing comes on top. Influencers publish authentic content when they collaborate with brands. In turn, brands will enjoy authentic awareness and engagement.
The Element of Trust
Traditional marketing: Despite how convenient it is for brands to manage digital marketing ads, itʼs is the consumers who have the last say. Statistics have consistently shown that consumers choose to ignore banners and ads. Their interactions have grown weaker and weaker because they view them as annoying and intrusive, factors negatively impacting their experiences online. In Thailand alone, figures point out that Thai users tend to ignore around 86% of the ads they see. This is such a huge number and demonstrates that consumers are suspicious of advertisement credibility and are not buying its claims anymore.
Influencer marketing: Influencer content, on the other hand, are well-received for how authentic they are. Promoted posts appear on their followersʼ feed naturally whether its Instagram, blogs, YouTube, or Facebook, and appear as a recommendation rather than a hard-selling ad piece. The proven-results clearly show that influencersʼ organic content strike a superior connection with consumers – building trust. Brands have their products endorsed by actual people, cementing their credibility in a way that ads can never do.
Competition
Traditional marketing: Content overload and short attention spans are soaring day-by-day and consumerʼs frustration when viewing ads is at an all-time high. As a result, publishers have exhausted their ad efficiency to 100% with the immense pressure marketers experience to create unique campaigns every time.
Influencer marketing: The results of having influencers create their own promotional content is starkly different. Ad fatigue is non-existent. Content overload and short attention spans are next to zero. A blend of artistry and creativity truly makes influencersʼ sponsored posts a storyline narrative of their lifestyle and experience. Their followers engage and interact with their posts giving brands the opportunity to shine. The authenticity, unique touch, and resonance influencer marketing provides brands far outdoes any other marketing approach.
The Overall Impact
Traditional Marketing: Brands are able to keep track of their ad performance easily through free tools such as Google Analytics and social media dashboards for Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Google Ads, and YouTube Ads. These tools allow brands to measure their brand awareness, reach, engagement, traffic, view, lead generation generated by ads.
Influencer marketing: In contrast with the traditional approach, influencer marketing provides an ambiguous picture of influencersʼ performance. Brands receive authentic results when they work with influencers, but the performance data itself is tough to track.
The challenge is that there is no independent analytics platform that can measure influencer marketing performance. Therefore, brands are compelled to manually calculate and track down numbers for their KPIs. Deliverables such as impressions, reach, engagement, audience quality, CPP, CPC are scattered in multiple places with varying benchmarks. However, there are AI/ML-driven third-party solutions around that offer real-time reports which come with all relevant performance metrics. This way, brands will receive a thorough report on how the KPIs and deliverables measure up in terms of ROI. Brands will also get the opportunity to measure intangibles such as sentiment, mood, voice, etc. to effectively weigh influencersʼ content posts and check how they are received by the target audience.
Key Insights
So what are the main takeaways between influencer marketing vs. traditional marketing?
Influencers are the new players in town. They are valuable “human ads” with a truly unique “human touch” that enhances a brandʼs credibility, brand, affinity, and trust. Influencers create authentic content and promote products in a highly entertaining way that is neither intrusive nor annoying. These serve as effective advantages in todayʼs overwhelming market that jostle for consumer attention.
On the other hand, digital ads are great for effective targeting. Metrics such as click-through-rates, conversion, and ROI can be measured in real-time for a low price.
Conclusion
The new marketing shift makes it clear that consumers embrace credibility and authenticity when identifying with brands. Working with influencers brings your brand enormous opportunities to strike a chord with the right audience. Nonetheless, digital ads are far from fading as they still do a good job in terms of ROI by putting companies on the online stage. Pairing influencers and digital ads give your brand a big boost as the unique benefits of both approaches complement each other when played out online.
Interested in knowing what Influencer House offers for your campaign? Get in touch with our influencer marketing expert planners and learn how Influencer House can give a huge boost to your marketing strategy.