Difference between Influence Marketing and Influencer Marketing

Man is a social animal. He always keeps visiting and greeting new people. Not only the physical other self but also another person’s culture, school of thought and behaviours. Man is always attracted by materialistic things and with every visit to your colleague’s place, you find something interesting about or in his place. You may like his furniture, but you never got a chance to ask where he got it from and you also need one for you. You also long for a celebrity’s clothes that catch your eye. You go through one Google search result after another to find it. You even post a picture on your social media, hoping that someone might help you find the perfect product for you.

Brands used to think that this was just one another dissatisfied customer but also a lost sale. Converting these into sales can be huge and can be an enormous marketing opportunity. You convert the disappointment of a customer into your sales and push your company’s marketing beyond just advertising. This is called influence marketing.

Influence marketing should not be confused with influencer marketing, which focuses on individuals pushing products to consumers. Instead, it’s about the whole journey the company makes with the customer from brand awareness, comparing product qualities, prices, reliability and till purchase decision. It creates a whole context in the form of content to reach out to the right customer at the right time.

Influencer marketing, as mentioned earlier, focuses on individuals pushing products to consumers. By various methods like affiliate with discount code, competition or contest, sample products or some other things like that. There is some third party outreach artist who can help this kind of marketing. Influencer marketing refers to the act of leveraging trustworthy (sometimes extremely popular) figures of authority in order to drive consumer action. Hosting an influencer event is a great opportunity to spread brand awareness among your key target audience. It also serves as an efficient way to gain social media attention and coverage. It has done a lot of goodwill for brands all over the world, and if you’re looking to start your own, you definitely landed on the right page!

A purchase decision includes various steps from awareness, selecting between products, looking for the perfect price, after sales services and then finally purchasing it. Setting up a proper context in each of these steps, making information float with a trickle down effect and making sure that there is no dissatisfaction is called influence marketing. 

Influencer marketing is hiring professionals who can from various niches like students, entrepreneurs, celebrities and even experts to promote and push your product. It generally influences the first step of a purchase decision i.e. brand awareness. These influencers have certain niches and targeted audiences to push your brand’s products by creating engaging content.

An influencer marketing strategy may or may not generate sales directly as it’s just a nudge given to the customer. The ROI for an influencer marketing strategy may be good if it gives the right amount of push. An influence marketing strategy, on the other hand, can directly push sales as there is nudge at each step of the purchase decision. The investment made in an influence marketing strategy can result in good ROI if there is proper and constant dissemination of information, in the right context at every step.

Agencies nowadays are constantly involved in providing brands with influencer marketing services. Online Reputation Management helps brands discover, manage and work with high-end influencers to make sure that your brand reaches millions of passionate and socially engaged audiences. We even help out brands in finding the right niches, figuring authentic (genuine) influencers, discovering trends in content and even calculating ROI for each targeted audience.