Why Traditional Marketing is Being Replaced by Influencer Marketing?

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As the age of traditional marketing has been taken over by influencer marketing, many brands are now trying to ride on the trend to hire social media influencers for their campaigns instead of artists and celebrities. The influencer marketing industry is speculated to be worth up to $15 billion by the year of 2022, up from as much as $8 billion in 2019, according to Business Insider estimates. Estee Lauder – a beauty giant has allocated 75% of their marketing budget into influencer marketing. Today, we will be discussing how influencer marketing has replaced traditional marketing.

1.Inexpensive compared to traditional marketing

As we have discussed over and over in the past, it is agreed that traditional marketing mediums are EXPENSIVE. A full-page advertisement in the newspaper could cost thousands of dollars back then; The cost of advertising on TV is calculated in the unit of seconds for airing time. Most importantly, the result of the investment could not be precisely tabulated and measured. 

2.Various form of marketing

Due to budget constraints, traditional marketing strategies forced brands to make choices between the format of advertisements whether it is in picture form or video form; the distribution of advertisement whether it is in newspapers or TV. One of the biggest advantages of influence marketing is that advertisements are now less expensive compared to traditional marketing. When the cost of advertising has been lowered, the creativity of both brands and influencers is no longer limited. The advertisements can now be published as photos, videos or even both on the internet. Most importantly, the content posted by different influencers can be micro-adjusted to fit the liking of their followers, maximizing the reach and engagement to the audiences.

3.Customized and Flexible Advertisement Options

Traditional advertising would always require consumers to purchase the mode of medium for them to willingly watch the advertisement. For instance, advertising on the newspaper would always require the consumers to first purchase the newspaper; advertising on the TV would also require the consumer to at least have a TV at home and have the time to sit down and watch the advertisement. However, what makes influencer marketing special is that the new marketing strategy is delivered by the medium of something that every consumer already has – their smartphone. 

The recent spike in mentions for brands

From what we have observed from Cloudbreakr’s platform, there has been a spike in the percentage of mentions in May this year for brands like Sudio, Realme and Shopee Malaysia on Instagram. For instance, the number of mentions for Sudio has increased by 333% during May, a whopping 9999% for Realme, and 258% for Shopee Malaysia. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, brands could not organize outdoor campaigns as we are all stuck at home under the Movement Control Order (MCO), and we believe that the lockdown has caused brands to switch tactics by hiring influencers to promote their business.

Follower counts VS Engagement Rate

In general, brands can benefit from getting more extensive reach by having influencers to promote their products, and certain brands tend to evaluate influencers by their followers count. Shopee held a campaign named Raya Bersama Shopee from 13th of April to 26th of May, which took place in a month before Hari Raya Aidilfitri, among 517 influencers that took part in this campaign, the post that has the highest engagement rate we have seen is 23.31% by Jazmy Juma Khan

You might ask why is Jazmy’s engagement rate getting so high when he only has 6,394 likes for this post? That is because the engagement rate calculates the overall engagement of the influencer’s followers in that post instead of just looking at the followers’ count. For Jazmy’s case, the reason for the high engagement rate is that his post is relevant to the timeline where people are all cleaning their house to celebrate Hari Raya Aidilfitri, and household items are one of the promoted items in Shopee.

The table below shows a few other influencers that are similar to Jazmy who have a high engagement rate for their posts, such as Aisyah and Vincent. The similarity between the three is the content they have created are all relevant to their identity and the interest of their followers. For instance, Aisyah is a beauty blogger and her post is about cosmetic products that are on sale in Shopee, her followers are interested in beauty-related content as well. Brands can get a high engagement rate for their post by selecting the right influencers and having them promote products that are relevant to them.

However, according to our data, it shows that not all of the engagement rates of the sponsored post are as high as we would expect. The data below was captured from the Sudio ETT Product Launch campaign which also took place in May and 279 influencers took part in this campaign. As we can see below, one of the influencers who has more than 1 million followers has gotten only 0.415% engagement rate for the sponsored post. We believe that is because the product itself did not match the interest of the followers of that influencer. In conclusion, followers count does not improve the engagement rate but it all depends on the relevance of the product to the influencer and the interests of their audience.

We believe the replacement of traditional marketing is inevitable, and we believe that these are the factors that have sped up the replacement of traditional marketing by influencers marketing. What are your thoughts about it? If you liked our article, subscribe to our email newsletter and never miss out on the next time!

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