WCIT2022: Industry experts on the growing importance of influencer marketing

Back in the 1980s and 90s, influencer marketing were basically endorsements by celebrities, like Michael Jackson with Pepsi and Michael Jordan with Nike. Today, thanks to social media, everybody can be an influencer, as long as they have a fairly sizeable following on twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook etc., and also a subject matter expert of a particular niche, noted Malaysian Digital Association (MDA) vice president Kausern Hieu (far left in pic).

“The global influencer marketing platform market is projected to grow from a US$6 billion industry in 2020 to US$24.1 billion by 2025. That’s a huge compound annual growth rate of about 32%,” he said, quoting projections by research firm MarketsandMarkets.

Hieu, who is also Nuffnang Malaysia country manager, moderated the recent World Congress on Innovation & Technology (WCIT) panel on “Rise of the Influencer and the Changing Landscape of Digital Marketing.”

Nuffnang is today the largest influencer platform in Malaysia with its community of 15,000 influencers throughout the country, as well as in Singapore and Taiwan.

The panellists were AEON (M) Bhd chief merchandising and marketing officer Low Ngai Yuen (centre in pic), and Stratgeist Pte Ltd CEO Jason Lim.

“I see a lot of misconjecture about how influencer marketing should work,” Lim said.

“The truth is, the marketing funnel – the awareness, consideration and conversion – it has to exist in all three of its forms for it to work at all points. Marketing has never been only about awareness or engagement. It has to drive your conversion or it’s just spending money for fun. If anyone thinks influencer marketing can be tagged to sales directly, we are in for a lot of disappointment,” he said.

Lim explained: “A lot of marketers have tried – if I activate this influencer and leave a promo code and see how many he or she sells…. Yes, you can get quick results and numbers to justify your expenditure at that point but really, that’s not the value that influencer brought to you.”

“The value that influencer brought was the awareness which if you had planned your entire funnel, you could have used many other methods to get them into consideration and conversion beyond the influencer’s platform only,” he said.

When asked if she disagreed, Low said: “No la. But I just like to work the funnel harder.”

Being chief merchandising and marketing officer often begets Low the question of why the two seemingly very distinct roles were not separated.

“Marketing and merchandising fits like hand in glove, perfect together,” she said.

“Marketing today is the business. It’s no longer about awareness, just to put out promotions, put out news. No. Today, marketing can give new business leads. Not just leads, but sell, directly. Marketing today is no longer a shared services cost centre. It’s a revenue centre,” Low stressed.

Low said that, while businesses are running as fast as they can to be ahead of the curve when it comes to influencer marketing, there are still lots of gaps – technology versus what marketers want, and ease in finding influencers and their communities with the required expertise, preparedness and readiness, such as education level, awareness level exposure etc.

According to Low, in the West, there are already many platforms that list influencers, with breakdowns of their expertise, abilities and capacities. In addition, these platforms provide a host of support to assist businesses gauge whether the influencer they engaged is the right match for them, such as artificial intelligence (AI) powered live data collection, real-time analysis, and post analysis.

The panellists also touched on business-to-business (B2B) influencer marketing.

“I’m a big believer that the B2B influencer market is very untapped. Because it’s sitting right there but you don’t recognise the person as an influencer, or as someone who can drive your brand’s growth or awareness of your product.

“Because these people who can do it are often disguised as a thought leader, or an evangelist regarding a particular field or industry. We follow them on LinkedIn, we interact with their posts, but then we don’t think how we can work with this person to move my brand forward,” Lim said.

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