How to think about influencer marketing

Celebrities were the original influencers. For the most part, only they made it through the gatekeepers at traditional media channels. Your athletes, musicians, and actors. 

The average Jane couldn’t just up and address millions of people at once. That decision was in someone else’s hands.

Of course, that’s changed. Now, anyone can gain expertise and share it with large groups of people. You learn. You share your knowledge. You entertain. And just like that, congrats—you become a media channel. 

People begin to trust you to deliver a message. People allow you to influence them. That’s how it all starts for creators, and as long as you continue to deliver the content people expect from you, the influence only extends to more and more people. 

That influence gets marketers like me pretty excited because it‘s a powerful tool for communication.

But... there are still lots of unknowns with this channel. Still questions about how to think about certain things. I’ve compiled some of the concerns I’ve heard from marketing folks over the past year.

In this series:

→ Is influencer marketing content or distribution?‍

→ Gifting vs. paying my creators?

→ Nano, micro, mid, macro—celebrity?

→ Doing influencer marketing in-house vs. agency vs. with a platform